AI search is multiplying the impact of PR programs. 89% of LLM citations come from earned sources, including 27% from journalistic outlets. This recent survey by Muck Rack has been excitedly received by PR teams. Not only does media coverage drive brand awareness, but it also fuels AI search responses. It’s a double whammy of PR impact!
The next question, though, is… what should the PR team now do to maximize its GEO impact?
Get up to Speed with GEO
First up, let’s get on the same page. We’re going to call optimizing for AI search Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) for our purposes here. Here’s an explainer about what that entails. In the face of a board-level mandate to rank highly in AI search, PR professionals unfamiliar with SEO techniques have homework to do.
Assign GEO ownership
In most organizations, no one currently owns GEO. It sits on the CMO’s desk looking urgent. GEO is a multidisciplinary approach, so assemble a team involving SEO, content, web, affiliate marketing and PR. This has all your citation sources covered. If a company treats GEO as an extension of SEO, many traditional SEO tactics will naturally carry over to boost visibility in AI search. However, there are also GEO-specific strategies – especially off-page – that can significantly increase influence and authority signals. These efforts are often led by existing demand gen or SEO teams, but the greatest impact comes when GEO and SEO are combined with PR, ensuring that LLM-influencing content reaches owned, earned, and paid channels for a powerful multiplier effect.
Benchmark Your Brand in AI Search
How is your brand showing up in AI search across the primary chatbots compared to your competitive set? What’s the sentiment for the key prompt responses and the primary citations impacting your brand visibility? These are critical benchmarks — and it’s surprisingly hard to get answers to them. If you don’t have your own custom tool, try SEMrush’s Enterprise AIO report.
This is a baseline, but the problem is that each AI tool constantly changes its weights; personalization changes user responses; and turning on or off web-search dramatically alters the outcomes. So there’s a big asterisk next to these metrics.
Reverse Engineer What LLMs Are Citing
Review the list of citations for your brand and its competitors. Chances are there will be several competitor sites in there linking to listicles about ‘top 10 [sector] companies’. That’s a content opportunity.
Look further down, and you will start to see a mix of roundup articles. Some of these will come from sponsored or affiliate programs such as Forbes Advisor. But others will be editorial — PR’s remit! OpenAI has publishing agreements with News Corp, The Atlantic, Vox Media, AP, Axel Springer, Financial Times, Dotdash Meredith, LeMonde, Time and Guardian Media Group, among others. You’ll likely also see trade media citations since AI crawlers tend to look a bit deeper in results than a typical search crawler might. This should inform your PR media list and lend extra weight to the horizontal or vertical trade media program you have in place.
Use PR to Fix AI’s Misunderstandings
The visibility and sentiment of your brand in AI search will vary by topic cluster. You might have 50-100 prompts grouped around each cluster your company wants to be associated with, and the responses will show that some are stronger than others. If your capabilities are misrepresented here, you’ll want to put more emphasis on that weaker topic. That means the PR program will need to change its messaging and aim to secure media coverage that can correct the perception in the market and among the LLMs.
For instance, you might place bylines about that weaker topic in your key trade media, allowing AI chatbots to cite them. While SEO activity tends to take several months to see results, AI search can surface articles in a matter of weeks or days. In fact, according to Muck Rack, journalistic sources are cited more often (+22%) when prompts include a degree of ‘recency’ e.g. ‘what are the latest advances to combat AI-enhanced phishing?’
Fast Track GEO Citations with Influencers
33% of citations are from third-party content and websites. That means you need other brands, analysts and influencers talking about you. Many comms teams are already engaging B2B influencers to reach their target audiences and to create custom content. GEO provides another reason to scale this effort since its content will feed into LLM responses. This content must be on the open web, so gated analyst reports won’t count, but their commentary to the media, their blog posts, and the landing page for their report will. Focus these efforts on the topics you want to see prominently in AI responses.
Work within Community Sites
Reddit and Wikipedia are two of the primary citation sources for LLMs like ChatGPT. This is an opportunity, but it’s not easily accessible. Wikipedia is highly resistant to companies directly changing entries about themselves, their staff, their competitors or their category. That’s what makes it good. There are firms that claim to be able to manipulate entries successfully, but our standing advice is not to touch it.
