MSL Canada and North Strategic have launched Digital Brand Influence (DBI), a new proprietary service developed with Moov AI that aims to help brands both understand and shape how they appear across large language models (LLMs).
Senior leaders at the Publicis Groupe Canada PR shops say DBI, a generative engine optimization framework, addresses a key shift in consumer behaviour as people move away from typing keywords into search engines to asking narrative questions directly to AI assistants.
“We know that LLMs are ultimately the ones that decide what gets seen, what gets trusted and even what doesn’t show up,” MSL Canada president Nadia Beale, tells strategy. “Speaking from the MSL standpoint, we’ve always been about influencing audiences to take action. And now the audience has expanded from just being humans to being both humans and machines. So we see this as a great opportunity to use our PR skills to help shape those signals that are being scraped by the LLMs and prioritized.”
The idea is that DBI analyzes a brand’s full digital footprint to identify the “signals,” or the bits of information considered by an app like ChatGPT when answering a question, that LLMs prioritize when generating responses.
For DBI, the signals fall into three tiers, according to Beale. At the top are authoritative, structured sources such as major news and editorial outlets, which carry the greatest weight inside AI systems. Mid-tier signals come from social platforms, with Reddit and YouTube proving especially influential depending on the category. Tier three is made up by contextual sources, like small or niche webpages that may surface when they specifically address an AI user’s question.
Olivier Blais, co-founder and VP of AI at Montreal-based Moov AI, which was acquired by Publicis in March, tells strategy that an important aspect considered by DBI is that not all sources are treated equally, nor consistently, by LLMs.
“With search engines, the websites that are the most popular with the most amount of links have an enhanced visibility,” Blais says. “The thing is, with LLMs, it’s all based on the context. So you could have a very tiny website talking about exactly the question that is getting asked, and this gets picked up by LLMs and exposed to the user.”
Because of that variability, the DBI process doesn’t stop at analyzing how a brand is being portrayed, Blais says. It can also outline a roadmap to show which PR levers a brand can pull to shift those signals and how each lever is likely to influence AI-generated answers.
A plan might involve strengthening authoritative coverage through earned media, updating owned content so it’s more legible to LLMs, or amplifying expert or creator voices that are viewed by AI as credible. When misinformation or outdated brand narratives are surfacing within a generative AI, Blais says, agencies can feed new signals, such as clarified product information, expert commentary, or well-sourced coverage, into the ecosystem. Over time, those fresh inputs help LLMs recalibrate and surface more accurate or on-brand answers.
While North Strategic president Sarah Stewart-Browne views DBI as the first case in Canada where such a framework is being powered by local PR strategists and AI technologists, she tells strategy that the bigger shift is less about tactics and more about mindset.
“A lot of it is things that we as PR practitioners have been doing from the beginning, in terms of the ability to create stories that travel and connect with audiences and influence,” Stewart-Browne says. “This is really changing things in a way that we are now influencing in a more broad perspective in terms of humans and machines.”
The agencies say the model also helps them reframe KPIs. Rather than treating media hits or performance in isolation, PR teams can now evaluate whether their work shows up in top citations within AI answers, a process that has been refined after the initiative was spearheaded by MSL’s U.S. team about a year ago, Beale says.
In practice, the agencies expect DBI to filter through every level of work, from senior strategic planning to more junior staff writing blog posts or news releases.
“It isn’t just going to be this information that’s sitting at the top. In fact, it’s really filtering down, because within our agencies, everyone’s contributing every day to client outcomes,” Stewart-Browne says. “As we evolve what KPIs look like, this inherently is going to just be part of the way that we do business.”
