I haven’t heard PR mentioned this much in SEO circles since the old days of blasting press releases through PR Newswire for links. (That worked for a pretty short window.) Now it comes up in almost every conversation I have.
An agency founder I talked with this week put it in a way I liked: GEO is starting to eat PR, or PR is eating GEO. Either way, they’re basically merging. I’d go a step further. I think AI search has reinvigorated the PR industry, because it finally gives PR a way to show what it actually did.
“We got you in Forbes” used to be the end of the report
PR reporting used to stop at the placement. Here’s the clip, here’s the outlet, here’s some estimated reach. What happened after that was pretty much a mystery.
Now you can show the placement, then show how many times it’s been cited in AI answers. And if you’re doing self-reported attribution (a “how did you hear about us?” field with an option for ChatGPT or AI search), you can even try to estimate how many leads or how much pipeline came out of that placement. That’s a lot more accountable than it’s ever been, and it’s tied to the hottest topic in marketing right now.
Everyone agrees it matters. Nobody owns it.
Muck Rack surveyed over 1,100 communications folks this summer. Most of them think GEO matters, and more than half are already going after coverage in high-authority publications specifically to show up in AI answers. But almost three in ten said nobody at their company actually owns GEO.
Why PR is harder to game
Something I’ve noticed: PR is a lot less prescriptive than SEO. There’s no checklist that reliably turns into coverage, so it’s much harder to abuse the way SEO and AEO tactics get abused. I think that’s exactly why AI engines trust it more.
The flip side is that the market has noticed. Plenty of link builders have rebranded as “citation builders,” and a lot of paid placements are getting dressed up as earned media. I’m pretty skeptical of that stuff, and I wrote about why in citation building is the new blogger outreach.
If I were running PR for AI visibility
I’d start by looking at which outlets AI already cites for the category, and pitch those first. Then I’d keep reporting past the placement. Watch how often each piece gets cited across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI features for a couple of months after it runs.
I’d also add an AI option to the “how did you hear about us?” field today. It’s the cheapest attribution you’ll ever set up. (I get into that more in the attribution problem.)
And somebody has to own it. SEO, PR and brand all feed into it, but one person needs to own the outcome. I have opinions on who that should be, and that’s Monday’s post.
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