Fitting GEO into your comms strategy: showing up in AI answer engines

A lot of the conversations I’m having with clients around Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) make it sound like a purely technical problem, something for product, SEO and engineers to solve. That framing is exactly why it’s easy for communications teams to overlook it.

In reality, GEO is a very old comms problem in a new wrapper: brands want to be top of mind when people go looking for answers in their category. They want to show up in the right searches, in the right questions, and in the right comparisons, rather than just on page one of a results list, but inside the explanations people actually read and trust.

The interface has changed, and so has the strategy needed to show up in it. Instead of scrolling through links, people are asking AI assistants questions and getting one tidy, confident response, and getting inside that response takes comms, SEO and analytics pulling together, not working apart.

Somewhere inside that response is a blend of journalism, brand content, reviews, reports, regulation and forum chatter. GEO is simply about getting that blend right so your voice and brand name is part of the mix.

From PR media lists to answer sets

For PR people, that blend is where things get interesting. Generative engines don’t care about your lovingly colour‑coded media list, they care about sources they see as authoritative on a given question.

When you type a category question into an AI assistant such as “What is X?”, “Which companies are leading Y?”, “How are brands responding to Z?” you’ll notice the same names cropping up underneath the answer, again and again. Sometimes it’s a mix of national or business titles, often it’s a couple of heavyweight trades, maybe an analyst or watchdog, plus a few vendor blogs that have done the hard work of real explanation.

That pattern is your answer set, and it's increasingly something you can track rather than infer. Platforms like Clarity’s Surfacd exist to track exactly this, showing where and how a brand appears across AI answers and citations. It tells you which publications and platforms are actually shaping how your space is described when a machine compresses everything into a paragraph.

Once you see that, the media strategy question shifts. It’s not just “where does our audience hang out?” but also “which outlets are quietly training and feeding the tools our audience will ask first?”

What can we really say in those AI answers?

The other half of GEO is about message discipline. Just because you’d like your brand to appear in a certain answer doesn’t mean you should always be there.

Some questions are low‑stakes explainers where you can confidently play the educator. Others are loaded with risk, regulation and emotion. If someone asks an AI assistant “Is it safe to…?” or “Should I move my money to…?”, you have to think about whether you truly want your brand turning up in the answer and on what terms?

This is where brands and comms teams need to be working through the same GEO lens together - with comms teams helping spot where a brand has genuine permission to speak as an authority, where it's better placed as a supporting voice, and where it should step back and let regulators, analysts or NGOs carry the weight.

GEO as a strategic filter

Seen this way, GEO isn’t another technical box to tick. It’s a filter you can run your media choices and narratives through:

• Are we investing enough in the outlets and institutions that actually feed the answers our audiences see?
• Are we saying things, in those places, that match the role we want in the conversation?

For PR people, that’s familiar territory. It’s the same work we’ve always done, picking the right rooms, bringing the right story, just applied to a world where the room is an AI answer box, and the story is whatever survives the compression.