• by Laurie Sullivan , 4 hours ago

Next Net Media has announced a partnership with Audacy, an audio and digital media company, to help brands keep content visible in artificial intelligence (AI)-based search engines.

The partnership aims to increase citations of trusted content in large language model (LLM) answers to queries, while also providing analysis on why a brand's content may be excluded.

Franklin Rios, chief executive officer at Next Net Media, referred to the technology announced Wednesday as "NextNet AI."

“Subject matter expertise must be reflected in the content for each specific location when supporting queries for hyper-local businesses,” said Rios.

As consumer behavior shifts toward agentic search, AI assistants, and recommendation-driven discovery, traditional SEO and paid media are no longer sufficient. Large national brands have the resources to adapt, while local and regional businesses risk becoming invisible.

The partnership brings enterprise-type AI discoverability capabilities to small and mid-sized businesses that are being excluded from emerging search and discovery channels because of cost, complexity, and technical barriers.

Through Audacy’s network of more than 550 media and marketing consultants and deep local market relationships, the new technology bundles into Audacy’s digital and media offerings.

Large language models (LLMs) need to pull information from structured data as consumers interact with AI-based search engines.

Next Net Media, a 20-year-old company with roots in search engine optimization, has created this possibility.

The partnership with Audacy aims to bridge traditional and AI-based LLM through technical SEO through what Rios called embedding and creating “vectors,” structured data, on web sites that allow LLMs to read it.

Brands and publishers benefit from being cited more often in AI-based queries, and there is a lower possibility of being “hijacked,” Rios said.

A hijacked LLM refers to marketing-driven optimization or GEO that forces specific brand answers, and can trick the LLM into ignoring its safety protocols to perform unauthorized actions or provide prohibited answers.

LLMs traditionally cite information by scraping a website and creating a series of topics, and then providing the answers, Rios said.

“If you have a bad agent putting false information out there, they could hijack the answer,” he said.

Next Net Media’s platform scores the answers and confirms the content with the publisher or brand. 

Supporting the transition for brands and publisher is also why Next Net Media partnered with Nvidia to use its graphic processing units (GPUs), rather than central processing units (CPUs), which are too slow to process massive amounts of data.

When asked about tying this technology into media buying, Rios said “there could be in the future, if someone wants to connect with a demand-side platform or supply-side platform.”

LLMs would need to open that type of model. Next Net Media is not in the media-buying or selling business, but it could be the source of how LLM agents and audiences interact with the content and then present the types of available advertising.

Google and OpenAI, for example, are separately testing these types of models.

NextNet AI is designed to support LLMs and agentic systems.

The platform optimizes websites and digital assets at the domain level, transforming them into formats that are natively consumable by LLMs, reducing processing cost while improving visibility across traditional search, AI recommendations, local discovery, content distribution, and digital PR.