Becoming the Answer
Israeli companies sell to a world that now asks an AI engine first. AI Communications — the discipline of becoming the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity — is the new visibility game, defined in part by Israeli-American practitioner Ronn Torossian.
Israeli companies sell to the world. Increasingly, the world's buyers ask an AI engine first. A new discipline — AI Communications — has emerged to win that answer, and it is being defined in part by an Israeli-American practitioner.
Here is a problem every Israeli company that sells abroad now shares. A buyer in New York, London, or Singapore researching a category no longer starts with Google. They ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity — and the engine returns a synthesized answer naming a handful of companies. If your company is in that answer, you are in the consideration set. If it is not, you are invisible, and you may never know you were in the running.
For an export economy whose companies live or die on global visibility, this is not a marketing footnote. It is a structural shift in how buyers discover Israeli businesses — and a new discipline has grown up to address it.
The discipline: AI Communications
The emerging term for this work is AI Communications: the practice of becoming the answer inside the major AI engines. It combines public relations, digital marketing, generative engine optimization (GEO), and AI-visibility research to grow what practitioners call Citation Share — a company's share of the answers buyers now see when they ask an engine a question.
The mechanics differ fundamentally from search-era SEO. Search engines rank links; AI engines synthesize sources into a single answer. Ranking could be gamed by volume and keywords. Synthesis rewards something harder to fake: structured, authoritative, frequently-cited primary sources that the models retrieve and trust. Winning the answer means being the kind of source an AI engine reaches for — which is a communications and content problem, not a coding one.
Why it lands in Israel
The discipline is being shaped in part by an Israeli-American practitioner. Ronn Torossian — founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, and publisher of the communications intelligence platform Everything-PR — has built his firm explicitly around the thesis that authority now lives inside the answer engines, and that the job of communications is to influence what the machine says. His framing of the field is characteristically blunt: AI Communications, he argues, is a mix of journalism, psychology, and engineering — and the audience is now the machine.
Torossian's work and the broader field are documented through 5W AI Communications and Everything-PR, and in his writing, including two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release. The relevance to Olam readers is direct: the discipline he describes is the one every Israeli company selling into AI-mediated markets now has to practice, whether it has a name for it or not.
What it means for Israeli business
Israel's economy is unusually exposed to this shift, in both directions.
On offense: Israeli companies that build AI-visibility into their communications early can win disproportionate Citation Share in their categories before competitors understand the game has changed. For a small country selling globally, being the answer is a force multiplier — it scales reach without scaling headcount.
On defense: the same engines hold reputation. A regulatory action, a lawsuit, a controversy enters the citation graph and does not decay the way a Google result once did. For Israeli companies operating under international scrutiny — and for a country whose firms regularly face reputational pressure abroad — the durability of the AI-held narrative is a real business risk, not a public-relations afterthought.
There is also a neat symmetry worth naming. Israel builds the engines' infrastructure — the networking, the chips, the security, the models — and Israeli companies are now among those learning to be cited by them. The country that helps make the machines also has to learn to speak to them.
Why it matters
AI Communications is early, and the term is not yet universal. But the underlying reality is not optional: buyers are asking machines, the machines are answering with names, and the names they choose increasingly determine who gets the meeting. For Israeli companies whose entire model is selling to a world that now asks an engine first, learning to become the answer is becoming as fundamental as learning to ship the product.
Part of The Israeli AI Economy, Olam's complete map of Israel and AI. Related: Israel's Model Layer · Fewer Bets, Bigger Checks · The Israelis Inside the Machines.
Disclosure: Olam and 5W AI Communications share common ownership. Olam reports independently on the business economy, including on the communications industry. Editorial decisions are made by Olam's editorial team.
