GEO is a communications exercise

Carrie Crecca Maitoza interviewed me for RePressed, her newsletter about work, the internet, and what comes next for people who have spent a career in PR. She asked sharper questions than I usually get, including one I declined to answer.

A few exchanges are below. The full interview is on RePressed, and it is worth your time for her framing as much as my answers.

Carrie: LLMs have flipped the impressions model. How do we, as publicists, and brands need to adjust our efforts so numbers have the optics they always had before?

We have always had a problematic tendency to conflate real measurement and analysis with merchandising. There is always going to be a need to merchandise your work and show a positive uplift, understandably so, and I do not begrudge anyone that. It just should not come at the expense of real analysis, which is not about looking for an up arrow. It is measuring consistently so you can understand trends over time and iterate accordingly.

The numbers are not always going to go up. And the reasons they are moving are probably changing every month, so the strategy should change with them.

Impressions and web traffic will keep declining, and keep declining in importance. What is more interesting is whether communications work is shifting what the latest models say: their answers, their recommendations, and increasingly their agentic actions. That is something we can measure, and it shows the impact of comms in a way an impressions count never did.

Carrie: What do you think PR people can do to ensure they have a place in their company in the midst of the AI conversation?

This moment underlines the value of earned and owned media: credible sources of informational content that add value for a reader, rather than promotional content. That has always been the remit of communications more than marketing or SEO teams.

One finding made it concrete for me. In an audit for a venture capital firm this March, 600 answers across five agents, the firm’s own website was cited in 139 of them. Every one of those answers already named the firm. In the answers where the firm never came up at all, its own site was not cited once. I assumed that was a quirk of one category, so I checked a hotel group’s audit from January, and it looked the same.

Two audits is not a law, so test it on your own brand. But it suggests that owned content corroborates you once you are already in the answer, and third-party pages are what get you into it. That is media relations, which is what this profession has always done.

Carrie: Can you discuss some outlets that are constantly cited in AI results?

I love this question, because I am going to refuse to answer it.

It is actually dangerous to simplify this down to a list: Reddit, Wikipedia, the New York Post, Business Insider, Forbes. Those outlets may come up a lot in aggregate. They may also be entirely irrelevant once you look more closely at the specific product, use case, industry, or brand you have been tasked to publicize.

One contrast from my own runs. In a venture capital audit, Wikipedia accounted for about 5% of all citations. In a hotel group audit, it was under 1%. Same method, same kind of prompt set, completely different answer.

So there is no generalization to be made about most-cited outlets. You have to do the work, and look specifically at the customer problem you are trying to solve and the product you are trying to sell, and see which outlets in that niche matter.

Carrie: What is one thing you learned recently about GEO that surprised you?

Something from my own side project. I have an upstate vacation house that I rent out, and I have been trying to optimize a direct-booking website to save on the platform fees.

ChatGPT is now my top referral source, well ahead of Google and ahead of the booking platform itself. The site has its own counter and no third-party analytics. Over eighteen days in September it logged 415 page views. ChatGPT sent 61 of them. Google Search sent five.

Small numbers over a short window, so hold it loosely. What surprised me is that you do not need a long-established website with years of backlinks and authority to show up. You can launch something new, publish genuinely useful content that answers the questions people are actually asking, do the technical work, and have a measurable presence in AI outputs fairly quickly.

Carrie asked thirteen more questions, including what to do about Google Zero and whether a writer can be audited the way a brand can. Read the full interview on RePressed.

Thanks to Carrie for having me, and for asking the question about merchandising that I have been chewing on since.