Why PR is leading the GEO era

Twenty years ago, when I started in this business, the question every founder asked me was, “Can you get us into TechCrunch?” Ten years ago, it became, “Can you get us onto page one of Google?” Today, the question is different: “How can you get us in ChatGPT answers?”

That question gets to the heart of generative engine optimization, or GEO. As AI increasingly shapes how people discover and evaluate companies, brands need to think beyond where they rank and start paying attention to how they are understood, cited, and recommended.

For PR, that shift creates a major opportunity. And it goes far beyond simply getting a brand mentioned in an AI-generated answer.

What is GEO?

GEO is all about improving how a brand and its content appear in answers generated by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI. Instead of competing for one of Google’s traditional blue links, brands need to think about whether they appear in the synthesized answer itself and, just as importantly, how they are represented when they do.

Researchers at Princeton University and other institutions introduced the term GEO in a study published at ACM KDD in 2024. Across a benchmark of 10,000 queries, the researchers found that GEO techniques could increase source visibility in generative answers by up to 40%. The most effective approaches included adding credible citations, quotations, and statistics. Keyword stuffing, on the other hand, did not help. For PR professionals, that distinction should sound familiar.

Why GEO matters now

The way people search for information is already changing. More than 900 million people now use ChatGPT each week, while AI-generated answers are also changing what it means to be visible in traditional search. Ahrefs found that when a Google AI Overview appears, clicks to the top-ranking page can fall substantially. Its latest research also found that only 38% of AI Overview citations come from pages ranking in Google’s top 10.

Then there is the earned media connection. Muck Rack’s May 2026 analysis of more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini found that 84% came from sources it classifies as earned media, with journalism accounting for 27% of citations. Paid and advertorial content accounted for only 0.3%.

In other words, ranking well on Google no longer guarantees that AI will mention your brand, and simply publishing more content isn’t enough. Credibility, authority, and third-party validation are becoming extremely important to how brands show up in AI-generated answers.

So, where does PR fit in?

1. You can’t pitch an AI, but you can shape what it reads

You can’t email ChatGPT a press release or invite Gemini to coffee. AI platforms form answers from a much broader information ecosystem, including journalism, research, government sources, company content, and other available material. PR plays an important role in shaping that ecosystem by helping companies earn something they cannot simply buy: credible third-party validation.

This does not mean one major media hit will suddenly make a company an AI favorite. The value comes from building a body of credible coverage that establishes what a company does, what it is known for, and where its expertise lies. In a world where AI is increasingly part of the audience, earned coverage can live beyond the initial publication.

2. PR has been building authority for decades

Long before anyone called it GEO, PR teams were building public records around companies and their leaders. A profile from several years ago, an executive interview, original research covered by the media, and consistent industry commentary can all contribute to the information available about a brand today. That is why GEO is an evolution of PR rather than an entirely new discipline.

Good PR has always been about building authority over time, not simply generating a spike in attention. Earned coverage can remain discoverable long after the original campaign is over, continuing to reinforce a company’s reputation and expertise. What has changed is how people discover that information. Increasingly, an AI system can encounter and synthesize that body of information to answer a potential customer’s question.

3. What works for GEO looks a lot like good PR

One of the most interesting findings from the original GEO research is what did and did not improve visibility. Adding statistics, credible quotations, and authoritative sources helped, while keyword stuffing did not. 

For PR professionals, those findings should sound familiar. Specificity, evidence, credible sources, and something genuinely worth saying are also what make a story useful to a journalist.

For years, brands learned to create content around what a search algorithm might reward. GEO reminds us that optimization cannot replace credibility. Promotional claims without evidence are difficult for journalists to use and equally unlikely to provide much value when an AI system is trying to construct an authoritative answer.

4. Being cited isn’t the same as being understood

One of the biggest mistakes brands can make with GEO is treating a mention as the end goal. Knowing that ChatGPT recognizes your company is useful, but what matters more is whether it understands what your company actually does, what differentiates it from competitors, and where its expertise belongs.

The IAB’s framework for measuring AI visibility captures this distinction by separating “presence,” whether a brand appears, from “portrayal,” how that brand is represented. This distinction matters for PR because our job has never simply been to generate mentions. It is to help establish a clear narrative that others understand and can credibly validate.

That challenge is complicated by the fact that there is no single “page one” of ChatGPT. Different AI platforms rely on different sources and can produce different answers, with meaningful differences in citation behavior across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. GEO success therefore should not be reduced to one citation or ranking. Brands need to look at whether they are represented accurately and consistently across the AI platforms and conversations that matter.

5. GEO is creating a new way to prove PR’s value

For years, PR teams have been asked to show the ROI of their efforts, and it has never been easy. PR is not like advertising, where you can put in a certain amount of money and directly track the clicks or conversions that come out. It is a long-term game about building brand awareness, reputation, and recognition. The value of a major profile, an executive quote, or sustained reputation building has never been reducible to how many people clicked a single link.

Marketing has spent decades connecting visibility to clicks, but AI-generated answers complicate that model. A potential customer can ask an AI assistant for the best solution to a problem, encounter your company in the response, and begin considering the brand without ever clicking a traditional search result. Influence can therefore happen before conventional attribution tools ever see it.

