It’s no secret that AI is changing the way people search the internet.
What used to be a quick Google search is increasingly becoming a more detailed conversation with an AI platform. Instead of typing a few keywords and sorting through pages of links, users can ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or another generative search tool a specific question and receive a robust answer in seconds.
For brands, showing up in search is nothing new. Traditional search engine optimization, or SEO, has long helped companies improve their visibility through keywords, backlinks, and website content. But AI has introduced a new question: How do you make sure your brand shows up when AI is the one answering?
That’s where public relations comes into play.
The Stories PR Pros Place Today Shape the Answers AI Gives Tomorrow
According to public relations and media intelligence platform Muck Rack, 84% of links cited by AI search engines come from earned media. That means much of the information generative engines use to formulate answers comes from third-party sources like news outlets rather than directly from a brand itself.
Earned media has always been valuable because someone other than the company is telling the story. A reporter covering a company announcement, interviewing an executive, or citing an organization as an expert provides something a brand cannot create for itself: external credibility. In traditional search, that credibility could help strengthen a brand’s authority and improve where it appeared in search results, but in AI search, it can become part of the answer itself.
That gives earned media a new layer of value. The stories PR professionals help place today can influence how generative engines understand, describe, and recommend a brand tomorrow.
From SEO to GEO
As search evolves, marketers and communicators are increasingly talking about GEO, or generative engine optimization. GEO is the practice of shaping your digital content and your broader web presence to improve the odds of being mentioned, cited, summarized, or recommended by generative AI engines when users ask questions. But the connection between PR and search did not begin with AI.
Experience, expertise, authority and trust, commonly referred to as E-E-A-T, have already played an important role in how search engines evaluate the quality and credibility of content. And those are areas where public relations has long had an impact.
A company can call itself an expert on its own website, but when its leaders are quoted as experts in news coverage, contribute meaningful thought leadership, or earn recognition from credible third parties, that expertise gains outside validation. Media coverage and other forms of earned visibility can help build a broader digital footprint that demonstrates what a brand knows and why people should trust it.
For PR professionals, GEO builds on that same foundation. The work we have always done around earned media, reputation, and clear messaging now has an even more direct connection to how brands appear in AI-powered search.
So what do GEO-optimized forms of content do differently? It’s written to be understood by machines, be quoted as facts, and to be re-used inside AI-generated responses. Using consistent language across websites, news coverage, social media, blogs, and other forms of content ensure your brand is known for what you want it to be known for.
The goal is not to repeat identical language everywhere. It is to make a brand’s authority clear, credible and easy for both people and machines to understand.
PR Is Reputation Management for Humans and Machines
For years, we have talked about public relations as a reputation management tool. That reputation now exists not only in the minds of customers, reporters, employees, and stakeholders, but also across the sources generative AI systems use to understand a brand.
AI can summarize what has already been published, but PR helps determine what gets published in the first place, and that changes the value of the work PR professionals have been doing all along.
Media relations is no longer solely about reaching the audience of a particular publication. Executive thought leadership can do more than establish credibility with potential customers. A well-written press release can live far beyond the day it is distributed. And each piece of credible, third-party information adds to the digital record AI systems may draw from when answering questions about a company, industry, or topic.
As more people turn to generative search for answers, brands will have less control over exactly how those answers are presented. What they can control is the reputation, credibility, and body of information those systems have to work with. In the AI search era, that makes public relations more important than ever.
