By Matthew Snodgrass & Joseph Daley
As a pharma brand, you spend time and money defining what you stand for. But when someone asks AI about your company, leadership, drug, or disease area, the answer may tell a very different story.
But let’s first go back a couple thousand years to The Odyssey. Shipwrecked and unrecognized, Odysseus enters the kingdom of a foreign king and hears a bard recounting the story of the Trojan War. The bard tells of Odysseus’ own experiences to an audience that does not yet know he is in the room.
He has to listen to someone else tell his story.
Today, every brand faces its own version of this moment. AI has become the new bard (no coincidence that Google Gemini’s initial name was “Bard”), scraping and pulling information from across the web, synthesizing it, and then retelling a brand’s story in its own words to anyone who asks.
For pharma and biotech companies, this is more than just an interesting development in the media landscape. AI is becoming an important intermediary between brands and their audiences. AI is an entity that is both a medium and a stakeholder. Patients use it to learn about their condition. Healthcare professionals use it to explore treatment options. Journalists and investors use it in their research. Advocates and caregivers use it in their care for others. And they’re all getting information and perspectives that are no longer just from your website. They’re made up, on the fly, from sources that hopefully include your website.
And when your audiences get their AI-generated answers, they don’t necessarily reflect the positioning that you’ve carefully crafted. It will reflect a narrative that AI has assembled from sources it can find and ones it finds authoritative.
The difference between those two narratives is what we at Syneos Health call The Framing Gap: the measurable distance between how a brand positions itself and how AI positions it.
Your brand positioning is no longer simply declared
Pharma companies have always worked within a fragmented communications matrix. A company may define its brand through its corporate narrative, product website, scientific communications, executive thought leadership, med comms, and carefully developed campaigns. Your audiences, in turn, encounter your brand through earned media coverage, clinical journals, social posts, advocacy organization content, professional conferences, and countless other sources.
Generative AI adds a consequential new layer to that mix. Rather than presenting users with a list of hyperlinks to evaluate on their own, AI can synthesize those sources and deliver a direct response to the user.
That AI response becomes a new framing of the brand.
Imagine that a company has spent years positioning a treatment around its relevance to a particular patient population. Yet when someone asks AI about the product, the answer describes the product simply as one treatment in a crowded category. Yes, the product may be visible in the answer, but the distinction the company considers central to its value has vanished.
That is a Framing Gap.
In other cases, an AI answer may:
- include outdated information about the brand;
- mention competitor products but omit the brand entirely;
- include answers about the brand but be absent from questions about the condition
These are not identical problems. One is an information availability problem. Another is competitive displacement. And a third is disease-state invisibility. Each problem emphasizes a pervasive shift in communications: brands must now consider not only what they publish, but also what AI learns, synthesizes, and repeats.
Visibility is necessary, but it’s not enough
The first question for communicators is a straightforward one: Is my brand appearing in AI answers?
Now that question is more involved than it seems. A brand may appear in conventional search results (SEO) but not in AI answers (GEO). It may be mentioned in an answer to a branded question but then missing from questions about the disease state or treatment options or prescribing. A company may have content online about its brand, but third-party publishers are providing more relevant answers, more concise answers, more AI-optimized answers, or they may simply have more authority.
AI visibility may establish whether a brand is part of the conversation, but it does not establish the intended positioning or framing of that brand.
For pharma companies, the implications are significant:
- Unique positioning can erode. Carefully developed differentiators that a company has crafted may be reduced to generic category language by AI.
- Competitors can occupy the answer. Other companies or brands may become more prominent when AI answers questions that matter to your brand.
- Disease-state authority can be invisible. A company may invest heavily in disease education but fail when competing against the heavy hitters in disease education authority such as Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, FDA, NIH, etc.
- Old information can continue shaping the narrative. Without more updated and optimized information, AI can still rely on the last know answer. We’ve seen AI citations of disease-related content dating back to 2013!
- Being mentioned does not equal being understood. High visibility can coexist with weak framing alignment for a brand.
The essential question is no longer simply, “Are people aware of us?” It is also, “When AI explains who we are, does our intended positioning prevail?”
Closing the Framing Gap requires more than monitoring
Identifying your Framing Gap can reveal if a positioning problem exists, but it will not change the narrative.
Closing the Framing Gap requires a prescriptive approach for identifying where and how a brand appears, assessing the conditions that influence its visibility (or lack thereof), and then seeding AI-optimized content that reinforces the brand’s intended framing across the entire PESO (paid, earned, shared, owned) spectrum – but in the order of AI importance of EOSP.
Syneos Health approaches the identification and closing of The Framing Gap through four complementary offerings.
1. Pulse Check: Identify the sources shaping the answer
Our AEO/GEO Pulse Check examines AI-generated answers to brand-related questions across multiple AI models and identifies the sources being cited. It helps establish whether a brand is visible in AI-generated answers about itself. It also shows other publications and competitors being cited. This serves as a snapshot of your AI visibility.
2. AI visibility analysis: Measure presence over time
Because AI answers can vary over time, a single snapshot is not enough. Ongoing AI analysis of visibility (mentions), sentiment, and authority (citations) will show how your presence in AI answers changes over time, especially important leading up to major milestones, approvals, press releases, etc. This baseline view reveals whether new content and communications are changing the brand’s frame within AI-generated answers.
3. Scorecard: Diagnose technical readiness
The other side of this AI visibility coin is more technical in nature. One metaphor we commonly use is the house. You could have great interior design, furniture, flooring (content), but if the exterior structure of your house (your website) is a mess, then no one’s coming to visit. There’s a multitude of technical reasons your website will be inviting to search and AI bots or not.
Our SEO/AEO/GEO Scorecard applies a 32-point technical check to your brand website, examining factors related to conventional search, answer engines, and generative AI. The criteria include technical foundations, structure, authority signals, and many other factors that will affect whether your owned content is seen, indexed, mentioned, and cited.
4. Content Compass: Build an answer-ready narrative
Our Content Compass translates these findings into action. Using an AI agent that’s customized for each brand, it gives communicators and content creators a practical playbook for developing content that is optimized for search and AI systems to find, understand, and cite. We pair that custom Content Compass agent with our Copywriting for AI agent to produce content that’s both topic-relevant for AI and easy to ingest by AI.
It maps priority topic themes, identifies the queries your audiences ask, and establishes writing and structural guidance to develop answer-ready content. The aim is not to write for a machine at the expense of humans. The aim is to make credible and relevant information to work for both.
Brand strategy must now survive AI synthesis
AI does not simply regurgitate a company’s homepage or campaign headline. It assembles an answer from a broader spectrum of authoritative information sources, which, hopefully, includes you. Therefore, the strongest frame for a brand is not necessarily the one a company states most prominently. It’s a synthesis of numerous sources that possess authority, AI-optimized answers, and a technically optimized website.
For us communicators, this demands an evolution in our storytelling. The goal will always remain: for humans to create stories that move other humans. From Eyeballs to Eyeballs. It’s now everything in the middle that must be sufficiently clear, structured, and substantiated to remain intact when AI synthesizes it alongside information from its pretraining and across the web.
AI optimization does not diminish the value of brand strategy. It makes brand strategy all the more important.
Those brands who don’t act on this may find themselves in Odysseus’ place: listening as someone else tells their story, finding the most important parts have been left out.
For a complementary perspective on the evolving relationship between AI and branding, see our earlier article The Framing Gap: How AI is Rewriting Brand Perception.
Contact Syneos Health Communications to assess your Framing Gap and learn how your brand can become a more visible, accurately represented, and authoritative part of AI-generated answers.
