What Is GEO? How AI Search Is Changing the Way Customers Find Your Business
Media Magnet Podcast -The Summer Series - Episode 8: How GEO Supercharges Media Coverage (With Ellie Sumner)| Episode 8 | Listen to episode here: https://www.liznable.com/podcasts/media-magnet/episodes/2149135669
There is a new acronym small business owners need to understand, and it is going to matter more every single month from here on. It is called GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — and it is reshaping how customers discover brands, products, and services through AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
In Episode 8 of the Media Magnet Podcast, Liz Nable sits down with Ellie Sumner, Digital PR Director at Prosperity Media, to break down what GEO actually means, why it matters for anyone already doing earned media, and what small business owners can do right now to make sure AI search engines recommend their brand instead of a competitor's.
The genuinely good news in this episode: you do not need an entirely new strategy. You need a smarter version of what you are probably already doing.
What Is Digital PR, and How Is It Different From Traditional PR?
Before getting into GEO, Ellie explained the foundation her work sits on: digital PR.
Traditional PR is focused on coverage and brand awareness — getting your story in front of the right audience through the right outlet. Digital PR shares those PR tactics, including research-led campaigns and journalist outreach, but the primary goal is different. Digital PR is specifically focused on generating backlinks — a link from a news publication or website back to your brand's own website.
Here is why that link matters so much. Backlinks act as a trust signal to Google. When a reputable site links to your website, Google reads that as a vote of confidence in your brand's authority. The more high-quality backlinks you accumulate, the higher you tend to rank when someone searches for terms related to your product or service. Given that most users never click past the first page of search results, ranking well is not optional — it is the whole game.
But that is only half the story now. Search itself is changing.
What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. It is a strategy focused on making your brand visible in AI-generated search results — the answers people get when they search on platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity rather than typing a query into Google.
The scale of this shift is significant. ChatGPT has around 800 million weekly active users, making it one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world, and a notable proportion of its users say they are using it specifically as a search engine rather than a chatbot. AI search is expected to overtake traditional search by 2028. A meaningful share of users have already discovered new products or brands directly through AI platforms — and that behaviour is even more pronounced among younger generations.
This is not a future trend you can afford to wait out. It is happening now, and it compounds the value of the media coverage you are already pursuing.
Why AI Search Converts Customers Better Than Google
This is the statistic that should make every small business owner pay attention: conversion rates from AI-driven search recommendations can be more than four times higher than conversions from traditional search engines.
Why? Because the search behaviour itself is different. On Google, someone might type "mattresses" and then have to click through multiple tabs, compare pages, and piece together their own conclusion. On platforms like ChatGPT, people tend to ask more conversational, in-depth questions — "what's the best mattress for back pain" or "what's the most comfortable mattress under $1000" — and the AI delivers a summarised, considered answer in one place.
That experience feels closer to asking a trusted friend for a recommendation than running a generic search. Customers arrive warmer, more informed, and more ready to act. By the time someone reaches a purchase decision through an AI recommendation, they have effectively already had their objections handled in the conversation that led them there.
How Media Coverage Feeds AI Trust Signals
Here is the part that matters most for anyone already working on earned media: AI search engines cite reliable sources. This is exactly why traditional PR remains so valuable — it creates credible, trustworthy content that AI systems are built to recognise and reference.
When your brand is mentioned online by a reputable source, that mention becomes a trust signal the AI can draw on when a user asks a relevant question. A few specific factors influence whether your brand gets surfaced:
- The reputation of the publication. Highly authoritative outlets carry more weight than low-quality or unknown sources.
- The context of the mention. Coverage that is directly relevant to the query — for example, being included in a "best products" roundup — performs particularly well, because AI models tend to lift directly from listicle-style content.
- Expert commentary. Positioning your spokespeople as credible voices builds the authority signal that AI systems are trained to weigh.
- Frequency of mentions. The more often your brand appears across credible sources online, the more likely it is to be surfaced ahead of competitors.
Importantly, AI platforms are not limited to pulling from news articles. They also draw on social media content and blog posts. Ellie shared a real example from her own agency's work: a campaign built around the best places to start a small business in Australia resulted in an Instagram post about that research being directly pulled into AI search answers. The earned media, the blog content, and the social post were all working together as inputs into the same AI-generated answer.
