When business leads, potential customers and decision-makers use artificial intelligence (AI) to search online for vendors or compare product or service solutions, does your business appear – or your competitors – in the search results? If you are not sure, this blog article could very well change your 2026 integrated marketing and content strategies for the better.
Point blank, each business in 2026 will need a waste-no-time strategy that ensures the business’s data points, case studies, product or service descriptions, vetted keywords, and personnel quotes are being incorporated into AI Search and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to address Large Language Models (LLMs).
Increasingly, when people search online, new AI Overviews present the response right at the top of the results screen. These overviews are Google’s generative summaries, compiled from multiple reputable sources and positioned above traditional listings—often capturing the attention and clicks that once went to top organic search results. Similar answer-first experiences now appear in AI chats from platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.
These instant responses create a “zero-click” reality: The evaluation happens before anyone visits a website. In this environment, visibility is not about appearing somewhere on page one of the search results; it’s about being explicitly cited—named, quoted, and linked—inside the AI-generated answer itself, where potential customers’ preferences are formed and decisions are made.
The shift is already here: ChatGPT sees roughly 800M weekly users; about 60% of searches end without a click; and by 2028, roughly 50% of traditional search traffic is expected to flow into AI systems. Search is no longer just about ranking on a search engine results page (SERP); it is about being referenced by answer engines.
As AI increasingly mediates discovery, the businesses that win are those that appear inside AI-generated answers, not merely beneath them. If generative tools are not recommending content produced by your business, it is time to recalibrate your digital content and search strategy for the AI era.
That is where Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) comes in, the practice of making a brand discoverable inside AI-generated responses—not just on traditional search results pages.
GEO vs. SEO: How They Work Together
Traditional search is not disappearing, but it is no longer the only arena for digital visibility and brand consideration. For marketers still relatively new to optimizing for AI, it is critical to understand GEO as an extension of SEO—not a replacement. SEO lays the foundation with fast, crawlable trustworthy webpages that systems can access and interpret. GEO then builds on this base by aligning your content to how AI engines evaluate, prioritize, and present information—so your business is included, named, and cited in generative results. Bottom line: If SEO is missing, GEO has no anchor—no credible, machine-readable source material or schema for AI to reference and attribute. Conversely, without GEO, even well-optimized sites risk being omitted from AI-driven answers.
AI systems do not pick sources at random either; they weigh credibility, clarity and contextual fit, looking for broad agreement among reputable publishers and reward genuine expertise— content from recognizable authorities that directly answers what people are asking during their online searches.
As buyers now divide their queries between LLM-based chats and traditional search engines, search behavior has materially changed. In this hybrid environment, GEO strategy is less about packing in short, high-volume keywords and more about answering longer, context-rich prompts with precise, useful explanations.
The New Visibility Metrics: AI Mentions and Citations
Consequently, how visibility is measured changes as well: two outcomes now matter most—mentions and citations. When an AI response generator mentions a brand or product, it not only helps readers recognize and recall the name; it also helps the system disambiguate that company from others with similar names. Explicit naming strengthens the model’s internal entity mapping (its knowledge graph), making future answers more likely to connect the correct facts, products and links to that brand rather than a look-alike.
A citation is the model’s receipt—a link to the article, dataset, blog post, case study or other source it can point to as evidence. Working together, mentions and citations lift visibility and guide more searchers toward selecting the featured company when comparing options.
Earning mentions and citations start with content built for meaning, not just keywords. Pages that closely match the intent behind a prompt—and are organized with clear headings, direct answers, concise summaries, simple tables or FAQs and transparent references—are easier for AI to quote accurately and safer to cite. This structure should be paired with sound technical hygiene: an indexable site, healthy SEO, and semantically aligned pages that fully resolve the question.
Off-site authority matters just as much. In an AI-first ecosystem, citations function like currency, and systems prioritize sources they can verify. When credible third parties substantiate a brand’s claims, models are far more likely to name and cite that brand in their answers. Accordingly, pairing GEO with strong SEO fundamentals and a disciplined digital PR program that earns meaningful coverage—online media mentions, high-quality backlinks, and other off-site signals—drives more consistent, measurable gains in AI mentions, citations and overall GEO performance.
The Strategic Connection Between Digital PR and GEO
Digital PR—the craft of creating content that earns online attention and authority—is integral to GEO. By running effective media relations and serving as a consistent, reliable editorial source for quotable research, expert commentary, and distinctive points of view, companies are better positioned to land media mentions and backlinks. This matters for GEO because leading LLMs increasingly learn from—and surface—material produced by reputable publications.
Some LLMs (including ChatGPT’s) even license content from major media outlets, which helps train their systems and informs what they present to users. As models ingest licensed journalism and other high-trust sources, earned media coverage becomes part of the evidence base that shapes what they “know” and choose to surface.
When digital PR and GEO are coordinated with content and site optimization, AI models and search results encounter the same facts and proof points across your site and third-party coverage. That consistency builds authority and raises the chances of being cited directly inside trusted answers where many buying journeys now start.
How ECPR Helps Brands Compete in AI-Mediated Discovery
Eberly & Collard Public Relations integrates media credibility with machine discoverability. We baseline current visibility in AI assistants and Google’s AI Overviews, identify the questions and categories that matter most for conversion, and turn priority topics into answer-oriented, well-structured pages so models can quote and attribute them accurately.
In other words, we translate your business and market expertise into clear, question-and-answer content and structure your site so your business’s content sources can be identified and credited through plain-language copy, consistent page titles/descriptions, and schema markup that makes answers easy for Google and AI assistants to find, quote and cite. As a result, your online information will show up when people search for your type of business, expertise, products or services.
In tandem, we run targeted media campaigns to expand online exposure—securing more brand mentions and higher-quality backlinks—to strengthen the signals modern AI systems prefer to cite. We align these efforts with technical and on-page improvements such as structured data (schema markup for FAQs/How-Tos/Product Roundups), site performance and clean internal linking (i.e., fast load times, clear topic hubs), so GEO and SEO reinforce each other. Thus, we monitor and report progress across both: SERP rankings and organic sessions alongside on-answer citations, assistant-originated traffic and assisted conversions.
For organizations that want a single orchestrator, partnering with a generative engine optimization agency—capable of GEO strategy, execution, and ongoing instrumentation—is the playbook for staying visible in AI’s new discovery channels and turning today’s generative search into tomorrow’s growth.
