You know this moment.
You land a great story in a respected trade publication. The audience is exactly right. The publication has credibility. The readers are buyers, decision-makers, and industry insiders.
You proudly send the coverage to the executive team. The CEO glances at it and says, “Nobody reads this. Can we get something in The Wall Street Journal?”
Cue the internal screaming.
Communications professionals have been living this conversation for years.
The podcast you pitched? Too niche.
The Substack feature? Not enough subscribers.
The industry newsletter? Too small.
The YouTube channel? Never heard of it.
For decades, the value of these placements was difficult to quantify in a way that resonated with the C-suite. We knew they mattered, that they reached the right people, that credibility isn’t always measured by audience size, but what we couldn’t fully explain was that these seemingly “small” hits were building something much bigger.
Now we can. It’s called Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, and it may be the best thing that’s happened to public relations in decades.
As AI increasingly becomes the way people discover companies, products, experts, and ideas, many of those niche publications, podcasts, newsletters, bylines, and trade media placements are becoming part of the information layer that trains and informs generative search engines.
In other words, that trade publication your CEO dismissed may have more influence on whether ChatGPT recommends your company than a one-off national media hit.
In fact, here is what’s actually happening while your leadership team is protecting their calendars waiting for that major national feature that may never come:
YouTube is now cited in 16% of LLM (Large Language Model) answers — officially beating out Reddit as a primary source of truth (Bluefish, Jan 2026, reported by Adweek).
LinkedIn is the #2 most cited domain across ChatGPT, Google, and Perplexity (Semrush, 325,000 prompts analyzed, Feb 2026).
Substack is being crawled continuously by AI systems as a high-trust, high-engagement editorial source (PR Daily).
Freshness matters: Content updated within 30 days gets 3.2x more AI citations than older content.
The podcast with “only” 2,000 listeners? Its transcript is indexed and its audio is parsed. AI systems love it. And, the vertical newsletter mentions your client waved off? They are one of the strongest authority signals AI tools use to decide who gets recommended in your category.
Traditional SEO is about getting your website to rank high in Google search results so people click through to your site. The whole game is about driving traffic.
GEO is something entirely different. It’s about making sure that when ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google Gemini answers a question in your category, your brand gets cited as part of that answer. SEO gets you clicks. GEO gets you citations. The user might never see your website. The AI just recommends you based on the data it trusts.
Here’s why that distinction matters right now: experts predict traditional search will lose 50% of its market share by 2028 as users migrate to conversational AI. Furthermore, data shows that buyers who do discover a brand through AI search convert at 4.4 times the rate (!) of traditional organic visitors. So, while the volume is shifting, the quality of the audience is skyrocketing.
The catch? You can’t buy your way into ChatGPT. There is no pay-per-click model for an LLM answer. Up to 90% of citations that drive brand visibility in AI responses come from earned media — third-party editorial sources, journalist-reviewed articles, and credible industry mentions.
Every media placement you’ve ever fought for, every reporter relationship you’ve cultivated, every byline you’ve placed in a trade pub — all of it is now the essential training data your prospects use to make buying decisions. AI engines don’t rank publications by subscription counts; they rank them by category authority. They are built to mirror how humans assess credibility: if a trusted independent party says it, it’s probably true.
Beyond just securing media placements, there are active, immediate steps communications leaders can take right now to deliberately optimize a brand’s AI visibility. It starts with knowing exactly where you stand.
Before you can fix your positioning, you need to know what the AI is actually saying about you. Your brand might be placed in the wrong category, or your flagship product might be described as a legacy offering you retired two years ago.
💪🏻 Here’s a scrappy, basic way to run an AI brand audit:
Test the Big Three: Run your brand name, your product category, and your competitive differentiators through ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. They pull from different source sets and will return completely different results.
Look for Erasure and Lag: Watch for brand erasure (not appearing in your own category- not good) and positioning lag (outdated corporate narratives- also not good).
Find What’s Being Cited: Dig into the footnotes. Know what channels, publications, and credibility sources are influencing LLMs in your specific market.
Document the Receipts: Screenshot any inaccuracies. This becomes your baseline data when you need to make the case internally for a dedicated GEO budget. Treat inaccuracies as a business risk, not a communications annoyance.
Once you know where you stand, you don’t need to become a technical coding expert to fix it, you just need to evolve your existing PR practice to account for how machines evaluate credibility.
