GEO and Reputation Management

Katelyn Holbrook

Communications, at its most fundamental level, is all about building and then protecting a brand. It’s grounded in getting the right messages in front of the right audiences at the right time—and keeping misperceptions and negativity in check—so audiences know and trust your brand.

The PR industry was founded largely on the premise that journalists were critical in helping audiences find, understand and engage with your brand. For many tech companies, industry analysts helped audiences put those brands into relevant categories and among similar companies. As the world went digital, SEO ensured your brand surfaced amid a sea of results when a user searched certain keywords.

But how does that change when artificial intelligence itself becomes an audience—and a gatekeeper—to how other audiences come to know your brand? Can communications professionals ensure key messages and stories reach audiences when AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity determine discovery?

Exploring a big opportunity—and guarding from risk

As AI-powered answer engines are rapidly becoming the dominant gateways to information, communications professionals face a new frontier: Generative Engine Optimization. This emerging discipline builds on traditional SEO, focusing on optimizing for AI assistants and chatbots that audiences increasingly rely on to find information and get questions answered.

The rise of AI has direct implications for brand visibility, credibility and reputation, making strategic communications critical in shaping how brands show up in this evolving environment.

Unlike traditional search engines, AI answer layers don’t simply fetch the top-ranked Google results; they instead evaluate and synthesize data.

Brands that deliver high-quality, authentic and technically optimized content across channels will hold a first-mover advantage. Investing in AI visibility is no longer optional. Failing to engage with GEO risks misrepresentation, or worse, omission entirely. As AI adoption accelerates, the window to shape brand perception in these systems is closing fast.

Starting with a clear understanding

Before improving your visibility in AI answer layers, you must first understand the current state of your brand in AI. This means conducting cross-platform audits—testing queries about your brand, category and competitors to see what AI tools surface:

Content readiness: Is your brand’s content structured and optimized so AI can easily find, interpret, and represent it accurately?

Search visibility: How often and where does your brand appear in AI-generated responses? Are competitors outshining you?

Brand vulnerability: Which weaknesses—outdated content, inconsistent messaging, misinformation—pose the greatest risk if amplified by AI?

When V2 has conducted audits on behalf of clients, results have exposed outdated or inaccurate messaging, unexpected competitors or total absence from seemingly relevant queries. The results also reveal which sources AI relies on, which vary by model and query, but consistently prioritize authoritative outlets: credible media, trusted wire services, Wikipedia and brand-owned sites.

Shaping your brand’s AI reputation

Armed with the information from an audit, the next question is simple: What can communications do to influence and improve GEO outcomes? Fortunately, many of the strategies have been core to communications and PR playbooks for decades. Furthermore, brands that have embraced an integrated strategy that prioritizes consistent messaging and storytelling across owned, earned, shared and certain paid channels will have a leg up.

Earned media still reigns—but needs a modern twist

High-authority press coverage plays a critical role in how AI engines assess brand credibility. Stories in trusted outlets are treated as fact-checkable signals of authenticity, and increasingly, as the data that generative systems use to shape their responses.

According to a MuckRack report, more than 95 percent of links cited by AI come from non-paid media and nearly nine in ten are earned sources. About 27 percent of all citations originate from journalistic outlets; a share that rises to nearly 49 percent when users prompt for recency (queries like “what’s new” or “latest”). The takeaway is clear: earned, authoritative coverage fuels the AI answer layer.

Tactic: Elevate media relations to focus on thought leadership placements, executive visibility and expert commentary in well-indexed, high-domain-authority publications that AI systems are most likely to cite and trust.

Owned content is your brand’s AI foundation

AI systems routinely scan brand websites and blogs for structured, reliable information. Content that’s technically accessible (via schema markup, logical hierarchy, etc.), deep in expertise and consistently updated performs best.

Tactic: Rebuild cornerstone-owned assets like your “About” page, executive bios and product information to be not just human-friendly, but AI-digestible. Think clear language, semantic structure and link-rich references.

Press releases: the comeback kid of GEO

In the age of AI, press releases serve a dual role: reaching media and feeding structured data directly into AI knowledge graphs. Leading wire services now offer tools that help optimize releases for bot-readability.

Tactic: Standardize your press release format to include structured metadata, subheads, quotes and factual data, making it easier for AI engines to parse and prioritize your content.

Monitor AI representations—and adapt quickly

Platforms like BrandRank.AI provide dashboards to track how brands appear in AI-generated answers. This visibility is key to adapting strategy in real time.

Tactic: Incorporate GEO audits into your media monitoring workflow. If an AI engine misrepresents your client’s product, adjust the upstream content—press, owned, social or Wikipedia—to address it.

Wikipedia: small edits, big impact

Because AI engines use Wikipedia as a key source, well-cited entries can significantly influence brand narratives.

Tactic: Don’t edit directly—that’s against Wikipedia policy—but ensure your communications efforts generate high-quality citations and media coverage that Wikipedia editors can use to update brand pages.

GEO is the new front in reputation management

For communications leaders, GEO isn’t a technical sidecar to SEO—it’s a core function of modern reputation management. It requires cross-functional collaboration across PR, content, digital and executive comms to ensure alignment across channels.

The good news? The communications toolbox is already filled with what’s needed: strong storytelling, smart distribution and strategic media engagement. The difference now is ensuring those stories are optimized for the machines that increasingly shape human perception.

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Katelyn Holbrook is Chief Client Officer at V2 Communications.