April newsletter: Top tips on dealing with AI search the accidental stakeholder

1 month ago

Pic: Polaris founder and Chicago Propeller Club President Ben Pinnington lays out four top priorities of club in his term, click image to watch.

Welcome to the latest Polaris newsletter.

It’s been a super busy period at Polaris, with multiple events including the first Chicago Propeller Club event of the year—and my first as President. With the Strait of Hormuz crisis covered in my last newsletter, and Iran maintaining its choke hold, this edition will focus on AI search – maritime’s accidental stakeholder. But suffice to say, while sea blindness among the public has been shattered by the looming energy crisis, there is still a long way to go for maritime to find its voice and tell its story positively. For all the good media work the IMO boss Arsenio Dominguez is doing, where are the maritime entrepreneurs in this debate—figures like Musk, Bezos or Branson? I fear that until we have more recognizable figures with a powerful voice message, the sector will remain abstract and arcane.

It was a point we tried to address at the recent Propeller Club event in Chicago, where we invited pupils from Chicago Hope Academy to witness a talk full of maritime passion with the author John Bacon. John and Captain Tom Wiater, owner of the Great Lakes shipping line Central Marine Logistics, held the audience captivated, discussing John’s riveting book on the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking. It was a lesson in the power of human storytelling—the crew of the Fitzgerald taking center stage. It is people that make our industry — people with authentic passion. If we can tell more of these human stories, we will stand a much better chance of attracting the best talent to the industry.

If you’re out on the road over the spring months drop me a line for lunch or a coffee. I will be at Chicago Propeller Club’s May 22 Maritime Day luncheon cruise register here, the Propeller Club Salute to Congress in DC, the Inland Marine Expo in Nashville, Posidonia in Athens, and Electric & Hybrid in Amsterdam.

Elsewhere if you want help with business development, getting your story telling and PR shipshape contact me for an informal consultation.

Best wishes,

Ben Pinnington
Founder
Polaris Media

CHICAGO, UNITED STATES

Understanding AI search – maritime business’s accidental stakeholder

AI has been called the most powerful technology created in decades. Its arrival has been sudden, and it has changed the nature of how you and your company are discovered and perceived.

The search undertaken by a Large Language Model (LLM) AI agent like ChatGPT, Copilot or Grok can influence your relationships and the willingness of customers, staff and partners to engage with you and your organization.

As a result, for maritime companies and organizations, AI is the accidental stakeholder you cannot afford to ignore—a key theme of my new book, Making Waves: PR strategies to transform your maritime business, and a talk by Rupert Younger at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.

Understanding and influencing how AI search works, and separating the hype from reality, is the challenge facing maritime and engineering companies of all types. And as we know, the conservative nature of maritime means adoption has been cautious and slow.

There is jeopardy in this approach. The hard reality is that if you are not featured in LLM results, also known as GEO and AEO, you are not part of the public conversation. And if you are featured but your presence is inaccurate or weak—especially compared to competitors—your reputation will suffer. For this reason, it is important to recognize that influencing LLMs is a public relations discipline, not a technical one. Research has shown that the public takes AI search answers seriously. A study by 72Point found that people trusted AI answers more than the government, social media influencers, and even their own family.

Polaris’ advice:

1) Prepare to deal with a dynamic, fragmented landscape.
There is not one but multiple LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Copilot and Perplexity. All have an opinion about your reputation, and this is a permanent change. Research by Gartner found AI search is set to replace traditional search by 2027. How and where LLMs source their answers is similar but varies. It is now the job of your PR team to keep a close eye on these perpetually updating domains, understanding they demand recency and new material.

2) Understand how AI thinks.
Not unlike a human forming an opinion, AI likes to see lots of evidence of your track record. Therefore, LLMs draw on multiple sources to back up their findings. These include “owned media” like your website and LinkedIn, as well as “earned media” (publicity) and review sites like Reddit. AI also likes to see you on credible industry websites, such as maritime trade associations, as well as speaking at trade shows. LLMs do not favor paid-for content.

