Brand visibility is changing — and it’s changing fast. Most Google searches now end without a single click. No website visit. No link followed. Just an AI-generated answer — and whoever’s named in that answer wins the moment.
If your search strategy still ends at Google’s blue links, you are optimising for an internet that is quietly disappearing. This is the GEO problem, and it’s reshaping how buyers make decisions right now.
However, too many ‘consultants’ are still telling their clients that the solution is purely technical, with better schema and tidier markup. That is the easy half. Getting ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI to actually mention your brand in their summaries is about building your reputation.
Think of it like this; the markup is the plumbing. The reason an AI assistant recommends a brand is that the trustworthy open web already talks about it. Getting the trustworthy web to talk about you has a name. It is earned media, and it is exactly what we, as a PR agency, have always done.
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You can rank on Google and still be invisible in AI
There is a stat doing the rounds that should worry any B2B marketing director. Search Engine Land reported in June that B2B brands which rank perfectly well on classic Google show up in only around 3% of AI Overviews. To put it clearly, that means you can sit at the top of page one and still be missing from the answer your buyer actually reads.
Our own State of Social Media 2026 report found something just as stark. Only 5% of senior UK marketers feel ‘very’ confident their brand will remain discoverable as AI replaces traditional search. We call this the ‘readiness gap’, and it is the reason we built this page – to help marketers navigate these murky waters.
Meanwhile the clicks are drying up. By early 2026 most Google searches ended without anyone clicking through to a website at all. The traffic you used to take for granted is being answered before it ever reaches you.
What every other GEO agency is selling you
If you go and read the GEO service pages ranking above this one, we’re pretty sure it will shout the same three words at you; structured data, entity optimisation, citations. One well-known agency we will not name even manages to define generative engine optimisation incorrectly while at the same time trying to sell it.
None of that is wrong, by the way. Schema helps machines understand your site. Clean markup helps an AI work out who you are. While it’s necessary, we believe it is the easy half, and the half everyone is fighting over.
So the real question is not whether your schema is tidy. It is whether the press, the trade titles and the credible corners of the web are actually talking about you. And the data on that is striking.
Earned media is most of the answer
When Muck Rack analysed more than a million AI citations, 82% of them came from earned media and 94% came from non-paid sources. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found web mentions correlated with AI visibility roughly three times more strongly than backlinks. And when the PR firm Hard Numbers asked ChatGPT about the reputation of the world’s biggest brands, earned media sources were cited 61% of the time.
The reality is, if the credible web is not talking about you, no amount of markup will put you in the answer.
Generative engine optimisation is a reputation problem
Modern AI assistants do not keep a tidy ranked list the way Google used to. They build an answer on the fly, and to do it they reach out to search and pull from the sources they trust. That is what retrieval-augmented generation means in plain English. The model goes looking for who the web vouches for, and repeats it.
Which means getting cited is not really a technical trick. It is the same job PR has always done. Get credible third parties to say good things about you in public, in places that carry weight.
There is a twist that makes this even more of a PR job than an SEO one. Search Engine Land found in June that AI Overviews lean on independent listicles, and off self-serving pages they recommend a competitor 69% of the time. That means you cannot write your own way into the answer, someone else has to put you there.
And this is the bit we find amusing; the industry spent twenty years telling PR people that SEO was the serious discipline and it was earned media that was the fluff. Now the most advanced search technology on earth runs on exactly the thing PR has always sold; earned reputation.
GEO, AEO and SEO: what is actually different
People throw these three letters around as if they mean the same thing, so let us draw the lines cleanly, because the difference is the whole point.
SEO, search engine optimisation, is about getting your pages to rank in a list of links. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is about being the source a search engine quotes when it answers a question directly. GEO, generative engine optimisation, is about being mentioned and recommended inside the answer an AI assistant writes from scratch.
They overlap, and admittedly, good SEO still helps all three because the AI usually starts by searching. But the further you move from links towards generated answers, the more the deciding factor becomes reputation rather than markup. That is the shift most agencies have not yet caught up with.
The technical half, done properly
We have been rude about schema on this page, so let’s be fair. The technical work matters and we do it. We just want you to know what good looks like, because a lot of it is sold badly.
Good technical GEO means your brand is described the same way everywhere it appears, on your site, your LinkedIn, your Google Business Profile and the directories, so an AI is never confused about who you are. It means your key pages open with a clear, self-contained answer a model can lift cleanly. It means the right structured data so machines understand your organisation and your services, not so you chase a snippet.
One thing changed recently that catches agencies out. Google retired FAQ rich results in the middle of 2026, so building a page around FAQ schema for search features is now pointless. We still write the FAQ in plain visible text, because that is what people and AI models actually read. We just do not pretend the markup earns you anything in the results any more.