GEO gives PR teams a new way to show the impact of that long-term work. If the authority and reputation built through consistent earned coverage help a brand appear in relevant AI-generated answers, PR teams can see their efforts are influencing the way a company is discovered and understood. Measures such as AI presence, portrayal, citation share, and prompt visibility can provide another way to demonstrate PR’s value alongside traditional metrics like impressions, traffic, and share of voice. In that sense, GEO does not just create a new visibility challenge for PR. It may also give us a new way to prove the effect of good PR efforts.

6. Your AI reputation needs managing too

Ask several AI assistants about the same company, and you can get several versions of its story. One might understand its current positioning, while another could surface an old executive, outdated product information, or a description that no longer reflects the business. Therefore, GEO is becoming a reputation issue as much as a visibility issue.

Traditional media gives PR teams a relatively clear path when something is wrong: a reporter, an editor, and usually some mechanism to correct the record. AI-generated answers are more complicated. That means PR teams need to monitor what AI platforms say about their companies and clients as much as they monitor the press, identifying inaccuracies and gaps as well as the sources that may be informing those answers. The goal is not to flood the web with company messaging, but to ensure that accurate, current, and independently supported information is available for AI systems to find.

7. Freshness matters

Authority takes time to build, but that does not mean old coverage is enough. Muck Rack found that more than half of journalism citations in its research came from content published within the previous year, with citations peaking sharply during the first month after publication.

That gives one of PR’s oldest skills new importance: staying relevant to the news cycle.

Timely expert commentary, original data, newsjacking, and perspectives on current industry developments do more than generate media attention in the moment. They continuously add fresh information to the public record surrounding a brand.

The brands that perform well in GEO are unlikely to be those that secure a handful of great stories and then disappear. They will be the ones that continue giving journalists, audiences, and AI systems credible reasons to understand why they matter now.

8. Authority is increasingly built around people

GEO is not only about companies. It is also about expertise. Ask an AI platform who the leading voices are on a particular technology or industry issue, and it needs information connecting real people with those subjects. Building those connections is one of PR’s oldest crafts.

An executive who is consistently quoted in credible reporting, interviewed on relevant podcasts, contributing thoughtful commentary, and publishing useful perspectives creates a public body of evidence connecting their name with their expertise. That makes executive positioning more than a traditional thought leadership exercise. It can also contribute to how expertise is represented in AI-driven discovery.

The goal is not to put an executive in every conversation, but to build a clear, consistent association with the subjects where that person genuinely has something valuable to contribute.

9.  GEO is a question business

Most brands will probably begin their GEO journey by asking ChatGPT, “What do you know about us?” I think a better question is: “Where should people discover us before they know our name?” A potential customer might ask which cybersecurity vendors a fintech should consider, how AI can improve customer retention, or who the leading experts are in digital trade. 

They are searching around a problem, category, or trend rather than a company name. The question itself can influence which sources an AI system cites. Industry-trend queries, for example, generated more than twice as many journalism citations as how-to queries. PR teams should therefore start thinking about a prompt map alongside the traditional media map.

What questions should a company credibly appear in? What problems does it solve? What topics should its executives have authority on? Which industry conversations should naturally lead back to the brand? The goal is not to insert a company into every possible answer. It is to earn a place in the questions that matter to its audience.

10. Don’t repeat the mistakes of SEO

A GEO industry is already emerging, complete with measurement platforms, scores, optimization tools, and promises to help brands crack AI search. Some of those tools will be valuable. But we should be careful not to repeat the worst habits of the SEO era.

The IAB says more than 20 companies now offer AI visibility measurement tools, with different methodologies that can produce different answers for the same brand. That alone should tell us how early this market still is.

AI platforms will continue changing. Building an entire communications strategy around whatever influences one model today is unlikely to be a durable approach. The better strategy is less flashy: create genuinely useful information. Make specific claims and support them. Bring original data to the conversation. Give journalists credible experts. Earn coverage from sources audiences trust. And make sure the story being told about your company is clear and consistent. Good PR should work for humans first. If it also gives AI systems better information to work with, that is precisely the point.

Why PR belongs at the GEO table

Leading GEO does not mean PR should own every part of it. Technical elements like structured data, site architecture, crawlability, and machine-readable product information will require collaboration across SEO, content, digital, and product teams. PR has its own learning to do as well. We need to monitor what AI platforms say about brands the way we monitor the press, understand which prompts matter to our audiences and which sources are shaping the answers, and evolve our measurement beyond clips and impressions to include AI presence, portrayal, citation share, and consistency across platforms. GEO will be multidisciplinary, but PR should have a strong voice at the table because credibility, authority, reputation, and third-party validation are already at the core of what we do. For the first time, GEO may also give us new ways to demonstrate how that long-term work translates into visibility and discovery.

When I started in PR, the definition of a good PR person was fairly simple: someone reporters trusted enough to take a call from. That definition hasn’t changed as much as the technology around it has. Today, a story can reach far beyond a publication’s immediate audience and become part of the information ecosystem AI platforms use to answer questions about companies, industries, products, and people. That gives the work we have always done another layer of influence, even when the person asking the question never visits the article or searches for the company by name.

That is ultimately why GEO matters to PR. It is not about finding a new algorithm to manipulate or abandoning the fundamentals of good communications for the latest search trend. It is about making sure the information surrounding a brand is credible, current, consistent, and strong enough to be trusted whether the audience is a reporter, a prospective customer, or an AI platform. The technology delivering the answer is new, but earning the trust behind that answer is what good PR has always done.