By Yanisa Chubplun, Integrated Communications Manager, Foundeast
When someone asks AI about your industry, does your brand show up in the answer?
If you don’t know, that’s the problem. Most PR teams are still optimizing for a world that’s quietly disappearing: press hits, media impressions, share of voice in traditional outlets. Meanwhile, the way people actually discover brands has already shifted underneath them.
This isn’t a future risk. It’s a current blind spot in PR strategy. And it’s called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
The Math Has Already Changed
Google’s AI Overviews now reach over 1.5 billion users every month across 200+ countries. An AP-NORC survey found 60% of U.S. adults already use AI tools to research information. These aren’t early adopters; this is mainstream behavior, already baked into how decisions get made.
Here’s the part that should worry every PR lead: a Pew Research study tracking real browsing behavior found that when an AI summary appears, users click through to traditional sources only 8% of the time, roughly half the click rate of pages without one.
Translate that into PR strategy terms. If your brand isn’t part of the AI’s answer, it doesn’t matter how good your press coverage is, the reader never gets there.
The click is becoming optional. The citation isn’t.
In Thailand and across Southeast Asia — among the most mobile-first, AI-curious markets in the world — this is moving faster, not slower. English-language models describe local brands from a thin pool of regional sources. When that pool is shallow, being in it or absent from it is decided early, and it sticks.
Getting Covered Is No Longer the Win
Traditional SEO is about ranking on a results page. GEO is about being selected as the source an AI cites when it generates a response. If SEO is being visible on a bookshelf, GEO is the book the librarian actually hands over.
And AI models aren’t choosing randomly. Three things drive selection.
Authoritative positioning. Generic blog posts and recycled talking points don’t get cited. Original research, proprietary frameworks, and expert commentary with an actual point of view do. Thought leadership stops being a “nice-to-have” — it becomes the raw material AI models pull from.
Structured, coherent narratives. AI parses organized information better than scattered messaging. If your website says one thing, your press materials say another, and your executives say a third, AI will find a competitor’s cleaner story and cite that instead.
Credible third-party signals. In PR strategy, earned media still matters, arguably more than ever, but not all coverage is equal. A relevant feature in a niche trade outlet that models actually train on can carry more weight than a passing mention in a mainstream headline.
The PR Strategy Mistake That’s Quietly Killing Your Coverage
Here’s the scenario that should make every comms director uncomfortable. Your team lands a strong feature in a top-tier outlet. Big win, goes in the report. But your brand is mentioned once, in paragraph eight, with zero context about positioning or expertise.
A human reader might still notice. An AI parser almost certainly won’t. That placement looks great in a clipping report and is functionally invisible to the systems now mediating what people see. You’re celebrating a win that doesn’t exist where it counts.
This is the trap: GEO gets treated as a tech problem, something for SEO or IT to “figure out eventually.” It isn’t. GEO is a communications problem — narrative clarity, editorial authority, content architecture. The exact things PR teams are supposed to own. While comms teams wait for a briefing deck on AI strategy, the brands actually winning are already auditing how AI describes their category and rebuilding their content ecosystems around it — not for human readers first, but for the models that filter what humans see.
Three Questions That Will Tell You Where You Stand
If you lead PR or brand communications, run this test this week.
Test your AI visibility. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity about your industry, your category, and your key services. Does your brand show up? How is it described? If the answer is “I don’t know” or “it doesn’t,” you have your answer about urgency.
Audit your narrative consistency. Does your website tell the same story as your press releases, your LinkedIn, your executive thought leadership? Fragmentation isn’t a minor inconsistency anymore; it’s the single biggest reason AI surfaces a competitor instead of you.
Shift from volume to authority. One deeply researched, expert-led article will outperform ten generic posts. If your content calendar is optimized for frequency rather than authority, it’s optimized for the wrong era.
The Brands That Move First Get to Define the Conversation
GEO isn’t a trend to “keep an eye on” for your PR strategy. It’s already reshaping how brands are discovered, evaluated, and chosen, right now, in real time, including in the SEA markets where the source pool is still being written, while most PR strategies remain unchanged.
The brands that organize their narrative now will shape what both people and machines learn to trust. The ones that wait won’t get a dramatic wake-up call. They’ll just quietly stop being part of the conversation, and won’t notice until someone asks why the phone stopped ringing.
Want to see how AI currently describes your brand?
At Foundeast, we run GEO-integrated communications audits for teams in Thailand and across Southeast Asia, ready to lead, not follow.