There is a warning attached to this too. Google’s June 2026 spam update specifically goes after brands and agencies trying to buy or game their way into AI answers. So anyone offering you paid citations or a clever shortcut is selling you a future penalty. The only route that lasts is the earned one.
Where B2B brands actually go missing
If you sell to other businesses, this matters to you more than to most. Your buyers are already asking ChatGPT and Perplexity to shortlist suppliers, compare tools and sense-check options, usually long before they ever fill in a form on your site.
And B2B is exactly where the gap is worst. That same Search Engine Land research found B2B brands ranking on Google still turn up in only around 3% of AI Overviews. Your buyer reads an answer that names three of your competitors and not you, and you never even know the conversation happened.
The fix is not more product pages. It is showing up in the trade and specialist press your buyers trust, with a point of view worth quoting. That is earned media, and for B2B it is the difference between making the shortlist and being invisible.
What an earned-media-first GEO agency does differently
Prohibition is a PR agency first and foremost. Getting brands talked about in the right way, in the places that matter, from the trade press to the nationals to broadcast, is what we do, and what our founders have spent a combined 50+ years in PR perfecting. Generative engine optimisation, the way we run it, is that same muscle pointed at a new target – the AI answer.
We are not an SEO shop that bolted PR onto the back of a service deck. We are the other way round, and for this particular problem the origin story matters, because the thing that moves AI visibility is the thing we were built to do.
That does not mean we ignore the technical side. We will make sure your site reads cleanly to a machine, your brand identity is consistent everywhere it appears, and your key pages are structured so an AI can lift a clear answer. We just refuse to stop there, because stopping there is why most GEO underdelivers.
How we run a GEO programme
1. The AI visibility audit
We start with our AI Overview Visibility Audit, which finds out what the machines actually say about you. We build a set of real buyer questions, run them across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers, and record where you appear, where you are ignored, and where a competitor is quoted instead. You get a clear baseline, a competitor citation map, and a ranked list of what to fix first. That audit is a standalone diagnostic in its own right, and the natural first step into the wider programme.
2. The earned media and content that moves it
This is the engine. We earn coverage and mentions in the sources AI models trust, the trade titles, the national press, the credible specialist sites. We build the citable assets too. The original data, the expert commentary, the genuinely useful pages that get referenced. This is where most of the movement comes from, and it is the part the schema crowd cannot easily copy.
3. Honest, clear measurement
We track your share of answer over time against named competitors, how often you are mentioned and cited, and the sentiment when you do appear. We report it straight and report it frequently.
What this looks like in practice
Here is the pattern we keep seeing. A B2B software firm comes to us frustrated. They rank well, the site is quick, the content calendar is full, and yet when a buyer asks ChatGPT to recommend a tool in their category and it names three rivals and not them.
We run the audit and the cause is nearly always the same; their rivals get quoted in the trade press, mentioned in roundups on credible sites, and referenced by analysts. Our new client has a lovely website that nobody outside the company links to or talks about. The AI has nothing to repeat.
So we go and change that. We get them commenting on the issues their buyers actually care about, in the titles those buyers read. We turn their own data into something worth citing. A few months later the same prompt starts including them, because the open web finally has a reason to.
None of that was a schema fix. It was PR doing the job it has always done, for an audience that now includes the machines.
What we will and will not promise
In May the industry measurement body AMEC published its GEO Principles. The short version is that AI answers are directional evidence, not gospel, and any agency selling you a single magic visibility score is overclaiming. We agree with them, which is a little awkward, because it makes the sales pitch harder.
So here is the honest position. We will show you real movement in how often AI tools mention and cite you, tracked the same way every month so it actually means something. We will not promise you a guaranteed slot in ChatGPT, because nobody can honestly promise that. We will not pretend a rising visibility score is the same as a closed sale, because the attribution does not yet support it.
If a GEO agency guarantees you the top of an AI answer, walk away. They are either lying or they do not understand how these systems work.
The GEO mistakes we keep seeing
Here are the mistakes we watch brands make over and over. None of them are daft. They are just the natural result of treating GEO as an SEO job.
The first is spending everything on the website. New layout, fresh schema, a content hub nobody asked for. The site ends up immaculate and the brand stays invisible, because the AI was never going to learn about you from a page only you control.
The second is chasing every tool. There are well over a hundred GEO platforms now, and most of them tell you roughly the same thing while disagreeing on the detail. A tool measures the weather. It does not change it. Buy one for the baseline, then spend the rest of the budget on the actual work.
The third is believing the guarantees. If someone promises you a fixed slot in ChatGPT, they are selling certainty that does not exist. The answers shift by user and by day, and Google’s June 2026 spam update now punishes anyone trying to buy their way in.
The fourth, and the most common, is silence. The brand has nothing to say in public. No point of view, no data, no expert willing to go on the record. So there is nothing for a journalist to quote and nothing for a model to repeat. Earned media starts with having something worth earning coverage for.
