GEO is the long game. PR has been playing it for decades.

Every few months, something rebrands what PR people have been doing for decades and the marketing world loses its mind over it. Right now, that thing is GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation. The idea that brands need to show up in AI-generated answers the way they once showed up on Google’s first page. New name. Same underlying truth: if you want to be found and trusted, you need credible third parties saying good things about you, consistently, over time.

The brands scrambling to ‘do GEO’ like it’s a campaign are going to be disappointed. Because GEO is not a switch you flip. It is the compounded result of years of showing up in the right places, saying the right things, and earning the kind of trust that no algorithm — old or new — can be paid to manufacture.

Your AI result is only as good as your reputation. Full stop.

Here is the mechanic that most brand teams have not fully reckoned with. Large language models are not crawling the web in real time and ranking paid content. They are trained on accumulated text — editorial, industry coverage, analyst reports, forums, published thought leadership — and they develop associations between brands and credibility over time. When someone asks ChatGPT which payments company in India is genuinely innovative, or which PR firm understands D2C, the AI is not looking at your Google Ads. It is drawing from everything credible that has been written about you, by people other than you.

Only 1% of sources cited in AI-generated answers come from brand-owned websites. One percent. The other 99% is earned — media coverage, third-party commentary, industry citations, expert mentions. 

McKinsey’s State of the Consumer 2026 puts the stakes plainly: by 2028, $750 billion in US revenue alone will flow through AI-powered search, and traditional search traffic to brand sites could fall by 20 to 50%. Their direct recommendation to brands? Strengthen public relations. Build consistent messaging across platforms. Earn presence in the conversations your industry is having.

McKinsey is not saying this to be kind to the PR industry. They are saying it because the math points there. You cannot buy your way into AI answers. You have to earn it.

One good story beats fifty forgettable ones. Every time.

I worked with a fintech founder who, early in our mandate, wanted to be everywhere. Every publication, every week, as many mentions as possible. It is a common instinct — visibility feels like momentum. What we did instead was slow down and find the one story that was genuinely worth telling: a deeply reported piece in a publication that people in the payments industry actually read and reference. Not a press release dressed up as editorial. A real story, with context and specificity and a point of view that the journalist found worth building on.

That piece landed and kept compounding. Journalists cited it in subsequent stories. It appeared in analyst briefings. And months later, when we checked how the company was being described in AI-generated answers about fintech in India, that story’s framing was there. One piece, built on genuine credibility, had done more for the company’s GEO visibility than fifty scattered mentions would have.

This is the part that takes patience. GEO rewards depth, consistency, and authority in a specific territory. A brand that publishes one sharp, well-placed piece a month in a credible outlet, over twelve months, will outperform a brand that sends fifty press releases and gets generic coverage across thirty portals. The algorithm learns quality. It just takes time to teach it.

LinkedIn is not vanity. It is a GEO signal.

Here is something the GEO conversation consistently undersells: personal brand visibility on platforms like LinkedIn is a genuine trust signal, not a nice-to-have. When a founder or CEO publishes consistently — real opinions, specific takes on their industry, commentary that only someone actually inside the work could write — it does two things simultaneously. It builds the kind of human credibility that journalists gravitate toward when looking for a spokesperson. And it feeds the ecosystem of indexed content that AI systems learn from.

Look at what founders like Deepinder Goyal at Zomato or Ritesh Agarwal at OYO did in their early years — not just building companies but building visible, vocal, opinionated presences that shaped how the media and market understood what those companies stood for. When AI learns about Zomato, it is not learning only from press releases. It is learning from years of the founder’s voice, the coverage that voice attracted, the conversations it seeded. Personal brand and corporate brand are not separate GEO inputs. They are the same signal amplified.

A founder who writes one thoughtful LinkedIn post a week, engages with their industry’s conversation, and occasionally publishes longer pieces in trade publications is doing more for their company’s GEO visibility than a media blitz of generic product announcements. Owned platforms, used with intent and consistency, are part of the foundation.

The brands winning GEO started before GEO had a name.

Gartner projects that PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027. That number is not coming from PR firms making a case for themselves. It is coming from the same research community that advises boards on where to allocate capital. The structural shift is real, the timeline is short, and the brands that are going to show up in AI answers two years from now are the ones building their credibility infrastructure today.

What that infrastructure looks like in practice: a founder with a consistent, specific point of view that gets published and cited. A company narrative that is coherent enough to be reinforced by every piece of third-party coverage, not contradicted by it. Thought leadership in the publications that matter to your category — not just the ones with the biggest circulation, but the ones that analysts, journalists, and AI systems treat as authoritative. Analyst briefings. Industry event presence. A media relationship programme built on something worth saying, not just news to push.

Flipkart understood this early. When the company built Flipkart Stories — its own editorial and newsroom platform — it was creating a body of credible, indexed, third-party-referenceable content about one of India’s most consequential companies. Journalists used it as a reference. Analysts cited it. And when AI systems were trained on content about India’s e-commerce landscape, Flipkart’s narrative was embedded in the source material at scale. That is GEO. It just predates the term by a decade.

The brands asking ‘what do we do about GEO?’ are asking the wrong question. The right question is: have we been building the kind of credibility, consistently and over time, that earns the trust of the sources AI learns from? If the answer is yes, GEO is already working for you. If it isn’t — no campaign is going to fix that overnight. Start building. The best time was five years ago. The second best time is now.

Chaitalli Roy, founder, CPR Global.