Every few years marketing invents a new three letter acronym. At the moment it is GEO. If you ask an AI assistant “what is GEO?” you will be told it stands for Generative Engine Optimisation: the art of influencing what large language models and AI search overviews say about your brand.
On one level that sounds fresh. On another, it is simply a new label for behaviours PR people have practised for decades: creating authoritative stories, placing them in trusted media, structuring owned content properly, and sparking useful conversation on social channels.
There is also a politics to it. Much of the early GEO conversation has come from the SEO world, as if PR were a junior partner suddenly invited to the grown ups’ table. That jars. PR has driven authority, reputation and, by extension, search for a long time. AI has merely made that role more obvious.
Which brings us to the great question: is GEO actually a thing, or just a spot of intellectual navel-gazing dressed up as innovation?
Because the debate does get oddly philosophical. At times, discussing whether GEO is “real” feels like first-year philosophy students arguing about whether chairs exist when nobody is looking. Important, yes. Slightly absurd, also yes.
So we decided to lean into that and ask some philosophers.
Literally.
Well, almost.
We created synthetic personas of some of history’s most quotable thinkers and posed a simple question: is GEO a thing? The exercise is tongue in cheek, but it highlights something genuine – that this debate sits somewhere between communications theory and playful metaphysics.
What is GEO, really?
In simple terms, GEO is the idea that brands can optimise for AI systems in the same way they once optimised primarily for search engines.
Instead of chasing a single blue link on a results page, you are trying to influence the synthetic summaries and recommendations generated by tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and AI powered search overviews. In practice, that means making sure the material those models train on and retrieve from is:
- High quality
- Hosted in authoritative places
- Consistent in how it describes your brand
- Easy for machines to parse and connect
When we ran a structured study of 100 AI queries across multiple brands, more than three quarters of the evidence cited in answers came from earned, shared and owned media that PR people already influence every day. In other words, AI already runs on PR.
Call that GEO if you like. Just do not pretend it is wholly new, or that it belongs to one discipline.
What the philosophers had to say
Since the whole “is GEO real?” debate drifts quickly into metaphysics, and because there is no danger of us taking ourselves too seriously, we decided to embrace the absurdity and ask some philosophers for their views.
Not the actual ones, of course. We generated synthetic versions of history’s greatest overthinkers and posed a simple question: is GEO a thing? The results were knowingly tongue in cheek, equal parts pub seminar and undergraduate philosophy tutorial.
We’ve turned the short versions into quote cards for the blog and a social carousel. Below are the fuller lines.
Plato
“Should GEO exist, it would be but a shadow upon the cave wall – useful only if it draws the mind towards the truth rather than further into illusion.”
Aristotle
“If GEO has form, function and purpose, then indeed it is a thing. If it merely excites curiosity without substance, it belongs to rhetoric, not reason.”
Confucius
“When people ask whether GEO is real, they reveal their desire for order. If it brings harmony, treat it as truth; if it brings confusion, leave it aside.”
Marcus Aurelius
“Whether GEO is real or imagined matters less than the discipline with which we meet it. Accept what is, endure what must be, and ignore what is noise.”
Immanuel Kant
“One can conceive of GEO as a thing in itself, yet we perceive only its representation. Thus its thingness is bound by the limits of our understanding.”
Søren Kierkegaard
“GEO becomes a thing the moment you commit yourself to believing it is, before that it merely hovers, like so many anxieties, on the edge of choice.”
Nietzsche
“If GEO is a thing, then ask who benefits from declaring it so. For every thing is born of someone’s will, often disguised as universal truth.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“Nothing is a thing until society treats it as such. GEO is no exception, its reality depends on the freedoms it enables or denies.”
Alan Watts
“GEO may be a thing, but only in the way a ripple is a thing, temporary, dancing within a larger sea. The trick is not to cling to it.”
None of this is meant as serious philosophy. It is a light way of making a simple point: whether GEO is “real” depends on what you think a thing is.
If a thing means a new law of physics, GEO is not a thing.
If a thing means a useful way of paying attention to how brands appear inside AI systems, then yes, it probably is.
What AI is actually doing with your PR
Labels aside, there is a practical reality that communicators need to understand.
AI models build brand narratives from three main inputs that map neatly onto PR’s world:
- Earned media
News articles, interviews and trade coverage in trusted outlets are treated as high authority evidence. When we examined AI outputs, these sources appeared again and again any time a model needed proof, context or a quote. - Shared media
Posts and discussion on platforms such as LinkedIn, X, forums and YouTube feed into how AI systems interpret sentiment, expertise and momentum. Social content increasingly acts as connective tissue between more formal sources. - Owned media
Websites, blogs, press rooms and reference pages give AI the raw material for definitions, boilerplates and product explanations. If your own site cannot explain you clearly, the model will try to infer meaning from others.
From an AI perspective there is no hard line between “SEO content” and “PR content”. There is simply content, some of which carries more authority and structure than others. PR has already been doing much of the hard work of AI optimisation, long before anyone came up with GEO.
So, is GEO even real?
Back to the search query.
What is GEO, and is it even real?
A fair answer might look like this:
- GEO is a marketing shorthand for influencing how generative AI systems describe and recommend your brand.
- It is real in the sense that AI outputs can be shaped by deliberate communications and content strategy.
- It is not a fundamentally new discipline. It is PR, content and SEO working together in a more AI aware way.
The bigger risk is not that GEO turns out to be a fad. It is that PR allows others to define and own it, even though the underlying levers sit squarely within media relations, corporate communications and content.
PR has always worked in a world where cause and effect are opaque, where you influence systems rather than control them, and where trust is earned rather than bought. That underlying mindset is exactly what AI now demands.
What brands should do next
Whatever label you prefer, three practical steps will help you show up better when someone asks an AI assistant about your brand. The first two are well established. The third is still experimental and should be treated with care.
- Treat AI visibility as a PR outcome
When you secure coverage in high authority media, think beyond human readers. That article is likely to feed multiple AI models for months or years. Plan stories with that second life in mind. - Structure your owned content
Make sure your website, newsroom and FAQs clearly describe who you are, what you do and how you are different, in language that both humans and machines can follow. Clear headings, concise explanations and consistent naming conventions all help. - Probe, rather than “measure”, the AI effect
Start adding AI outputs to your evaluation mix, but do so with appropriate health warnings. Regularly test what AI systems say about your organisation and note how that appears to shift, over time, when new models role out and after major campaigns or news moments. Use this as directional insight, not as hard attribution.
At this stage there is no universally agreed, repeatable methodology for isolating the impact of PR on AI outputs. Models are opaque, prompts and interfaces are constantly changing, and results are inherently non deterministic. You can spot patterns, correlations and useful signals, but you cannot yet treat them as decision grade econometrics.
At PR Agency One we describe this space as AI optimisation: using earned, shared and owned media to shape how AI systems understand and present brands, then exploring how that influence sits alongside more traditional brand, reputation and commercial metrics. It is an active area of development for us and for the industry.
So is GEO a thing?
In the strictest sense, yes. In the practical sense that matters to brands, it is as real as the stories you tell, the coverage you earn and the content you publish.
If you are still unconvinced, feel free to ask Plato.
