Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is having a moment. As AI-driven search changes how users find information, clients are asking urgent questions: How do we make sure we show up in AI-generated answers? How do we influence what ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews say about us? How do we know whether we are being recommended, ignored, or quietly beaten to the punch by competitors?

At its heart, GEO is the evolution of something PR has always done: telling engaging stories that build the authority, trust, and reputation brands need to be discovered, understood and chosen. Although the platforms, behaviours, and measurements are new, one thing remains constant: AI visibility is not built on keywords alone; it is built on credible signals of authority and relevance, and great PR has always created those signals.

What is GEO in Digital Marketing?

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the process of optimising a brand’s online footprint so that Artificial Intelligence models and large language models (LLMs) cite, recommend, and surface the brand in user queries.

For years, brands focused entirely on traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), like Google. However, nowadays people are asking AI tools for recommendations, comparisons, explanations, buying advice, shortcuts, and summaries. They are asking which product to choose, which service to trust, which brand is credible, and which expert to listen to.

That changes the nature of discovery. While SEO focuses on giving you a list of places to visit, GEO focuses on giving you a conclusion.

For brands, that is a serious shift. If you are included in the answer, you are part of the consideration set. If you are absent, you may not even make it to the starting line. GEO ensures that AI systems understand your brand, trust your expertise, and see enough validated evidence across the web to recommend you.

The Benefits of GEO for Modern Digital Marketing

• Increased Brand Authority: By securing citations within LLM responses, your brand is positioned as the definitive industry leader.
• Higher Conversion Intent: Users asking AI tools for product comparisons or buying advice are further down the sales funnel. Being the recommended choice drives highly qualified traffic.
• Future-Proofed Search Visibility: As traditional search volume shifts toward conversational AI platforms, GEO keeps your brand visible across all emerging platforms.
• Defensive Competitive Advantage: Optimising early prevents competitors from monopolising AI Share of Voice (SOV) within your industry niche.

Smoking Gun’s GEO agency approach helps brands understand, measure, and improve their visibility in AI-generated answers. In practice, that means combining query-led insight, earned authority, expert storytelling, and AI visibility measurement to understand not just whether a brand appears but why it appears and what needs to change.

Why GEO is Familiar Territory for PR

PR shouldn’t stand at the back of the GEO conversation waiting for someone technical to explain the clever bit. Building trust is what good PR has always been designed to do.

AI models do not trust a brand blindly; they look for third-party validation. They scan for a journalist, including a brand in an expert-led feature, a trusted review site recommending a product, a trade title recognising genuine expertise, or organic community conversations on forums. Taken together, these earned media moments build a brand’s digital reputation. The difference now is that these footprints are being read not only by people but also by machines.

However, this isn’t just business as usual. To win at GEO, PR must become more forensic. We need to understand what people are asking AI tools, which sources are shaping the answers, where competitors are appearing, why they are being recommended and what associations are being built around them.

How Does Technical Optimisation Work?

While reputation is the foundation, technical optimisation ensures that LLMs can actually find and read your data. If content is badly structured, hard to crawl, or hidden away, even strong brand authority will fail to show up in AI Overviews.

We need the dashboards, the data, prompt tracking, citation analysis, and an understanding of retrieval, answer engines, structured content, and how different AI platforms behave.

Technical optimisation works best when there is something meaningful to optimise. A technically perfect brand with no trusted external authority will still be ignored by AI, because GEO is not about tricking AI into saying nice things about you; it is about making sure there is enough credible, consistent evidence in the world for AI to understand why you belong in the answer.

The best GEO agency will not treat this as a choice between PR and search but as a discipline that needs both.

Case Study: GEO Visibility Project

At Smoking Gun, our work proves that AI visibility can be measured, tracked, and directly influenced. We recently explored this in a GEO visibility project for a household brand.

The client had strong earned media, social traction, and category growth, but this real-world authority was not consistently showing up in AI-generated recommendations. Our work focused on the questions consumers were asking, the sources shaping AI answers, and the kinds of trusted signals the brand needed to build across editorial, expert, owned, review and community environments.

Over a four-month campaign, the results spoke for themselves:

• AI Share of Voice (SOV) increased from 3.2% to 9.1%.
• Brand mentions grew from 274 to 1,424.
• Estimated LLM-driven traffic potential rose from 48k to over 3.2 million.

This wasn’t achieved through a magic trick, but through the strategic alignment of measurement, search understanding, credible storytelling, and earned authority.

Choosing the Right GEO Agency for Your Brand

GEO is not a dark art, nor is it just traditional SEO with a new hat on. LLMs are looking for signs of authority, relevance and trust. They need sources, context, and corroboration. They need to understand why a brand should be included in an answer. GEO marking is a nuanced discipline that bridges the gap between technical data optimisation and public relations.

The best GEO agency will not treat this as a choice between PR and search but as a discipline that needs both. Their role is to connect technical understanding with the authority-building work that makes brands trusted enough to appear in the answer. 

When choosing a GEO agency, look for a team that provides:

• PR and Earned Media Expertise: To build the authentic, off-site signals of trust that LLMs require.
• Advanced Data Insights: The ability to benchmark your current AI visibility, track competitor share of voice, and identify prompt trends.
• Integrated Strategy: A team that connects technical SEO services with strategic public relations to ensure your brand is authoritative both to search engines and AI models.

Own the AI Narrative with an Award-Winning Agency

Don’t let your competitors control what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews say about your industry. Smoking Gun is built for the age of generative AI; our agency helps ambitious brands take control of their visibility where it matters most.

Get in touch with our expert team today to request an AI visibility audit and discover how our specialist GEO and digital PR strategies can increase your visibility and secure your brand’s place in the future of search.