Think about how you actually find information these days. A few years ago, you typed a question into a search engine and scrolled through pages of links, trying to decide which ones looked reliable. Now, you ask an AI assistant and get a neat, self-assured paragraph that has already made that decision for you. You rarely wonder where the answer came from. You just accept it. That paragraph might come from a respected publication, a competitor, a blog, or a social media post—and there is no label to tell you which. For companies, this quiet shift is seismic. Their official websites and press releases once stood a chance of being found by people searching for facts. Today, if the official version of a company’s story isn’t structured in a way that AI systems recognize, it may never appear anywhere near the answer. And in an AI-generated world, being absent is not neutral; it means allowing algorithms to define your reputation from whatever they find elsewhere. At the same time, fake news and misinformation have made public trust more fragile than ever. Rumors spread faster than corrections, and a single viral falsehood can undo years of reputation building. People no longer know which source to believe, so they delegate that decision to a chatbot. The result is a strange paradox: it has never been easier for a company to publish information, but it has never been harder for that information to be believed. This is the problem epresspack set out to solve. Founded in France in 2011, epresspack has grown into the global leader in digital newsrooms and public relations software, supporting more than 350 organizations across 24 countries, including 40% of the CAC 40 and 15% of the Fortune Global 500. But the company’s mission is not just efficiency. It is to ensure that official, verified information stands out in an environment where AI-powered search engines decide what people see. It helps companies become “AI-legible”—clear enough, organized enough, and authoritative enough for machines to quote them. Or, to put it more simply, epresspack helps the truth travel at the same speed as the lie.
One of the most visible companies to embrace this new philosophy is TotalEnergies. As a global energy group, TotalEnergies operates in a crowded and often hostile information environment. Every announcement about climate, production, or investment is scrutinized, criticized, and sometimes distorted. The company needed a way to make sure its official voice was part of the digital conversation, especially as AI assistants became the first stop for people asking questions about energy policy. So TotalEnergies turned to epresspack’s digital newsroom solutions. This was not a small website redesign. It was a strategic decision to centralize all corporate communications in a single, searchable, well-structured platform that could serve several audiences at once: journalists looking for facts, investors looking for updates, and AI systems looking for trustworthy sources. The newsroom became the corporate version of a wire service—one official feed, constantly updated, with every piece of content properly categorized and enriched. TotalEnergies also made a particularly interesting move: it introduced question-and-answer formats across its communications. Instead of publishing only traditional press releases, the company began producing content that directly addressed common questions. What are TotalEnergies’ energy transition plans? How are safety standards enforced? What does the company say about a specific environmental incident? These Q&A formats are carefully designed to match the way people naturally ask AI assistants, and to give those assistants an authoritative answer to draw from. The logic is simple. If a chatbot must answer a question, it will look for a page that presents a clear, direct, structured response. TotalEnergies wants to be that page, not a critic’s blog post or an old news article. This strategy does not eliminate criticism or debate, but it does ensure that the company’s own facts are in the arena. In the fight against misinformation, that is a crucial first step. It also shows that a legacy corporation can move as nimbly as a startup when the stakes are high enough.
To understand why TotalEnergies and other companies are making these moves, it helps to look at the mechanics. For two decades, the goal of corporate communications was search engine optimization. Companies wanted to appear at the top of Google’s results, so they hired SEO experts, stuffed headlines with keywords, and obsessively monitored rankings. Then artificial intelligence changed the rules. Modern AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI, and Perplexity do not simply rank links; they synthesize answers from multiple sources. That has given birth to two new disciplines. The first is AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. AEO focuses on structuring content so that an AI can easily extract a direct answer from it: clear questions, concise answers, logical headings, and semantic markup. The second is GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization. GEO goes deeper: it helps AI systems understand why a particular source is trustworthy. By maintaining a consistent publishing cadence, building a coherent record of official information, and aligning content with the language patterns that AI models associate with authority, GEO makes an organization’s newsroom a natural candidate for citation. Epresspack has built both capabilities into its platform, alongside digital newsrooms, media relations tools, content distribution, and analytics. The platform’s clients include some of the most recognizable brands in the world, and the goal is not to trick search engines or AI models. It is to give them a well-organized, transparent, and truthful source to rely on. AEO and GEO are often compared to learning a new language—the language of machine attention. Companies that speak it will be included in AI answers. Companies that don’t will be silently omitted. And in a world where people increasingly trust those answers, omission is a fatal kind of invisibility. The old question was, “Did you publish it?” The new question is, “Will an AI believe it?”
