GEO:
What is
it?
Something significant has happened to the way people find information about technology products. AI engines known as LLMs, became a primary discovery layer for millions of consumers, journalists, investors, and buyers.
When someone asks ChatGPT which e-bike brand is best for urban commuters, they get an answer. When a journalist asks Google's AI Overview to explain what companies lead the mechanical keyboard market, they get an answer. When a procurement manager asks Perplexity which fitness tech brands are credible for a corporate wellness program, they get an answer. The brand that appears in those answers and the brand that does not are in fundamentally different positions in the market.
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of ensuring your brand appears accurately, authoritatively, and favourably in AI-generated responses. It is the newest and in many ways most urgent frontier of brand visibility, and most PR agencies have not caught up to it yet.
Proper Propaganda has been working in this space since AI-powered search began materially affecting how brands get discovered. We have built a system for GEO and tested it extensively on both ourselves and clients. Results have been superb. We understand how AI systems work, how they source their answers, and what a brand needs to do to show up reliably and well.
How AI
Engines
Actually
Source
Their
Answers
To understand why GEO matters, you need to understand how large language models and AI engines generate their responses.
These systems are not retrieving live data from a single source. They are synthesising information drawn from a vast corpus of content that includes media coverage, reference sites, social platforms, brand-owned content, and community discussions. The specific mix varies by tool, but the pattern is consistent: AI engines treat the information environment around a brand as a signal about what that brand is, what it does, who it serves, and how credible it is.
This means several things for a technology brand.
First, the volume and quality of earned media coverage directly affects how AI systems understand and describe a brand. A brand with 500 placements in credible tech and mainstream media is, from the perspective of an AI engine, a much better-defined and more authoritative entity than a brand with 20 placements. The AI has more signal to work with and more source validation.
Second, consistency matters enormously. If a brand's owned media, rented media, and earned media tell conflicting stories about what the brand is, AI engines get confused. They will either produce vague, hedged responses, omit the brand from relevant queries, or describe the brand inaccurately. Signal clarity is the technical term for the problem. Fixing it is a core part of GEO work.
Third, the specific language used to describe a brand across its media footprint shapes how AI engines categorise and surface it. A brand that is consistently described as the leading compact drone camera for sports and recreation will appear in responses to very different queries than a brand described generically as a consumer electronics company.
What
GEO
Involves
in
Practice
GEO is not a single tactic. It is a systematic programme across multiple content layers. Here is what it actually encompasses.
AI Presence Auditing. We begin every GEO engagement by assessing how the brand currently appears across major AI engines. We query ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity, Gemini, and others with the kinds of questions a prospective customer, journalist, or investor might ask. We document what the AI systems say, what sources they appear to be drawing from, where the brand is absent, and where it is described inaccurately or inconsistently.
This audit is usually illuminating. Brands often discover they are absent from category queries where they should be prominent. They discover that AI tools are describing them with outdated positioning or missing key products and capabilities. They sometimes discover that a competitor's narrative is occupying space that should belong to them. The audit tells us what we are working to fix.
Owned Media Optimisation. Your own website is the highest-authority signal you control. For GEO purposes, this means ensuring the site contains clear, well-structured, comprehensive content about what the brand is, what it does, what categories it competes in, who it serves, and what its key products and capabilities are. AI engines read and weight this content. Vague, jargon-heavy, or thin website copy is a GEO liability.
Rented Media Optimisation. Rented media includes platforms you use but do not own: social media, Wikipedia, YouTube, and others. Wikipedia is particularly significant for GEO because AI engines treat it as a high-authority reference source. Brands that have a well-maintained, accurate, and comprehensive Wikipedia presence have a measurable advantage in AI-generated responses. We assess and improve rented media presence as part of the GEO programme.
Earned Media as GEO Signal. This is where GEO and classic PR converge to produce rocket fuel. The third-party coverage a brand earns in credible media is one of the strongest signals an AI engine uses to understand and validate what that brand is. We build earned media strategies with this in mind, ensuring that the coverage we generate is not just reaching human readers today but also building the AI-legible content corpus that will affect AI-generated responses for years.
Signal Clarity and Conflict Resolution. One of the most common GEO problems is signal conflict. We identify and resolve these conflicts systematically, building a consistent signal across all content layers.
Query Mapping and Content Gap Analysis. We map the specific queries that prospective customers, journalists, investors, and buyers are using when they interact with AI tools in the relevant category. We identify gaps where the brand should be appearing but is not. We then develop content strategies to close those gaps, whether through owned media, earned media, or both.
The
Research
Foundation
of AI
Search
Our GEO work is built on both primary consumer research and deep client and category analysis. For AI monitoring our preferred tool is Scrunch.
We conduct research into how consumers in the relevant category actually use AI tools in their discovery and purchase process. What questions do they ask? What kind of answers do they expect? How does an AI-generated recommendation influence their subsequent behaviour? This primary research shapes the GEO strategy in ways that assumptions and guesswork cannot.
We also research the AI information environment around the brand's category extensively. What sources are AI engines drawing from? What language is being used to describe the category and its key players? What content gaps exist that the brand could fill? This analysis informs both the content strategy and the earned media targeting.
This is the same research rigour we bring to all our work. GEO is not a technical tweak. It is a strategic programme, and like all strategic work, it needs to be built on real data about how the target audience behaves and how the information environment is structured.