GEO and SEO, side by side
It helps to see the two next to each other. The goal is the same, getting found, but it becomes a different game once you move past the basics.
| Traditional SEO | Generative engine optimisation | |
| What you compete for | A ranked link on page one | A mention inside the AI’s written answer |
| Who decides | Google’s ranking algorithm | The model, based on who the web trusts |
| The main lever | On-page content and backlinks | Earned media and third-party reputation |
| What the buyer sees | A list of ten blue links | One answer naming a few brands |
| How you measure | Rankings and organic traffic | Share of answer, mentions and citations |
| Who usually owns it | The SEO team | It should be PR, working with search |
None of this means SEO is finished. It means the centre of gravity has moved, from the link to the answer, and from your website to your reputation.
Proof
Here is the thing that makes this more than a theory. The work that gets a brand into an AI answer is the same earned-media work we already do, getting clients quoted as the authority in the titles people and machines trust. Three recent examples.
Freeths: owning a national news moment
When ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office aired, Freeths had actually led the real legal fight for the sub-postmasters. We put lead partner James Hartley in front of the camera and built a LinkedIn campaign that peaked with an 80-minute LinkedIn Live Q&A on the real story. It drove 186,467 impressions and 4,700 live viewers, and made Freeths the name the sector tied to the real case, with Hartley as the authoritative voice. Authority like that, attached to a named expert, is what builds the reputation AI engines repeat.
Huthwaite: turning 50 years of IP into a voice
Huthwaite own the iconic SPIN Selling methodology, but was struggling to cut through when it came to thought leadership, despite having an abundance of industry knowledge and internal experts. We launched a podcast and content series for the business, Mastering Sales and Negotiations, built around named senior guests and tied to their own methodology. We grew it from a standing start to more than 35,000 downloads in nine months, with a breakout episode hitting 17,527 subscriptions. The series turned half a century of research into content their buyers actually consume, which is how a B2B brand becomes the cited authority in its field.
The third most cited PR agency in the UK
Before we sold GEO to a single client, we decided to get our own house in order. We restructured our service pages around the questions buyers actually ask AI engines, published named-expert commentary under individual’s bylines, and built the citation trail — earned coverage, structured data, authoritative third-party mentions — that LLMs treat as proof. We also went even BIGGER on building our own earned authority, including launching our own hugely popular podcast, Embracing Marketing Mistakes.
Prohibition – according to objective third party analysis – is now the third top cited PR agency in the whole of the UK. For context, that’s out of more than 6,000 agencies!
None of these started as GEO projects. They are earned reputation, built in credible places, which is precisely what the AI answer is built from.
Generative engine optimisation FAQs
What is a generative engine optimisation agency?
It is an agency that helps your brand get mentioned and recommended by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. The good ones treat it as a reputation and earned-media job, not just a technical SEO tweak.
Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
No, though good SEO still helps. SEO gets you ranked in a list of links. GEO gets you into the answer the AI writes instead of that list. The big difference is that AI answers lean heavily on what trusted third parties say about you, which is earned media, not on-page tweaks.
Can you guarantee my brand will appear in ChatGPT?
No, and be wary of anyone who says they can. AI answers vary by user, prompt and day. What we can do is measurably increase how often you are mentioned and cited, and show you the trend honestly.
How is GEO different for B2B?
B2B buyers research in AI tools long before they speak to you, and B2B brands are badly under-represented in AI answers even when they rank on Google. The work is the same in principle, but the sources that matter are the trade and specialist titles your buyers actually trust.
How long before I see movement?
Earned media takes time, so this is not an overnight fix. Most clients see the visibility trend start to move within a few months, as coverage and citable content build up. Anyone promising instant results is selling you the markup, not the reputation.
Do I need a tool like Profound or Brandi?
You need measurement, and there are good tools for it. We stay tool-agnostic and pick what fits, rather than tying you to one platform. The tool tells you the score. The earned media changes it.
How do you measure GEO?
Share of answer against your competitors, how often you are mentioned and cited, and sentiment when you appear, all tracked consistently and reported against the AMEC GEO Principles. No vanity scores.
Will GEO replace SEO?
Not replace, but it is taking over the part that matters most. SEO still gets you found and still feeds the AI. The difference is that more of your buyers now read the generated answer instead of the list of links, so being in that answer is becoming the priority.
We already have an SEO agency. Why use a PR agency for this?
Because the bit that actually moves AI visibility is earned media, and that is a PR job, not an on-page one. Your SEO agency can keep handling the markup. We handle the reputation that gets you cited, which is the half they usually cannot do.
Find out what AI says about you
If you want to know whether the AI engines are recommending you, ignoring you, or quoting your competitors, that is exactly what our AI Overview Visibility Audit tells you. Fill in the form below and we will get back to you.
