If you’re in PR, right now you’re focused adjusting your 2026 KPIs and metrics to account for 2025’s biggest elephant in the room: AI search (or GEO, generative engine optimization). In 2025, GEO emerged as a critical counterpart to traditional SEO:
- 67% of organizations worldwide adopted large language models (LLMs) for their operations as of 2025, with the global LLM market forecasted to reach $82.1 billion by 2033.
- 63% of marketers reported prioritizing generative search optimization (GEO) in their 2024–25 content strategies.
And LLM adoption and GEO strategies are now the norm due to stark changes in search:
- E-commerce sites reported a 22% drop in search traffic due to AI-generated suggestions instead of traditional search clicks.
- A Geostar guide states that brands can boost “brand citations” in AI-search by over 150% through GEO strategies.
So how can you conquer GEO in 2026?
10 Best Practices for GEO
The following best practices outline how organizations can improve visibility inside AI tools and integrate GEO into their broader measurement and strategy.
-
Treat GEO as essential instead of optional.
Generative AI is mainstream. Many stakeholders who are not familiar with SEO are still comfortable using LLMs to find solutions, vendors and services. Prospects increasingly use AI to answer questions once routed through Google alone. GEO should therefore be treated as a core discovery channel.
-
Track appearance across multiple LLMs.
Organizations should not check a single model (e.g., GPT) and assume full visibility. Instead, they should assess presence across platforms like:
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Perplexity
Each engine returns different answers, highlights different competitors and updates at different rates.
For example: A brand may appear as the number one recommendation in Gemini, be entirely absent in ChatGPT and be mis-categorized in Perplexity all in the same week.
-
Start with manual tracking.
Before deploying advanced tools, simple spreadsheets can be highly instructive. Manual tracking helps establish a baseline and clarifies what AI is “learning” about a brand. Useful variables to record include:
- Whether the brand appears at all
- Tone of mention
- Factual accuracy
- Hallucinations or errors
- Competitors mentioned
- Changes in responses over time
For instance, manual tracking might reveal that an AI model describes your company as “open source” even though it isn’t. This is a small but important error you’d miss without checking each answer directly.
-
Use buyer-intent prompts.
Generic prompts (e.g., “Who is the best PR consultant?”) offer limited insight. More valuable are buyer-intent queries, such as:
- “Best PR strategists for B2B tech”
- “Who can help with GEO optimization?”
- “Top agencies for startup launches”
These prompts more closely reflect real-world AI-assisted buying scenarios.
For example: When one agency tested buyer-intent prompts, they learned LLMs consistently recommended two competitors (but not them) despite strong SEO performance.
-
Leverage GEO tools but understand limitations.
Specialized tools can assist in tracking GEO, but they vary in coverage depth and quality. Many entry-level or mid-priced offerings track ChatGPT alone, while insights from other engines (Perplexity, Claude, Gemini) are often restricted to enterprise tiers. Manual methods remain useful because practitioners can precisely define what is being measured and validate it independently.
-
Use a hybrid approach, including tools and human validation.
AI tools can collect and summarize data, but human judgment remains essential for interpretation. A robust GEO workflow combines:
- Automated insights from GEO/answer-engine tools
- Manual review of results and narrative patterns
- AI-assisted analysis run on structured logs
This hybrid approach mitigates the effects of hallucinations, discrepancies between tools and limited transparency in lower-tier products.
-
Create a GEO scorecard (AI Visibility Index).
A simple yet powerful GEO measurement framework can include:
- Visibility: Does the brand appear?
- Ranking: How high in the response or list does it appear?
- Tone: Is the mention positive, neutral, or negative?
- Accuracy: Are descriptions and claims correct?
Rolling these into a single AI Visibility Index gives stakeholders a clear, trackable metric to monitor over time. For example, a brand with strong SEO visibility might still score low on accuracy if AI summaries repeatedly misstate its product category or key differentiators.
-
Compare GEO and SEO side-by-side.
AI search behaves differently from traditional search, but the two channels influence one another. Reports that place GEO metrics alongside SEO metrics provide a more complete view of brand visibility, narrative control, and demand creation.
-
Track more than mentions.
Effective GEO measurement goes beyond “Do we show up?” to “Do we show up accurately, responsibly and persuasively?” Additional dimensions include:
- Answer relevance to the intended query
- Task completion (LLMs often time out on complex prompts)
- Context accuracy and nuance
- Hallucination frequency
- Planned additions in 2026: bias and toxicity indicators
-
Monitor which journalists influence AI.
Advanced GEO tools increasingly provide insight into which journalists, outlets and websites shape AI understanding of a brand. This is highly valuable for PR strategy, helping to identify:
- Whose coverage LLMs prioritize
- Which outlets are most influential in AI-generated answers
- Where to focus media and relationship-building efforts
What this could look like: A single review from a respected analyst blog may end up shaping how multiple LLMs describe your brand, while a Forbes mention barely registers in AI responses.
GEO is rapidly becoming a competitive advantage. Brands that treat AI engines as a core discovery channel will outperform those focused exclusively on traditional SEO and legacy PR metrics. To be surfaced, trusted and recommended by the tools stakeholders actually use, GEO must be integrated into marketing and PR strategy and measurement.
Lindsey Bradshaw is a freelance PR pro who’s worked with B2B and consumer tech startups for nearly two decades.