Trust in news among Filipinos has fallen to 28 percent — a 10-point drop in a single year, and the steepest decline of any of the 48 markets in the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report. In one of the world’s most online populations, where seven in ten now 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.

Stratworks, the all-Filipino communications agency based in Bonifacio Global City, reads that contradiction as a central marketing challenge of the moment. When people stop trusting any one source, they do not stop deciding. They check around. A brand’s claim is quietly measured against whatever else is available, and increasingly an AI assistant does that checking for them, returning a single answer drawn from across the internet before anyone clicks a link. The agency reads that wider collapse in trust as a broader signal: a public skeptical of what it reads does not switch that skepticism off when it turns to a company, a product, or a campaign.  Stratworks calls its answer Omnisearch Marketing — an approach that helps brands stay visible, credible, and consistent across every place people now search, from Google and AI assistants to social platforms, marketplaces, and reviews.

Search became a reputation question

“Search used to be treated mainly as a marketing function,” said Mark Christian Parlade, Managing Director of Stratworks, Inc. “It has quietly become a reputation function.” The shift, he argued, has moved ahead of how most brands still operate. “The old playbook assumed you could win attention on your own channels. 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.”

None of this makes the familiar tools less important. If anything, a campaign matters more when the surrounding signals can confirm it, and less when they contradict it. Advertising, events, social video, digital PR, and crisis response all still do their work. What has changed is the ground they land on. A brand can run a flawless campaign and still be introduced to a customer by something it never made: an old controversy an AI surfaces first, a Reddit thread or forum complaint that has been simmering quietly for months, a marketplace listing that no longer matches the latest message. All of it reads as true. Only some of it is the brand’s.

That shift shows up in buying behavior too. More than four in ten Filipino internet users discover new brands through social media, according to the Digital 2026 report by Meltwater and We Are Social. Combined sales across Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop in the Philippines reached an estimated US$22 billion (roughly ₱1.2 trillion) in 2025, up 15 percent in a year, by research firm Cube’s count, much of it driven by comparison and judgment happening inside the apps themselves. And the wariness is explicit: nearly half of Filipinos, 48 percent, fear AI’s capacity to generate false information, according to the WIN World AI Index reported locally by the Philippine Survey and Research Center. The more skeptical the audience, the harder it checks, and the more a brand’s standing rests on whether the evidence outside its own channels holds together.

The wariness is not limited to news. Dentsu Philippines’ 2025 consumer report found Filipinos increasingly skeptical of brands as well, concluding that companies must now earn attention and trust because simply being present is no longer enough. Read alongside the collapse in news trust, it points to a single condition: a public that has grown harder to convince, wherever the message comes from.

Where attention stops being enough

A campaign can earn attention, but attention is no longer the whole task. In a low-trust environment, what a brand says has to be backed up by what others independently show, and that corroboration is the oldest discipline in public relations, which is the bet Stratworks is making.

Some of Stratworks’ clients have already started working this way, treating the wider record that customers and AI now read — search results, earned media, social, marketplaces, reviews, even the forum threads few brands track — as one reputation environment to be examined and strengthened, rather than a set of channels managed separately.  The agency frames Omnisearch Marketing as the discovery layer of its broader omnichannel marketing service in the Philippines — how a brand is found and judged the moment someone looks it up. The name describes the shift it answers, that visibility can no longer be planned one search, one platform, or one channel at a time.

In that picture, AI is not the whole problem. It is the new interpreter of a much larger record. “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,” said Lori Umali, Chief of Staff at Stratworks, who specializes in AI visibility optimization. “Then we find where the signals are outdated, thin, or inconsistent, and close those gaps so the picture holds together wherever someone, or something, is looking.” No agency can dictate how an AI will answer, Umali said; the work is to strengthen what it draws from. Search optimization remains the foundation, but no longer the whole structure.

A discipline the algorithm didn’t replace

Stratworks has been doing reputation work for 26 years. It ran public relations for the First Philippine Mount Everest Expedition, and has held the Jollibee and PLDT Home accounts for years. It is the only agency to win Agency of the Year from both the Philippine Quill and Anvil Awards in consecutive years. The craft in all of it is the same one AI search now turns on: building brand authority that holds up under scrutiny, through earned media, consistent storytelling, and the vouching of credible third parties.. “The brand no longer gets the first word,” Parlade said. “Often it does not even get the last one.”

Donna Nievera-Conda, Stratworks’ President and Co-CEO, frames Omnisearch as continuous with the agency’s purpose rather than a departure from it. “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. We have never just managed reputations. We build cultural relevance, and that is what earns trust wherever people are searching.”

What has changed is visibility. The question now is knowing what that wider record actually says. For most companies, no one has examined the full picture of how their brand appears across search, AI, social, marketplaces, and forums. A Stratworks engagement begins there, with an Omnisearch Visibility Audit that maps where a brand's story holds together and where it breaks down. In the most connected, least trusting market on the map, it may be the most useful thing a brand can do before the next campaign goes out. The rest of the internet is already telling a story of its own, and a brand is stronger when its message and that record agree. 

For more information on omnisearch marketing,omnichannel marketing, and other PR-related matters, visit Stratworks’ website,

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