By Aaron Henry, Managing Director, Foundeast
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is rapidly becoming part of the marketing vocabulary.
As consumers increasingly use ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI platforms to research companies, compare products, identify suppliers, and make purchasing decisions, brands are beginning to ask a new question:
How do we become visible in AI-generated answers?
The emerging GEO industry has produced plenty of technical answers. Improve website structure. Create authoritative content. Strengthen entity signals. Make information easy for machines to understand. Build topical authority.
All of these things matter.
But we believe there is a more fundamental point being overlooked.
Public relations may be the best foundation discipline for GEO.
Not because traditional PR agencies have suddenly become specialists in artificial intelligence, but because many of the signals that influence how AI systems understand and evaluate organisations are signals that good PR has always been designed to create.
GEO Is About More Than Your Website
Traditional SEO trained marketers to think heavily about websites.
What keywords should we rank for? Which pages should we optimise? How many backlinks do we have? How should our site architecture be structured?
GEO expands the problem.
When someone asks an AI platform about your company, the answer may be informed by information distributed across a much wider digital ecosystem.
That can include:
- Media Coverage
- Independent Reviews
- Industry Publications
- Company Websites
- Executive Interviews
- Thought Leadership
- Directories And Databases
- Research And Reports
- Partner Websites
- Social And Community Discussions
- Other Third-Party References
This creates an important distinction between traditional search optimisation and AI discoverability.
A company can control what it says about itself.
It cannot directly control what the rest of the internet says about it.
And that is precisely where PR becomes important.
AI Needs Evidence, Not Just Claims
Imagine two companies competing in the same category.
Company A has an extensively optimised website describing itself as a market leader. It publishes dozens of SEO articles targeting relevant search terms.
Company B also has a technically sound website, but its executives are regularly quoted by journalists. Its products are covered by respected industry publications. Its research is referenced by third parties. Its leadership publishes informed commentary. Other organisations describe the company in ways that consistently reinforce its expertise.
Which company provides the stronger digital evidence of authority?
This question matters for GEO.
Publishing a page saying that your company is an expert is a claim.
Having multiple independent sources associate your company with that expertise creates corroboration.
PR is fundamentally a discipline for generating that third-party validation.
PR Builds the Information Environment Around a Brand
One of the biggest mistakes we see in discussions about GEO is treating it as another isolated marketing channel.
It isn’t.
GEO is better understood as an outcome of the broader information environment surrounding an organisation.
If you want AI systems to associate your company with a particular market, capability, product category, or area of expertise, those associations should exist consistently across the web.
That requires more than publishing content.
It requires creating reasons for other people and organisations to talk about you.
This is what PR does.
Media relations generates independent coverage.
Thought leadership associates executives with areas of expertise.
Research creates referenceable information.
Press releases distribute structured information about companies, products, partnerships, and developments.
Interviews create detailed connections between people, organisations, industries, and ideas.
Corporate communications help maintain consistency in how an organisation is described.
Over time, these activities create a network of signals extending far beyond the company’s own website.
That network is increasingly valuable in an AI-mediated discovery environment.
Earned Media Has a New Strategic Value
For decades, companies have valued media coverage primarily for audience reach.
An article appeared in a newspaper, magazine, trade publication, or website because people would see it.
That remains important.
But earned media now potentially has a second life.
A credible article can become part of the persistent digital evidence surrounding a company.
This fundamentally changes how organisations should think about PR value.
The audience for a piece of media coverage is no longer necessarily limited to the people who read it when it was published.
The information can remain searchable, discoverable, referenced, summarised, and potentially surfaced by AI systems long afterwards.
That makes PR increasingly important as information infrastructure.
Authority Cannot Simply Be Optimised Into Existence
There is another reason PR provides such a strong foundation for GEO.
Technical optimisation can make information easier to find and understand.
It cannot manufacture genuine authority.
If ten pages on your own website describe your company as a leading expert in an industry, they are still ten claims originating from the same source.
If respected media outlets, customers, analysts, partners, industry organisations, and other independent sources repeatedly associate your company with that industry, the information ecosystem looks very different.
This does not mean every third-party mention automatically improves AI visibility. Nor does it mean an individual press article will cause a company to appear in ChatGPT.
GEO is considerably more complex than that.
But it does illustrate why authority, corroboration, consistency, and third-party validation matter.
