The GEO playbook, one step at a time.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the practice of making sure AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews pick up your content and represent your brand right. Where SEO was about climbing the rankings on a results page, GEO is about becoming the source the AI trusts, quotes and summarises when someone asks about you.

And people are asking. More and more, your audiences aren't scrolling through a page of blue links, they're asking an AI tool and taking the answer at face value. Which leaves PR with one rather important question: when someone asks an AI about your brand, who's writing the reply?

For most brands right now, the honest answer is "not us." GEO is how you take that pen back, and make sure the story these tools tell about your brand is one you'd recognise: accurate, up-to-date, and told by you.

Do you even know how your company performs in AI search results? That's a good place to start. If you've never done this before, an easy, quick way to get a basic overview is to use Ahrefs' free AI visibility checker.

If you'd like a more in-depth analysis where you can also find out how you perform against your competitors, why not take advantage of our free GEO Scan? Find out more by simply replying directly to us with the words "GEO SCAN".

The next step is to perform a content gap analysis. This means identifying areas or topics where your brand has insufficient coverage. We recommend checking out this step by step guide by Saigon Digital, and pay particular attention to Step 4.

Run that analysis and, like most brands right now, you'll probably spot some gaps. Here's why closing them matters: AI will fill those gaps in any way it can, telling your brand's story in a way that you have no control over.

Anyone (whether customer, investor, curious journalist, or future employee) who searches your brand should find a story that is accurate, up to date, and most importantly… told by you.

That's why we've identified the 6 key, practical steps you can take to optimise your PR content for AI visibility.

We broke down these steps in detail in a webinar. Watch the key takeaways from the webinar to see each step explained.

Want to see those steps put into action? We recently led a workshop on exactly that: how to apply these GEO optimisations to a press release.

You'll see an example of a press release in the guide. Try applying the GEO optimisations you learned from the webinar to that press release. Then check out the "after" version of the same release at the end of the guide to see if you checked everything off.

Make use of our handy Owned Media Checklist to quickly evaluate each piece of content you publish and make sure it's GEO optimised.

Still want to read more? We wrote a blog article about how to optimise your newsroom for SEO, GEO and AI Discovery in 2026. We included a template for the Schema Markup in there, so check that out to give AI a cheat sheet to correctly interpreting and summarising your content.

The last step towards being a GEO pro? Measuring the impact of the work you're doing.

Our final piece of advice is to simply keep learning! The way we work with AI is adapting and developing constantly, so we need to adapt too to keep up. Here's some resources we'd recommend to subscribe to, to get regular updates about these topics straight to your inbox.