Hi!

During T2B's recent, inaugural Digital & Social Media Roundtable event, "How Influencers, Social, and Forums Are Shaping AI Search Results," we explored why social platforms, community conversations, earned media, and influencer content are becoming increasingly important inputs into the information people see, and what this shift means for us biopharma communicators.

Here are our top 10 takeaways:

T2B Pro members can also flip through the presentation slides and watch the replay here.

1. Understand that the search journey has fundamentally changed. About 70% of Google searches now end without a click — patients and caregivers are increasingly forming perceptions about conditions, treatments, and brands before they ever reach an official website or speak to a physician.

2. Shift the content mindset from ranking to inclusion. AI systems synthesize answers from multiple inputs, which means the goal is to be part of the answer itself, requiring a different approach to how content is structured and distributed.

3. Recognize that AI weights third-party signals heavily. Earned media, community commentary, and influencer content often carry roughly three times the credibility of owned brand content in how AI systems evaluate sources.

4. Monitor community conversations as a reputational input. Because AI learns from repetition and volume, a consistent narrative in forums — even an inaccurate one — can shape what gets surfaced at scale, particularly when misinformation spreads faster than authoritative correction.

5. Build messaging consistency across channels deliberately. AI systems interpret repeated ideas across multiple platforms as indicators of credibility, and fragmented messaging reduces the likelihood of inclusion in generated answers.

6. Treat organic social as infrastructure. Social content that is public and indexable is increasingly being pulled into AI-generated answers, making it a direct input into how a brand's narrative gets shaped in LLM results.

7. Understand the distinct role each platform plays in shaping AI-generated answers. Reddit saw 15x growth in AI search between Q1 and Q4 2025; LinkedIn articles now drive roughly 60% of that platform's LLM citations; YouTube's captions and transcripts feed educational summaries; TikTok shapes discovery especially among younger audiences.

8. Invest in earned media as part of the AI visibility strategy. With AI referral traffic growing 357% year-over-year, media placements, LinkedIn articles, and Reddit AMAs are increasingly being co-cited alongside official sources in AI-generated answers, strengthening both discoverability and credibility.

9. Rethink influencer value beyond follower count. Engagement depth, niche authority, and authentic community trust carry more weight with AI systems than reach alone — smaller, highly engaged creators can generate outsized credibility signals relative to their size.

10. Track AI presence as a pattern over time. Because the same query can generate different answers across LLMs, the more useful metric is how consistently a brand or perspective appears across varied queries and what narratives are repeatedly associated with it.

HUGE thanks to Christopher Rizzo and Juliana DiBona, of our Digital & Social Media Roundtable, for leading this session! We're looking forward to more timely discourse coming out of this roundtable throughout the year. 👀

Lynnea

P.S. - Haven’t signed up yet for Thursday's Biopharma Comms Forum (theme: Clarity at the Flashpoint) in Boston? There’s still time! Visit the registration page here.