These are areas where PR has an inherent advantage.
PR and SEO Should No Longer Operate Separately
This does not make SEO obsolete.
Quite the opposite.
PR becomes considerably more powerful when combined with strong technical SEO, content strategy, and website architecture.
PR creates external authority and third-party signals.
SEO helps ensure that a company’s owned digital presence clearly communicates who it is, what it does, and what subjects it should be associated with.
Content builds depth around those subjects.
Structured website architecture makes relationships between services, expertise, people, locations, and industries easier to understand.
GEO brings these disciplines together.
The problem is that many organisations still divide them between completely separate teams.
The PR agency generates media coverage.
The SEO agency optimises keywords.
The web agency maintains the website.
The content team publishes articles.
The social team creates posts.
Each activity may perform adequately on its own while nobody is responsible for the cumulative information environment being created around the brand.
For GEO, that fragmentation becomes increasingly difficult to justify.
The Best GEO Strategy Starts With What You Want to Be Known For
Before asking how to appear in AI search, organisations should answer a more fundamental question:
What should the market know us for?
That decision should shape communications across earned, owned, and digital channels.
Suppose a company wants to become strongly associated with sustainable data centre infrastructure in Southeast Asia.
A coherent Discoverability programme might include original research about regional infrastructure trends, executive thought leadership, targeted media relations, expert commentary, SEO content addressing relevant questions, technically optimised service pages, interviews, case studies, and strategic third-party references.
Each asset performs a different function.
Together, however, they reinforce the same entity-topic relationship:
Company → Sustainable Data Centres → Southeast Asia
That consistency is far more powerful than creating a collection of disconnected pages designed around individual keywords.
And PR can provide the strategic narrative that holds the entire programme together.
From Public Relations to Discoverability
This is why we believe the future of PR extends considerably beyond media coverage.
The objective is increasingly Discoverability.
Can journalists find you?
Can customers find you?
Can Google understand you?
Can AI platforms identify what you do?
Can they distinguish you from competitors?
Can they find independent evidence supporting your expertise?
And when someone asks for recommendations in your category, does your organisation have enough credible digital presence to be considered?
PR cannot answer all of those questions by itself.
Neither can SEO.
Neither can content marketing.
Neither can website development.
But PR provides something particularly difficult to replicate: the ability to build credible external evidence around what an organisation wants to be known for.
That makes it an unusually powerful foundation for GEO.
GEO Changes What Good PR Should Deliver
This also raises the standard for PR agencies.
Generating a burst of coverage and producing a monthly clipping report is no longer enough.
Modern communications programmes should consider how every activity contributes to the client’s long-term discoverability.
A media placement should build authority.
A press release should establish clear entities and associations.
An executive interview should reinforce expertise.
A thought-leadership article should answer questions relevant to customers and search behaviour.
A website should convert those signals into a coherent owned knowledge base.
SEO should ensure that information remains discoverable through traditional search.
And GEO strategy should examine whether the overall digital footprint gives AI systems sufficient evidence to understand and potentially recommend the organisation.
The disciplines increasingly reinforce one another.
PR Has Always Been About Influence. Now the Audience Includes Machines.
PR has traditionally focused on influencing how people understand organisations.
That remains its central purpose.
But the mechanisms through which people discover information are changing.
Search engines became intermediaries between companies and audiences.
Generative AI is becoming another.
The organisations best positioned for this transition will not be those attempting to manipulate individual AI answers. They will be those building the strongest, clearest, most authoritative information footprint across the digital ecosystem.
That requires technical optimisation.
It requires excellent owned content.
It requires structured websites.
But above all, it requires credible signals beyond the organisation’s own channels.
That is why, as GEO develops, one of its most important foundation disciplines may turn out to be one of the oldest disciplines in modern communications:
Public relations.
At Foundeast, we approach GEO as part of a broader Discoverability strategy that integrates PR, SEO, content, digital, and web development. The objective is not simply to rank for more keywords or chase individual AI citations. It is to build the authority, relevance, third-party validation, and digital footprint that make brands easier to discover wherever their audiences are searching.
See how we put these principles into practice on our own website in Building for Discoverability: Four Principles That Delivered 430% Organic Growth for Foundeast, where we share the results and lessons behind our integrated approach to PR, SEO, and GEO.