The proof that this works did not come from a theoretical presentation; it came from real numbers at CNH, a global leader in agricultural equipment and a long-standing epresspack client. CNH is exactly the kind of company that could rely on its established name to carry it—but it chose to participate in a pilot to deploy AEO and GEO optimizations across its newsroom. The results were surprising even to experienced digital strategists. Between the second and third quarters of 2026, AI citations of CNH’s official content increased by 193%. That is not a gentle improvement; it is nearly a tripling of visibility. Even more striking, the visibility expanded beyond the boundaries of branded searches. Before the optimizations, CNH’s content might have surfaced only when someone typed “CNH” or mentioned one of its brands. After the optimizations, its newsroom was being cited in AI responses to questions about agricultural equipment, farming technology, sustainability practices, and industry trends. CNH had become part of the wider conversation, not just a reply to a direct brand query. The third finding is perhaps the most important for communications leaders. In AI-generated answers, only about one percent of citations result in clicks. That could easily be read as bad news—but the opposite is true. It shows that citations themselves are the primary impression. When an AI answer mentions CNH’s dedication to sustainable agriculture, it builds trust in that moment, even if the user does not click through. The citation is the new headline, the new ad impression, the new word-of-mouth recommendation. Communications teams have traditionally measured success by press mentions and website visits. They are now learning to count citations, not because clicks are irrelevant, but because an AI citation carries a layer of algorithmic credibility that a link alone cannot offer. For CNH, the pilot was a clear verdict: official, well-structured newsroom content can hold its own in the age of machine-generated answers.
Behind these metrics and technologies is a deeply human concern: the need to be believed. Antoun Sfeir, epresspack’s founder and CEO, puts it plainly. “In the age of artificial intelligence, publishing official information is no longer enough. Companies must ensure that their content is accessible, identifiable, and cited by AI engines. This is the new dimension of corporate communications that we are addressing at epresspack.” Sfeir’s words are aimed at communications professionals, but they reflect a broader shift in how trust is created. For most of the twentieth century, trust was managed by journalists and editors. They decided what was newsworthy, fact-checked the details, and presented the public with a curated version of events. That role has not disappeared, but it has been joined by something new: the algorithm. An AI system has no editor, no curiosity, and no ethical instinct. It has patterns. It learns which sources look reliable and then repeats their words as if they were gospel. That makes the structure of information just as important as its truth. A company can be perfectly accurate and still be ignored because its website looks disorganized, its press releases are PDFs without proper metadata, or its answers are buried in paragraphs rather than presented as clear statements. Epresspack’s AEO and GEO technologies are not magic spells; they are tools of clarity. They make it easier for machines to recognize what is true and official. In doing so, they also make it easier for human beings to receive trustworthy answers when they ask an AI for help. This is what Sfeir means by “the new dimension”—a layer of work that happens before any human reads a word, a layer that determines whether the words are read at all. It is a strange, invisible frontier, but one where the fight against misinformation will likely be won or lost.
Epresspack itself is a product of this shifting landscape. It started in France in 2011, before ChatGPT, before “answer engine” was a common term, before fake news became a global obsession. At that time, a digital newsroom was a convenience; today, it is a necessity. Epresspack’s growth has mirrored the evolution of digital trust. In 2025, the company made a major strategic move by acquiring TheNewsMarket, the American leader in digital newsrooms. That acquisition brought a portfolio of well-known clients into the epresspack family, including Fidelity, adidas, CNH, Kia, Genesis, and the International Monetary Fund. It also gave the company a stronger foothold in North America and an expanded ability to serve organizations whose audiences span the globe. With teams in Paris, London, Milan, San Francisco, and Ahmedabad, epresspack now offers both global reach and local care. This combination matters because misinformation does not stop at borders. A false claim about a product can be generated in one language, translated by an AI, and repeated in another market within hours. To respond, companies need a newsroom that is rigorous enough to be cited by machines and human enough to connect with readers in different cultures. The rise of AI has not made corporate communication easier; it has made it more demanding. Journalists still matter, but they are no longer the only gatekeepers. AI systems have become invisible intermediaries, and companies must learn to communicate with them as carefully as they communicate with the public. That is the lesson of TotalEnergies’ Q&A formats, of CNH’s 193% citation jump, and of epresspack’s global expansion. The future belongs to organizations that do not simply publish facts, but make those facts impossible to ignore in the machine-generated answers that are rapidly becoming the world’s default source of information. In an age of fake news and artificial intelligence, the most human thing a company can do is ensure that the truth is easy to find.