PMI's communications chief says the company is optimizing its website for LLMs, using AI personas to test messaging, and highlighting a decade of smoke-free revenue growth from 0% to 38%.
Alpha Score of 59 reflects moderate overall profile with moderate momentum, moderate value, moderate quality. Based on 3 of 4 signals – score is capped at 90 until remaining data ingests.
Philip Morris International is treating its corporate website as a strategic communications channel in the age of large language models. Moira Gilchrist, the company's chief global communications officer, said in an interview that PMI is optimizing its owned content so LLMs serve accurate information about the company's shift toward smoke-free products like Iqos and Zyn.
"The days of search engine optimization are over – now it's all about generative engine optimization," Gilchrist said. The goal is to ensure that when someone asks an LLM about PMI, the model pulls from the company's own data rather than stale or inaccurate sources.
Gilchrist, a self-described AI enthusiast and early adopter, said she uses AI tools for "pretty much everything." One of the most valuable applications, she said, has been building "personas" – artificial audience replicas that PMI uses to test how its messaging lands before it goes public.
"Those personas are absolutely fascinating," she said. "The feedback that we get really helps us to improve how we're communicating."
The approach lets PMI simulate how investors, journalists, or the general public might react to a new product announcement or earnings release. Gilchrist described it as a shift from traditional focus groups to continuous, AI-driven iteration.
PMI's corporate website has taken on a new role as LLMs increasingly pull information from public sources. Before, Gilchrist said, "nobody would go there, unless you were a journalist or perhaps an investor." The general public had no reason to visit. As LLMs become the default search interface for millions of users, the PMI website is now a direct channel to people asking questions about the company.
"We're making sure that the LLMs can pick up the rich information that's there and serve it up when people are inquiring about us," she said.
The company has also been using internal metrics externally to demonstrate the shift from cigarettes to smoke-free alternatives. Gilchrist said PMI started running campaigns around quarterly earnings releases that highlight key numbers. When PMI launched its first smoke-free product in Japan in 2015, 0% of net revenue came from smoke-free alternatives. By the first quarter of 2026, that figure had reached 38%. (The source text says "43%" in one place and "38%" in another; the 38% figure is from the earnings release referenced in the interview.)
"That helps people to understand the magnitude of progress that we've made already," she said. "We still have a long way to go, but I'm super proud of the progress we've made so far."
Gilchrist described the shift to owned-channel strategy as "a more thoughtful approach" rather than a matter of more resources. The company is working to structure its website so LLMs can easily find and accurately reproduce PMI's data, from revenue breakdowns to product safety information. "That's an art that everybody's learning today," she said.
According to AlphaScala data, PM earns a Moderate Alpha Score of 55 out of 100, reflecting its position in the consumer staples sector. View PM stock page
In Q1 2026, smoke-free products accounted for 38% of PMI's net revenue, up from 0% a decade earlier. The company is betting that its owned content – optimized for LLMs and backed by AI-driven message testing – will ensure that figure reaches more people accurately.
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