The playbook for PR agencies who want to own GEO

Jeff Bezos said it takes 10 years to become an overnight success so, working in the communications industry, you’d be forgiven for feeling like the Digital PR boom of the early 2020s came out of the blue. 

Rise at Seven, the agency I co-founded in mid-2019 with Carrie Rose, poured fuel on the fire and grew rapidly as a result, but even Carrie and I had been talking about Digital PR to the SEO crowd for around six years by that point – and we certainly didn’t come up with the idea.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is a fundamentally different opportunity for people in comms because we’re all coming to it at once. 

Right now, we’re missing:

• A shared language: whether that’s the terminology (GEO? AIO? AI-search? Or is it still just SEO?) or the best practices (there’re no Google policies on linking to refer back to)

• Industry standard measurements: there’s no “domain authority” to get to grips with…and no dominant tools in the toolkit, other than the ones you’re probably already using

• Agreement on whose responsibility it is to increase prominence in LLMs

What everyone, whether their background is PR or SEO, can agree on, is that the most difficult part of “doing” GEO is being talked about in the media. Few brand-side marketers are going to doubt the ability of PR agencies to get that job done – and this time, the nuances of that coverage work favourably for PR:

• LLMs connect entities (brands and individuals) with specific attributes, which happens through consistency; not through the endless pursuit of new sites linking to your website, using more and more tenuous stories to facilitate that. Your long-standing relationships are about to pay off

• “GEO” coverage is largely reputation management: a single profile, with a carefully managed message, in the right press, is more likely to get cited than a larger volume of coverage that isn’t directly about the brand. This means that the coverage is an end to itself, and not just a necessary step towards getting traffic...

• …Which, by the way, is no longer the endgame: you can, and probably do, measure referrals from chatbots (just like any other media) in Google Analytics, which is about as much as most search agencies are able to do right now too

• Most SEO agencies that were going to move into PR have now done so (and some have even left the industry). If they didn’t try to get in on the demand five years ago, why would they now?

So, if you agree with me that GEO is (almost) a level playing field, with only a handful of search agencies positioned to capitalise – and you believe, as Gartner does, that PR and earned media budgets are expected to double in the next two years as a result – what should you do about it?

Three steps towards winning GEO work:

1. Get a tracking tool: at this point, few search agencies have proprietary measurement technology for things like “share of model” (sometimes referred to as “inclusion rate” – the percentage of relevant prompts where the brand is cited), so you’re buying something off the shelf, just like they are. Head to your search engine of choice to build a shortlist.

2. Ladder that tracking up to more meaningful measurement. In the absence of clicks, brand metrics, the things good marketers measure in brand trackers and funnels, are generally more useful predictors of revenue than most performance marketing metrics – and “traditional” comms metrics like narrative alignment and sentiment, are well suited for GEO.

3. Decide who you are appealing to and how you fit. If PR budgets are going to double because of GEO, like Gartner states, then that money is more likely to come from “traditional” SEO budgets, which many large brands spend most of on earned media anyway. You don’t need to better understand how SEO agencies work as much as you need to understand how brands want to work with SEO agencies. It’s process and structure – not search engine black boxes – that represent the route into GEO for PR agencies.