From the group chat: Why earned media is your new SEO

We hosted a webinar last week on the topic of GEO, looking at the role of earned media in LLM visibility and how comms teams can react to the shift in behaviour towards using AI platforms. 

 

Here’s what the team had to say in the chat after the event: 

Ricky Ambury, Senior Director 

Kerry Sclater, Senior Social Account Director 

Rob Stone, Head of Innovation and Digital 

 

Rob: Good session in our webinar on GEO today! Lots of great discussion and some interesting questions from the audience. Were there any questions or areas of focus that you weren’t expecting?

Kerry: There were some interesting questions about measurement from the audience – which is a great topic to ask about because there is no silver bullet currently!

Rob: Sadly, there never is…

Kerry: We can use tools like SEMRush to give us some data, but for me the key is having a repeatable, qualitative steer on how you’re showing up. That’s why when we do GEO audits, we use a proprietary impact scoring framework that allows us to score, benchmark, and then re-measure once changes have been implemented.

Rob: I was really interested in Chris’ (Christopher Olley, panellist from Siemens) points about how LLMs fit into the broader storytelling piece and how these approaches might disrupt the visibility of your overall narrative in a way that is quite different from what we’ve been used to, because brands might have less control Do you think other clients will be looking at that?

Ricky: I think so. It’s hard because you build a brand’s story over a long period of consistent messaging across multiple touch points. Your hope is that if that’s been done successfully then it will be easy for an LLM to deduce what the narrative is. What’s likely to happen is that brands will need to supplement this with some targeted interventions to address specific areas of limited AI visibility on discrete areas.

Rob: The question from the audience about where to focus when there is so much change going on really shines a light on how tough it must be to have yet another thing you need to stretch your budget and resources to.

Ricky: I think we’ve used the analogy before from the early days of search and asked the question of ‘who’s going to be the Ask Jeeves of AI?’. The reality I think is that the choices brands make today in where they focus attention will also influence which ones prevail (for example, look at ChatGPT now integrating with ecommerce).

Rob: Poor Jeeves. Nobody wants that to happen to them. We’re going to see some big ecosystem buildouts over the next year as these platforms look to drive revenue from other sources.

Ricky: It’s easy to see why ChatGPT is popular now because of its scale, and from a b2b perspective, Copilot (Chris’ choice) – which might not be the most advanced but simply because of its MS integration – is likely to become a default for so many. Let’s not forget that Betamax was better than VHS but ultimately lost….

Rob: At the risk of really aging ourselves here, I always thought MiniDiscs were the better product too. I guess the reality is that we don’t know what will win just yet, but we can set a broader strategy that gives us the best chance while also covering all the other bases.

Rob: Another good audience question: what do we think about the role of thought leadership content, which has been high value in recent years, and how it might impact responses from LLMs?

Ricky: Yeah, this was an issue we could do a whole other webinar on. I actually think AI might be the route to discovering if a brand really does have ownership of a topic. Now you might do media share of voice analysis but that can be crude if it’s just volume rather than influence and is a snapshot in time. You’d imagine that well-placed, sustained media coverage from a brand with a clear position on something will see it become an easy answer to the question of ‘which business is leading the charge on X?’.

Rob: This kind of content needs to connect with people in a way that is very different from a product list or price comparison too.

Ricky: Yeah, it’s going to be much more subtle and my sense is it will be through the kind of back to basics PR Chris talked about – good old fashioned storytelling.

Kerry: That back to basics message I think is really important – and hopefully reassuring for people that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Also from a social content perspective, it’s just about a good solid content approach that starts with an understanding of the audience and the content they’re seeking. We’ve found using synthetic personas (created with AI) really useful with our work in helping tailor content to the language and queries our audiences are searching for.

Kerry: A lot of the audience questions also showed that people are really keen to know what tangible actions they can take – even with finite resource. I think it’s useful to split into quick wins this side of the new year; and then elevating plans for 2026. Quick wins on social would be checking and optimising your bio, pinning key posts and doing an audit so you understand how you’re currently showing up. Then 2026 planning would be using the audit findings to optimise planned content, and considering doing a specific content pillar designed around search queries. Rob had some useful tips too re checking your structured data and indexability, and making sure your content is fresh.

Rob: Yeah, I think there are some quick wins that can add value – a lot of traditional channels have been neglected in recent years. We had a client who was alarmed that his job title and role wasn’t up to date in an AI summary about him, but that was exactly the way it was written on the corporate website for his brand.

Rob: Thank you for all the input on this, it’s been an interesting topic to explore! There is so much happening right now and it’s all still very new, we’ll have to run another session in a few months to cover what we’ve learned…

If you’d like to discuss how GEO might impact your brand, listen to a replay of the webinar or would be interested in a GEO audit, get in touch by emailing social@citypress.co.uk