Publishers spent years learning how to engineer Google. Now they’re trying to do the same for AI answers – and sell it as a brand product. Germany’s BCN, the joint-venture commercial arm of three major publishing houses – Hubert Burda Media, Funke and Klambt – is rolling out a commercial product that helps brands get properly surfaced and described inside ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants, not just on traditional search results pages.
Called AI Brand Voice, the offering bundles an AI visibility audit, content strategy, AI-optimized branded content and ongoing optimization across roughly 300 specialist titles, spanning technology, finance, beauty, health and luxury, including Chip, Elle and Grazia. BCN claims the JV reaches around 63 million users across the three publishing houses.
The process starts with an audit using third-party tools like Peak AI and Rank Scale to fire large prompt sets at different models and map what shows up: which brands are visible, how they’re described, and which domains the models rely on most. From there, BCN defines the most important “AI search intents” based on user prompt analysis, and the content needed to match them, then produces what it calls “GEO content” – listicles, reviews and comparisons tailored for AI systems – and places that branded content in relevant titles, measuring changes in visibility, citation rate and sentiment over time.
