The Role of PR and Earned Media in AI Visibility
“ChatGPT and Gemini aren't even showing our company/product in their responses. Even worse, they're recommending our competitors! We need to fix this!”
If you haven’t gotten this frantic call/email yet, you will soon. This topic has become extremely common. Google now gives users an AI overview of their question or search without even needing to click the links. More and more people are just skipping Google entirely and heading straight for AI chatbots.
SEO, once the King of strategy for on-page visibility, has been dethroned. Developing a good SEO strategy is something that can take months of concentrated effort. And yes, it’s still relevant and important for a brand to actively engage in its content and focus efforts on improving SEO ranking.
But as technology and focus on AI have shifted to become common in well, really, almost all businesses and our daily lives, it’s also important to shift organizational communications and PR plans to include a focus on GEO.
GEO
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of understanding and influencing how brands show up in AI-generated answers. If your page ranks high in standard Google searches, that’s great, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to ranking or even being mentioned by an AI chatbot. GEO is still a fairly new tool in the arsenal of PR and communications. But we do know that AI strongly favors corporations or brands when brands communicate a clear air of authenticity. Strong brand signals and trusted mentions (again, in media or by online word-of-mouth) are the best way to appeal to LLMs. Something I also think is worth noting, especially given a blog I previously wrote: LLMs are increasingly relying on press release distribution for their citations. That's a huge win for traditional PR.
I think also something that content professionals and even the general public forget is that the answers given by an LLM are not endorsements but simply pattern recognition. LLMs cannot form opinions or make true recommendations, but they notice how frequently a brand is mentioned and use THAT as the basis for their answers when a user is asking a question.
Don’t forget about traditional SEO when developing your communications strategy; it’s still extremely important. It’s better to think of GEO as more of a partner than an outright replacement. SEO optimization remains important for page ranking and “clicks”, but writing and producing content with GEO in mind will allow AI to easily extract information from your pages to answer a user’s query.
“If your brand is not showing up in the media coverage AI is reading, you are not showing up in the answers AI is giving. That is a visibility problem with real business consequences.”
How To Best Leverage GEO For Your Brand Visibility?
We’re still learning the best ways; this is new to all of us. But a good starting point is writing very clear, well-thought-out content, including things like comparison tables (between your brand and a competitor, for example) and FAQs, as well as focusing on your organic and earned media placement strategy.
AI tools don’t recommend one brand over another because they think it’s better; they simply surface brands that are consistently associated with the topic. This comes from media mentions, website content, but also online conversation and commentary that repeatedly links a brand to a specific category or solution. The future of GEO and its role in PR and communications remains uncertain, but brands that educate and integrate GEO into their media and communications strategy will ultimately have the advantage.