Why GEO Is the Future of Brand Visibility Beyond Google: GEO and the PR Strategies That Influence AI Itself

GEO (GEO, Generative Engine Optimization) represents a fundamental shift in how “search” works. As described in a recent analysis by the well-known venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, we are moving beyond the era where visibility meant ranking high on a search engine results page (SERP). Instead, in what A16Z calls “Act II of search,” discovery now increasingly happens through large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and similar AI-driven interfaces. The goal of GEO is not to optimize for a list of links, but to ensure your brands content is recognized, cited, and surfaced within the synthesized answers these engines deliver. 

In more concrete terms, traditional SEO optimizes for backlinks, keyword density, page-rank signals, and click-throughs, while GEO optimizes for “model relevance”, which is the likelihood that an AI model will include your brand or content in its answers. This means structuring content to be clear, authoritative, and easy for an LLM to parse; emphasizing context, clarity, and comprehensiveness over repetition or keyword stuffing. 

Many of the signals that influence what an AI “remembers” or cites do not come from a brand’s own website or content. Rather, they come from external, credible publications, the kind of “third-party, authoritative sources” that have traditionally been important for PR. In other words, earned media, press coverage, journalistic articles, and industry write-ups are the backbone of GEO visibility. 

This is where a modern PR agency like BIG FISH PR becomes vital. As the agency itself argues, in the AI era, “news coverage plays an even more powerful role … not just in influencing people, but in influencing machines.” PR is no longer just about shaping human perception; it’s about shaping how AI models internalize, reference, and repeat your brand story.

But GEO isn’t just about “getting coverage.” It’s also about timing, structure, and relevance. AI models tend to favor recent, authoritative content. Coverage in well-recognized outlets, with clear, well-structured articles, increases the chances of being cited by generative engines. BIG FISH PR notes explicitly that recency and authority matter: “fresh, relevant, and authoritative content wins” when it comes to AI visibility. See “Why Earned Media (News Coverage) Matters More Than Ever in the Age of AI”.

Because of this, PR strategy in the GEO age must be forward-thinking. Rather than sporadic press hits, brands need sustained, strategic earned media that builds up over time, constantly reinforcing their presence in the “model memory.” That means planning announcements, product launches, thought-leadership pieces, op-eds, interviews, or features in major outlets, not just for human visibility, but for AI “citation potential.” BIG FISH PR has publicly framed their 2026 approach around exactly this: shaping how stories are discovered, shared, and ranked by AI. 

What’s especially interesting about GEO: it shifts many of the old assumptions around content optimization. It is no longer sufficient to have the “right SEO keywords.” Instead, content needs to be understandable to AI, context-rich, and authoritative. Long-form storytelling, depth, clarity, and narrative coherence become more important than rigid keyword optimization. 

But that doesn’t mean traditional SEO disappears; rather, GEO builds on and evolves it. Content infrastructure (crawlability, clean data, structure) still matters, but GEO requires those pieces to work in the service of being cited. As some observers note, the two disciplines SEO and GEO are complementary. Together, they maximize visibility for both human search and AI-driven discovery. 

A real-world example of this is: the launch of Ding Dong: How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door by Jamie Siminoff. BIG FISH PR, which has worked with Siminoff and his companies for many years, handled the PR for the book launch. Prior to the official launch, a search across all AI models for: “does Jamie Siminoff have a book” returned no credible results, because no authoritative book-announcement coverage existed. 

According to BIG FISH PR, after the agency launched the book and secured press coverage, those same searches (on AI models) a week later produced outstanding results: All AI models now recognized the book’s existence, cited it, surfaced it, and used the earned media coverage in responses to related user prompts about the Ding Dong books as well as Ring and Amazon.

This underscores the power PR has on GEO, not just as a tool for shaping human perception, but as a method for embedding brand identity into the “knowledge base” of AI. Once credible outlets cover the news, AI models ingest and internalize these signals, increasing the chance of future reference. In a sense, earned media becomes “training data,” or at least part of the data context, for generative engines. BIG FISH PR puts this front and center.

The result is not just short-term publicity. Effective GEO-informed PR builds long-term “model equity.” When future users ask AI about a founder, company, product, or book, those earlier press mentions may determine whether the AI “knows” anything about your brand at all. That positions your brand not just in today’s conversations but in the future memory of AI, influencing what users will see, learn, and believe.

GEO AKA “AI Search” is the emerging paradigm for brand visibility in a world where LLMs shape how people discover information. Public relations, particularly high-quality, authoritative earned media, now plays a central role in making brands visible to both humans and machines. Agencies like BIG FISH PR are already using this shift to help clients get “found by AI,” ensuring their stories, products, and people show up when it counts, across generative engines. 

Like this article? Want to learn more about PR and GEO? Read BIG FISH PR’s GEO-First PR Playbook for 2026, 15 Steps to Make Brands Discoverable by AI Models.