AI is disrupting search—PR can help your company get found
Have AI bots met your company? Time to introduce them: AI-powered search answers are shaping what people know about your brand and how (or if) they find you. That means generative engine optimization (GEO) is sidling up to search engine optimization (SEO) as a fundamental need for every kind of company or organization. It’s daunting—GEO requires a whole new approach—but PR can help.
A Pew Research Center study conducted earlier this year found that that Google users were less likely to click on result links when visiting search pages with an AI summary. And roughly 26% of users encountering an AI summary stop their browsing session on that page, indicating they didn’t research further, according to Pew. An Adobe study conducted around the same time found that 77% of people in the U.S. who use ChatGPT use it as a search engine, 24% go to ChatGPT first. So yeah, search is changing.
In contrast to SEO, a game of keywords, clicks and backlinks, with GEO the goal is to appear in the AI’s answers or citations. Right now, we’re living in a mixed world of GEO and SEO, and heads-up marketers are trying to win at both.
Generative AI’s reliable sources
Cracking the GEO code requires understanding what generative AI systems consider to be reliable sources. A new report from Muck Rack, What Is AI Reading?, provides some insight. Researchers created a large, diverse set of prompts (aka questions or requests); fed them into Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini with citations enabled; and analyzed the responses and cited links. Their findings in short: It’s the stuff you can’t buy that significantly influences AI responses.
That’s because AI favors what it considers credible sources in its responses, according to Matt Dzugan, Muck Rack’s senior director of data. More than 89% of links cited by AI are earned media, defined broadly in the study as academic/research, aggregator/encyclopedic, third-party corporate blogs and content, government/NGO, journalism, press releases, and social/user-generated content.
Corporate blogs (not your own) and journalism account for the lion’s share of links in the earned category. More than 27% of links cited by AI are journalistic content, and when queries seek recent information, journalism’s share rises to 49%. The remaining links cited are owned media (6%) and paid/advertorial netting (5%).
All that data adds up to a vital role for PR teams that are skilled at media outreach, thought leadership and case studies.
GEO winners and losers
Overall, credibility wins, at least for now. Generative AI systems prioritize sources that provide some third-party verification that you’re the real deal. That means content you worked to place on a third-party blog without sponsoring it, journalist-written stories or contributed articles in media outlets, and mentions in Wikipedia, Reddit and the like. Sorry influencers.
Top news outlets came out strong (Reuters, Financial Times, Axios, and Forbes, for example), with Claude citing more eclectic and deep-dive outlets, like NPR and Harvard Business Review, than ChatGPT and Gemini.
Other widely cited sources include Wikipedia (in the encyclopedic bucket) and NerdWallet and TripAdvisor (in the third-party corporate blogs and content bucket). According to Dzugan, Wikipedia’s “juried” process makes its content reliable to AI. Reddit (in the social/user-generated content bucket) unsurprisingly proved a top citation for advice-seeking prompts like “Where’s the best place to live?”
For news junkies like us it was interesting to see that Substack didn’t show up much in AI results, but Dzugan thinks that will change as the newsletter platform continues to accumulate cultural cachet. Outlets that use paywalls and don’t have agreements with major AI players may be left out of AI answers completely.
Finally, trade outlets shined in answers to questions about their sector. According to the researchers, “While overall, large news organizations like Reuters and Associated Press do ‘top the charts’ of citation frequency, the AI systems tend to select niche-appropriate outlets frequently when queried about specific industries.”
What GEO’s rise means for brands
With the caveat that generative AI systems are “rapidly evolving and inherently opaque,” as Muck Rack puts it (meaning their behaviors may change), these are our top takeaways for brands:
Media outreach remains vital to brand visibility. Media placements are getting harder and harder to land: In Muck Rack’s 2025 State of PR survey, 72% of PR pros noted low journalist response rates, and 62% reported shrinking media lists in relevant beats. But the effort is worth it to make sure your brand is on the “minds” of AI platforms. Trade placements are especially valuable (and more attainable) for B2B companies, and regular coverage matters: AI platforms favor recency, regardless of the topic, when it comes to journalistic sources.
Thought leadership is a heavyweight in this new landscape. Contributed or bylined articles (pieces published in media outlets under your expert’s name) remain one of the best ways to build a presence in trade outlets. Plus, repurposing these articles for third-party blogs and on your own website creates additional content for AI systems to cite.
Strategic communications partnerships are worth the relationship building and then some. We were struck by what a large slice of the AI results pie the third-party corporate blogs and content category commanded. Take the time to build communications partnerships that get your content on allied organizations’ platforms, and your brand is more likely to be cited in AI searches.
It is and will be a wild time when it comes to GEO, with a lot to follow and learn. And we’ll be right by our clients’ sides as it all unfolds!