Reddit is different. Anyone can post in a subreddit, but the admins will quickly shut down corporate shilling. Some tools can surface discussions about relevant topics and brand mentions, such as TalkWalker. However, any engagement here will need to be authentic by members who already have standing in that community. What does that mean for your GEO program? It’s time to take Reddit seriously and assign team members, perhaps from the developer relations or evangelist team, to establish their credentials and to understand how that community views your category.
Review sites like G2, TrustRadius, Capterra, and Gartner Peer Insights are also important for GEO. Typically, these review programs fall outside the PR remit, but if not, it’s time to kick review acquisition up a gear. These sites publish their own roundup articles based on those reviews, which are then cited by LLMs, making this another goal for this effort.
Align Social Media – Results May Vary
Ask two GEO experts about social media and you’ll get three perspectives.
Social media content doesn’t directly move the needle for SEO, and its impact on GEO is still emerging. However, by shaping opinions that spill into media, blogs, and other web content, it becomes part of the broader influence ecosystem. When viewed as a content syndication platform – especially through channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube – social media can extend the reach of your most useful content beyond your website, creating more opportunities for LLMs to encounter and cite it. GEO shouldn’t be the sole reason for social publishing, but aligning topics strategically can maximize its influence, and like much of GEO, we’re still uncovering which levers drive the strongest results.
Track GEO like a Funnel Metric
Unlike Google Search Console, which provides data in real-time, obtaining data from AI chatbots requires re-running your 100+ prompts, which incurs an associated token cost. So you’ll be doing this in snapshots once or twice a month. Circle the team up each month to understand your brand visibility and sentiment, compared to its competitors. Even if your PR outcomes (media articles, analyst reports, influencer content, etc) aren’t cited directly, have you moved the needle? Bear in mind that the models might just have changed how they weigh different sources for live search.
PR outcomes have additional benefits in supporting GEO efforts. The PR team needs to understand the fundamentals of GEO as it evolves. By working with the SEO, Web, Content and Affiliate Marketing teams, PR can play an essential role in driving visibility and improving perception in AI search results. This should include understanding the baseline metrics and primary citation sources, prioritizing topics in the PR program that align with GEO goals, and focusing on media outlets most cited for the brand and its competitors. The PR team can also take the lead in working with analysts and influencers most likely to be referenced to improve third-party citations, drive social media themes and set the strategy for establishing relationships within key communities on Reddit, Quora and review sites.
It’s an exciting time to be in SEO and PR as we discover best practices for GEO. The brands that align these teams will put themselves in the best position to take advantage of changing buyer behavior. If you’d like to learn more about GEO, we have other content on our blog like this template to GEO press releases or this walkthrough about implementing LLMs.txt and in this episode of our podcast. Or feel free to reach out to us here.
About the Author
Morgan McLintic is the founder and CEO of startup marketing agency,Firebrand. Firebrand works with early- and late-stage startups to help raise awareness and drive demand. It does this through integrated programs involving PR, content marketing and digital marketing. The firm was recently recognized as the Boutique Agency of the Year by the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) and awarded Gold Winner of theB2B PR Campaign of the Year by The Drum. Firebrand works with startups in sectors spanning fintech, cybersecurity, AI/ML and infrastructure such as Emburse, Human Interest, Planful, Weaviate and Yubico.
Prior to Firebrand, Morgan was the founder in the US of LEWIS, a global communications firm, which grew to $35m in revenues and 200+ staff in the US, and $75m with 600 staff globally. He has over 30 years' tech experience, both consumer and B2B. At LEWIS, Morgan led the acquisition of three companies - Page One which was integrated and rebranded as LEWIS Pulse; the Davies Murphy Group, a 65-person PR and marketing consultancy; and Piston, a 50-person full-service digital advertising agency.
Morgan has been a speaker at events for AlwaysOn, Holmes Report, MIT / Stanford VLABs, OnHollywood, PR News, PRSA, Social Media Club, Social Media World Forum, Venture Capital and Private Equity Group, and WITI. PRWEEK named him to its Global PR Powerbook in 2015 and 2016.
Follow Morgan onLinkedIn, tune into theFiredUp! podcast, or explore his latest posts onFirebrand’s blog.