Here are your strategic priorities:
Define Your Buyer-Centric Prompts: Identify the exact conversational prompts your target audience is typing into AI tools and build your media strategy around those queries.
💡 Here’s one quick and easy way to do this: Ask your LLM with this prompt–
"Act as a market researcher analyzing user behavior in AI search engines. My target audience is [Define Audience]. Provide a list of 15 highly specific, multi-turn prompts this persona would type into ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity/Gemini when trying to solve [Specific Problem]. Include the context, constraints, and specific output formats they would ask for.
Map the LLM-Trusted Landscape: Which outlets are AI systems in your specific vertical actually pulling from? Spend an hour testing prompts, studying what gets footnoted, and building an intentional target media list based on machine trust, not just human eyeballs.
Elevate Your Executive Spokespeople: Train executives to lose the vague marketing fluff kind of speak—think, "We are leveraging next-generation, cutting-edge paradigms to synergize our client offerings." The AI’s algorithm flags this as high-noise, low-value information and skips right over it. Have them adopt the Context (the situation)-Insight (the expert opinion) -Implication (the real-world consquence) structure instead, as it forces the speaker to package their thoughts into a perfect, bite-sized data packet that AI layout engines love.
Fix Positioning Lag Proactively: Don’t wait for a quarterly audit to catch outdated narratives. Coordinate your earned media push and structured data ahead of every product launch or corporate strategy shift to feed the models fresh data inputs immediately.
Build Cross-Functional Accountability: PR, content marketing, and SEO can no longer operate in separate corporate silos. GEO requires a unified signal network, which means shared strategy, standardized terminology, and shared measurement frameworks.
The press release was already staging a comeback, but GEO makes it genuinely strategic again, provided you write it for machines as well as humans. AI systems place massive weight on structured, unambiguous third-party validation.
AI-optimized press releases pack everything important in the first 75-100 words, avoid vague terms (“platform” or “the company”), provide clear attribution (not “company spokesperson”), and follow a structured formatting. Additionally, the optimized headline formula is: [Organization] + [Action] + [Product/Service] + [Quantifiable Benefit].
If you’ve been measuring PR success through vague impressions and clip counts, you already know those metrics carry less and less weight with leadership. GEO gives you a reason to upgrade the conversation to metrics the C-suite actually respects:
AI Visibility Score: How prominently your brand appears in AI-generated answers for the specific prompts your target buyers are using. This is the new “page one ranking.”
Answer Share of Voice (SOV): How often your brand appears in AI answers in your category compared directly to your competitors.
Pipeline Influence: Connecting AI discovery directly to your CRM. With 59% of marketers already reporting measurable inbound growth from AI visibility, this is how you prove ROI.
If you want to move beyond manual audits, several specialized (and pricey!) platforms have emerged to track the path from prompt to recommendation. Generally-speaking, these tools provide comprehensive research (specific prompts/topics that buyers use in your AI search), daily tracking across AI platforms, audits and detailed recommendations for improvements (think tailored content pieces, Reddit threads to get included in, etc.), and more.
Here are a few of note (in random order):
Brands that treat PR as a nice-to-have function in the AI era are missing what may be one of the biggest shifts in discovery since the birth of Google.
As buyers increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and AI Overviews for answers, the brands that get recommended won’t necessarily be the ones spending the most on advertising. They’ll be the brands that have built the strongest network of trust, authority, and credibility across the web.
Conveniently, that’s exactly what great PR has always done.😉
For years, communications teams have had to defend the value of earned media. In the GEO era, we may finally have the proof we’ve been looking for.
Open ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity and ask each of them these five questions:
What is [Your Company]?
Who are the leading companies in [your category]?
What makes [Your Company] different from competitors?
Who are the most influential executives in [your industry]?
What companies would you recommend for [problem your customers solve]?
Document the answers.
Then ask yourself:
Did your company appear?
Did your CEO appear?
Was the description accurate?
Were competitors mentioned more often than you?
What sources were cited?
If the answers surprise you, you’ve just identified your first GEO opportunity.
Did your company show up? Did your competitors? And were you surprised by the answer? Let’s talk about it!
You Beta Believe It is a newsletter for communications professionals about learning AI in public, in real time. If this one made you think or you enjoyed it, please share it!
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