Choosing the Right Publications for GEO
If you are already pitching media, the good news is that the targeting principles barely change. You still want to land coverage in tier-one press and in high-authority niche publications relevant to your industry — exactly the same outlets you would target for traditional PR purposes.
There is one extra consideration specific to GEO: not every website can be crawled by AI bots. Some publications, due to the way their site is built, are simply inaccessible to the large language models powering AI search — meaning your coverage there will never be picked up, no matter how good the placement is. Tools exist that let you check whether a specific website can be crawled by AI platforms before you invest time pitching it.
Beyond traditional media, smaller, niche, high-authority blogs and industry newsletters can carry significant weight. A well-respected business blog with a smaller but highly engaged readership can matter just as much to AI search visibility as a major mainstream outlet — sometimes more, depending on how niche your audience is.
To check how authoritative a particular site is before pitching it, you can use tools that measure domain authority — a score out of 100 that estimates how much trust search engines place in a given website. Sites scoring above roughly 40 are generally considered worth pursuing.
How to Reverse-Engineer AI Search Results
One of the most practical, immediately actionable tips from this episode is also one of the simplest.
If you want to know where to focus your PR and outreach efforts, go directly to ChatGPT or Perplexity and search for the exact phrase you want your brand to appear in. If you sell mattresses, search "best mattresses." If you run an accounting platform for small business, search the question your ideal customer would actually type.
Look at what comes up. Sometimes the AI platform will list its sources directly. If it does not, you can simply ask it: "what sources did you use for this answer?" That response will often reveal exactly which publication, listicle, or roundup the AI pulled its answer from — giving you a clear, specific target to pitch for inclusion.
This single tactic turns a vague goal like "get featured online" into a precise, evidence-based pitching strategy.
Practical GEO Tips for Small Business Owners Just Getting Started
Ellie's advice for anyone new to this space was refreshingly simple and not at all overwhelming:
1. Be intentional with your language in press releases and pitches. Write your "about" section and brand description exactly the way you want it to appear, because journalists frequently copy and paste that language directly into their stories — and that same language is what AI search engines will pick up and repeat in their answers.
2. Push for the backlink. Whenever you secure media coverage, ask for a link back to your website if one is not automatically included. This benefits both your traditional SEO and your GEO visibility.
3. Make your website AI-crawler friendly. A simple search on how to structure website content so it can be properly read by large language models will give you a clear, beginner-level breakdown you can apply yourself.
4. Position your spokespeople as go-to industry commentators. This is identical to traditional PR best practice — the more your experts are quoted on relevant trends and newsjacking opportunities, the more authority and trust your brand accumulates.
5. Think beyond your product. Consider the broader questions your ideal customer might be searching that sit outside your specific offer. A mattress brand might consider data-led content around "how to get a better night's sleep" rather than only content about mattresses directly. This widens the number of AI search queries your brand has a genuine chance of appearing in.
The Reassuring Truth: This Doesn't Replace PR, It Amplifies It
If all of this feels like yet another thing to learn on top of an already long list of marketing tasks, Ellie's closing message was reassuring. The fundamentals of earned media have not changed. You are still pitching journalists the same way. You are still building genuine relationships with the media. You are still finding ways to connect your business to what is already happening in the news cycle.
What has changed is what happens to that coverage after it is published. Every piece of earned media you secure now has the potential to work twice as hard — feeding both traditional search rankings and the AI platforms an increasing number of your customers are using to make purchasing decisions.
As Ellie pointed out, many small business owners are likely already doing things that show up in AI search results without even realising it. It is worth taking the time to search for your own brand on ChatGPT or Perplexity and see what is already being said about you. You might be further ahead than you think.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
- Moz Chrome Extension — a free tool to check the domain authority of websites you are considering pitching
- ChatGPT and Perplexity — search these directly to see how your brand currently appears, and reverse-engineer the sources behind competitor results
Ready to Build Authority That Works Across Every Platform?
GEO does not require a separate strategy from the one Liz already teaches inside her programs — it simply means your media wins now work harder for you, across Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity alike.
If you want to learn how to pitch media with confidence, build the kind of credibility that gets you featured consistently, and set your business up to be the trusted answer AI search engines recommend, that is exactly what the Media Members Inner Circle is built for.
