Only 28 percent of Filipinos now say they trust news, down 10 percentage points in a year—the steepest decline among the 48 markets covered by the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report. At the same time, seven in 10 Filipinos get news from social media.
In a country where seven in 10 people get their news from social media, the finding points to a contradiction with consequences few marketing plans were built for: Filipinos are more immersed than ever, and more skeptical than ever, of what they find.
For Stratworks, a Filipino communications agency based in Bonifacio Global City, that means looking beyond the traditional boundaries of search engine optimization, advertising and corporate communications.
The agency calls its approach “Omnisearch Marketing,” which seeks to make brands visible and credible across Google, artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, social platforms, marketplaces, reviews and other places where consumers look for information.
Search becomes reputation
“Search used to be treated mainly as a marketing function,” Stratworks managing director Mark Christian Parlade said. “It has quietly become a reputation function.”
The change is particularly significant as AI tools increasingly synthesize information from multiple online sources rather than simply presenting users with links.
“The old playbook assumed you could win attention on your own channels,” Parlade said. “The harder question now is whether the rest of the internet backs up the story you are telling, because that is what AI search reads first.”
That means a company’s advertising, website and social media posts are only part of the information consumers may encounter. Reviews, news reports, marketplace listings, forum discussions and past controversies can also shape how a brand is presented online.
The shift is already reflected in consumer behavior. More than four in 10 Filipino internet users discover brands through social media, according to Digital 2026 by Meltwater and We Are Social.
Meanwhile, combined sales on Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop in the Philippines reached an estimated $22 billion, or about P1.2 trillion, in 2025, according to research firm Cube.
Consumers are also approaching AI cautiously. Philippine Survey and Research Center, citing the WIN World AI Index, reported that 48 percent of Filipinos fear AI’s potential to generate false information.
Dentsu Philippines has similarly found consumers becoming more skeptical of brands, putting greater pressure on companies to earn rather than simply capture attention.
Beyond attention
For brands, the implication is that a successful campaign may not be enough if the wider online record tells a different story.
A consumer who sees an advertisement could subsequently check TikTok, Google, Reddit, an e-commerce marketplace or an AI assistant before making a decision.
Stratworks is betting that public relations becomes more important in this environment because independent sources can corroborate—or contradict—what companies say about themselves.
Some of its clients are already treating search results, earned media, social content, marketplaces, reviews and online discussions as parts of a single reputation environment rather than separate communications channels.
“We look at what a brand says on its own channels, what media and other people say about it, how it appears in search, reviews, and marketplaces, and what AI tools can reasonably pick up from all of that,” Stratworks chief of staff Lori Umali said.
The agency then identifies information that is outdated, inconsistent or lacking and works to strengthen those signals, she added.
Old discipline, new interpreter
The technology may be new, but Stratworks argues that the underlying communications challenge is not.
The agency has spent 26 years working in reputation and communications, with campaigns including public relations for the First Philippine Mount Everest Expedition and long-running work for brands such as Jollibee and PLDT Home.
“The brand no longer gets the first word,” Parlade said. “Often it does not even get the last one.”
Stratworks president and co-CEO Donna Nievera-Conda sees Omnisearch as an extension of that reputation-building work.
“For 26 years our mission has not changed—to build trust and cement reputations through communications that transform,” she said.
“Omnisearch is how we keep that promise in an age when a brand’s reputation is increasingly read, and judged, by machines as well as people.”
Stratworks begins the process with what it calls an Omnisearch Visibility Audit, examining how a company appears across search engines, AI, social platforms, marketplaces and forums.
In an environment where audiences can instantly cross-check corporate claims against an expanding universe of information, the challenge is no longer simply getting a brand seen.
It is making sure the story consumers find elsewhere holds up when they look. —Ed: Corrie S. Narisma