Owned media is particularly important, and organizations that are slow to update their websites and social media should take note—particularly in the case of a crisis, merger, or change in management.

Case study: I recently heard of a case where a university had been in a public dispute with a trade union. AI search answers around the dispute were biased towards the trade union, as it had uploaded multiple press statements to its website and spoken to the press. The university had played an old-school PR game, trying to dampen the story by issuing statements only to the media and uploading nothing to its website. As a result, the lack of source material diminished the university’s side of the story in AI search.

3) Media relations matters.
LLMs draw heavily on niche industry press like the maritime media. Curiously, there appears to be bias towards certain titles. ChatGPT, for example, advises that maritime companies should target press releases to Tradewinds, Lloyd’s List, Splash 24/7, gCaptain, Maritime Executive and Seatrade. It can also reference Marine Link, Offshore Energy, Safety4sea, Riviera, Marine Log and The Waterways Journal.

This is the jagged frontier of AI, but I wonder if a reckoning could be looming for the maritime press, as LLMs appear to favor a narrow range of publishers—mirroring trends in mainstream media reported by the Press Gazette. This could lead to maritime publishers striking deals with LLMs for content usage. In the meantime, there is an issue with LLMs indexing paywalled content. The workaround is to amplify coverage from Tradewinds or Lloyds List on social media or on your website biography so LLMs can pick it up.

4) Deploy thought leadership.
A big point. Long-form LinkedIn articles and newsletters are more impactful than standard posts for AI search. While posts can spark engagement with your immediate network, they fade quickly. In contrast, LinkedIn’s article and newsletter formats are more discoverable for LLMs. Check this article from LinkedIn on how to leverage LinkedIn for AI. The research says articles in the 800–1,200 word range perform well. It further highlights that originality is crucial—95% of LLM citations from LinkedIn come from original posts, not reshares. Publishing authentic content, rather than synthetic AI slop, also helps avoid indexing issues.

5) Ethics, Policy and Governance.

This is a whole topic in itself but it is important you have an AI policy to set guardrails around ethical usage. LLMs are not human. They do not feel, have humor, empathy or morals. This was shown by Grok which was again criticized this month for producing inappropriate deepfakes and the tragic story of a suicide of a man who formed a romantic relationship with the Gemini LLM.

The policy should clearly outline how AI should be used. This should cover sharing confidential information on company or personal LLMs risking information being used to train the AI or appear in the public domain. Companies should further ensure staff fact check GEO results understanding LLMs hallucinate, infringe copyright and can be biased. An example is using an LLM to select entry level CVs with the LLM favoring the type of person already employed by the organization by class, race, schools attended and the type of language used. This could mean someone who shows potential is missed.

Elsewhere the dangers of sharing data were recently highlighted in a lawsuit against Otter, the popular transcription tool, which alleges Otter secretly records conversations without proper consent and then uses that data to train its machine-learning models. According to the Press Gazette this has led to some newsrooms banning the use of Otter

6)AI isn’t the be all and end all.

I hope this does not come back to bite me but today AI is just one stakeholder among many that shape reputation. LLMs don’t take into account, for example, many print maritime magazines that are well read and respected. And it has limitations. It cannot write like you or be a key note speaker and it cannot seal a deal over dinner or build relationships. Relationships, and keeping a promise to deliver, remain at the heart of maritime, something I heard ACBL’s CCO Ricky Stover emphasize at a recent talk at Loyola University. For companies investing in PR the rise of LLMs underlines that PR used properly should not be relegated to drafting press releases and posts. PRs should be used as advisers to build trust, listen to stakeholders, shape judgement and win support. For this AI is only a tool.

For help updating your communications strategy, AI policy and storytelling, drop me a line.

Connect with Ben on LinkedIn

SPECIAL THANKS TO FOREST & BLUFF MAGAZINE IN CHICAGO FOR INTERVIEWING ME ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITIES IN MARITIME AND MY WORK GROWING POLARIS OVER THE LAST 20 YEARS.

Claim a free copy of Ben Pinnington’s new Amazon best selling PR book Making Waves: PR strategies to transform your maritime business USA edition here