Communications playbooks have not kept pace with the speed of change.
Sukhi Sahni is a fractional CMO, industry expert, adviser and educator. Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Spin Sucks and creator of the PESO Model. Sarab Kochhar, Ph.D., is senior communications officer of global communications at the Gates Foundation.
If you have been feeling like the rules of your job quietly changed and nobody sent a memo, you are not imagining it. The way people find information and decide whom to trust has shifted rapidly, and most communications playbooks have not kept pace.
We recently led a Ragan workshop on AI visibility, owned media and the PESO Model for a room of experienced PR, marketing and communications pros. The questions the audience asked were not about tools. They were about real problems — and almost every one was, at its core, a PESO Model question. Owned media not structured to be found. Earned coverage serving AI work but not being tracked. Shared content scattered across channels with nothing tying it together.
These are a few of the questions the audience asked, with in-depth responses.
Is GEO the same as AEO?
Close, but not quite. AEO — answer engine optimization — is the older term, originally for the answers surfaced in featured snippets, voice search and “People Also Ask.” GEO — generative engine optimization — is newer and more specific: it refers to being cited or named within the synthesized answers LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini generate. The two are converging, but the playbooks differ.
Nearly 60% of searches now end without a click. If your content is not structured to be cited, you are not just ranking lower. You are not in the conversation at all.
“We don’t have original data. Does that mean AI will never cite us?”
The honest answer: you do not need to own the data. You need to own the interpretation. This is an owned media problem in disguise — the expertise exists, but it has no permanent home on a domain you control.
“Our students do well” is an anecdote. “Eight out of 10 graduate students are working in their field within six months, based on our annual alumni survey,” is a citable claim.
A landmark study by researchers at Princeton, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi found that adding statistics, citations and quotations can improve AI visibility by up to 40%. Vague claims get skipped. Specific, sourced ones get used.
Three things to do:
- Turn outcomes into named, numbered claims. “82% of our graduates are employed in their field within six months” gives AI something to cite.
- Build a consistent author bio for every expert — same name, same title, same description across your website, LinkedIn and anywhere they publish.
- Refresh content regularly. Half of everything cited in AI answers is less than 13 weeks old. A “last updated” date with new data signals your source is alive.
“We post on LinkedIn, send newsletters and have a news site. Why aren’t we showing up?”
Being everywhere is not the same as being findable. PESO integration is not a checklist of channels. It is a connected system where earned media references the same claim, shared media links to the same source and owned media points back to the same page. Most teams think they are running PESO when they are really running four parallel content streams that never meet.
Imagine a journalist writing about workforce development in higher education. She finds a news release, a LinkedIn post and a newsletter excerpt — each citing the same stat but linking to a different page, or nowhere. She cannot verify the source. She moves on. AI does the same thing.
On the LinkedIn link question: LinkedIn now suppresses the reach of posts that use the “link in comments” workaround. Put the link in the post itself.
To see where each of your four media types is pulling its weight and where the gaps are, we built a free PESO Model Diagnostic that takes about 10 minutes.
Two things to do:
- Choose one URL per topic or claim you want to own. A real page on your website that everything links back to. That is your source of truth.
- After your next campaign, ask: does every piece link back to the same source? Three pieces pointing to one page work as a system. Three standalone pieces are noise.
What about Wikipedia?
According to the 5W AI Platform Citation Source Index 2026, Wikipedia accounts for 26% to 48% of ChatGPT’s top citation sources. When anyone asks AI about your organization, up to half the answer is shaped by a page most communications teams have never strategically touched.
Most organizations do not have a Wikipedia problem. They have a Wikipedia vacancy. No audit, no relationship with editors, no documentation of what got reverted, no internal policy on who can edit. The page does enormous work, and no one is responsible for it.
Wikipedia is what happens when earned media becomes infrastructure. Done right, it is the most leveraged PESO play available — converting past earned media into permanent AI visibility. A real strategy means verifiable third-party sourcing, conflict-of-interest rules you understand cold and quarterly audits instead of one-time fixes.
Rapid-fire answers
On crisis. GEO is not a crisis tool. It is the foundation you build before a crisis. A reporter opens ChatGPT during a breaking story. If your owned content is well-sourced, current and consistent, AI pulls from it. If not, AI pulls from whoever has earned media on you — usually the coverage, the critics and the commentary. The work has to happen before the crisis.
On Reddit. You do not have to post there to benefit. A That 5W analysis found Reddit is the No. 1 cited source across every major AI engine, appearing in roughly 40% of citations. It is shared media doing earned media work — and most teams leave it to customers, critics and strangers. Search Reddit for what your audience is actually asking, then use those exact words in your FAQs and program pages.
On reluctant executives. You do not need your CEO on LinkedIn, but shared media still has to come from someone. The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Report found 95% of hidden buyers say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to outreach. Find the person who already talks about your core topic in meetings, at conferences and with clients and help them publish consistently. Consistency beats seniority every time.
The takeaway
Most organizations already have more credible content than they realize — paid, earned, shared and owned. What they do not have is the structure that turns four streams into a single system that AI can read.
The organizations that get this right in the next 12 months will define how their categories are described in AI for years. What gets named. What gets cited. What gets believed. The ones who wait will spend the rest of the decade trying to correct an answer written without them.
Do not wait for the memo. Write the playbook.
The post We led a workshop on AI visibility. The questions in the chat were the real story. appeared first on PR Daily.
