“We do, in fact, have more control over our own narratives than ever before. The traditional press is no longer the only gatekeeper of which stories get told and which get ignored. You can and must tell your own story and put it out into the universe.”
— Ronn Torossian, For Immediate Release, 2011
Ronn Torossian wrote that in 2011, years before ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews existed. He was describing a structural shift already underway: the gatekeeper losing its monopoly on what gets known. In 2026, that shift has an endpoint. The AI engine is now the gatekeeper, and it decides which brands enter the answer and which are left out entirely. The instruction in the passage holds exactly: tell your own story, build your own authority, put it into the universe in a form the engines can find and cite. The mechanism Torossian named has simply moved one layer deeper.