In an era dominated by AI chatbots, a website's relevance increases. These AI systems don't create information; they crawl the web to find it. Your site serves as the foundational data source, making a well-structured, up-to-date digital presence critical for discoverability and accurate representation by AI.

Earned media is a primary source for generative AI, appearing in over 60% of brand reputation-related responses according to research. This positions PR at the center of the new "Generative Engine Optimization" (GEO) landscape, creating the most significant strategic opportunity for the industry in over a decade.

Beyond data privacy, a key ethical responsibility for marketers using AI is ensuring content integrity. This means using platforms that provide a verifiable trail for every asset, check for originality, and offer AI-assisted verification for factual accuracy. This protects the brand, ensures content is original, and builds customer trust.

As AI devalues simple clicks, marketing focus must shift to building a strong brand that algorithms recognize as authoritative. High-quality, well-structured owned content (like blogs and reports) becomes more critical for discoverability than traditional performance marketing tactics.

A critical learning at LinkedIn was that pointing an AI at an entire company drive for context results in poor performance and hallucinations. The team had to manually curate "golden examples" and specific knowledge bases to train agents effectively, as the AI couldn't discern quality on its own.

AI models heavily weigh earned media from credible publications when determining brand authority. With 61% of AI brand mentions coming from editorial sources, PR is no longer just a brand-building exercise but a critical technical lever for GEO, directly influencing discoverability.

With 80-90% of AI-powered searches resulting in no clicks, traditional SEO is dying. The new key metric is "share of voice"—how often your brand is cited in AI-generated answers. This requires a fundamental strategy shift to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), focusing on becoming an authoritative source for LLMs rather than just driving website traffic.

Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on keywords and links, GEO aims to make your brand visible in AI-generated answers. This is achieved by becoming a citable, trusted authority, which requires a blend of public relations, high-quality owned content, and technical site readiness.

Marketers must evolve from SEO to GEO, optimizing content for how brands appear in LLM results. This requires a new content strategy that treats the LLM as a distinct persona or channel, creating content specifically for it to crawl and ensuring accurate brand representation.