Why GEO Is
More Urgent
Than Most
Brands
Realise
Here is a concrete illustration of why GEO has become urgent.
Keychron, one of our longest-standing clients, is now described by AI tools including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok as the best mechanical keyboard manufacturer available. This reflects a body of earned media built over several years, a clear and consistent brand narrative, and a strong signal across owned, rented, and earned media. When a consumer asks an AI tool for keyboard recommendations, Keychron appears. Its competitors, some of which have comparable or even superior products in specific segments, are frequently absent because their media footprint is thinner and less consistent.
The stakes here are significant. AI-driven discovery is not a secondary channel. For a growing segment of tech-savvy consumers, journalists doing background research, and investors evaluating market position, AI tools are a primary information source. Brands that invest in GEO now are building a competitive advantage that will be increasingly difficult for late movers to overcome.
GEO and
the Rest
of the
PR
Programme
GEO does not operate in isolation. It is the layer of the PR programme that ensures everything else we do for a client has lasting AI-visible impact.
Classic PR generates earned media. That earned media is GEO infrastructure. Performance PR drives commerce coverage that also builds AI-visible signal. Brand narrative work produces the consistent language that GEO depends on. Influencer relations generates content that AI engines read. The whole programme is more effective when GEO is built into it from the start rather than added as an afterthought.
For clients with existing PR programmes, GEO can be layered in without disrupting what is working. For clients starting fresh, GEO considerations should be built into every element of the programme from day one.
Who is
GEO
For
GEO is relevant to every technology company operating in the US market, full stop. But it is especially urgent for companies in competitive categories where multiple brands are competing for the same discovery queries, for companies entering the US market where AI-driven discovery may be one of the first things a prospective customer uses, for brands that have invested in PR and media coverage but have not thought systematically about how that coverage translates to AI visibility, and for companies whose current AI presence is inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent.
We work with technology companies of all types and sizes, from well-funded scale-ups expanding their US footprint to established players who need to update their AI signal after a rebrand or strategic pivot.
GEO is the practice of improving how a brand appears in AI-generated responses from tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini. It involves auditing current AI presence, optimising owned and rented media for AI legibility, building earned media that functions as an AI-visible signal, and ensuring consistency across all content layers so AI engines can accurately understand and represent the brand.
SEO focuses on improving a brand's ranking in traditional search engine results pages, primarily through keyword optimisation, backlink building, and technical site structure. GEO focuses on how AI systems synthesise and present information about a brand in conversational responses. The two overlap because AI engines draw on many of the same signals as traditional search engines, but earned media has an outsized role in GEO, meaning PR should be the leader of any GEO program. GEO also involves content layers that SEO does not address, including the consistency of brand description across earned, social platforms, and reference sites like Wikipedia or forums like Reddit.
The major ones: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Google AI Overview and Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude. The information environment around a brand affects how all of these tools respond to queries about it. The specific weighting of different sources varies by tool, which is why a systematic cross-platform approach is more effective than optimising for a single engine.
AI engines synthesise their responses from a large body of source material including media coverage, brand-owned content, reference sites, social media, and community platforms. Brands with more extensive, more credible, and more consistent coverage in this source material appear more frequently and more accurately in AI responses. Brands with thin, conflicting, or outdated coverage tend to be absent or misrepresented.
Yes. We measure GEO performance with a best in class tool called Scrunch. It systematically queries AI tools with relevant category and brand-specific questions on a regular cadence and tracks changes in how the brand appears. Metrics include presence rate (how often the brand appears in relevant category responses), citation rate (how much a brand's content is cited by AI engines), and sentiment (how the brand is characterised relative to competitors). We also track upstream signals including earned media volume and citations, owned media productions and presence on other third party spaces like Wikipedia or Reddit.
GEO is a medium to long-term programme. Some improvements, particularly fixing signal conflicts and updating inaccurate AI descriptions, can be relatively fast. Building the broader earned media corpus that creates durable AI visibility is a longer process, typically six to eighteen months for meaningful shifts in category-level queries. We are transparent about this timeline. The brands that invest in GEO now are building an advantage over brands that start later.
It is particularly relevant at market entry, for two reasons. First, you have the opportunity to build AI visibility correctly from the start rather than having to correct an established but inaccurate AI presence. Second, AI-driven discovery is likely to be one of the first things prospective US customers, journalists, and investors use when they encounter your brand for the first time. Showing up well in those initial AI interactions is a significant early advantage.
Directly and significantly. Third-party media coverage in credible outlets is one of the strongest signals an AI engine uses to understand and validate what a brand is. A consistent body of earned media that uses specific, accurate language about a brand's category, positioning, and differentiation is the foundation of strong AI visibility. This is why GEO and classic PR are not separate investments but parts of the same programme.
Monthly retainers run from $5,000 to $20,000 USD depending on the scope of the audit, the extent of content gaps and signal conflicts to resolve, and whether GEO is running as a standalone programme or integrated into a broader PR mandate. Fees are structured around output and outcomes.
Ready to Show Up Where Decisions Are Made?
Strong brands need to be visible in the places people now go to understand a category.
When AI systems can clearly identify what your brand is, what it does, and why it matters, you start appearing in the conversations that shape perception and purchase. Visibility improves. Positioning sharpens. And the gap between you and competitors becomes easier to maintain.
In the US market, being present in AI-generated answers is quickly becoming table stakes.
Book a call with our team and let's talk about what's possible. Or reach us directly at info@properpropaganda.net.