A few weeks ago, I attended a webinar about AI visibility. While I was expecting PRSA Idaho's virtual session to be a refresh on keywords and backlinks, I left the session with new knowledge.
The search landscape has gained a new layer that most PR practitioners (me included, until that hour) aren't paying enough attention to yet. This blog post outlines the key takeaways from presenter Dave Burnett, founder of AOK Marketing, that I learned.
SEO didn't disappear. It just got a roommate.
Rankings, backlinks and keywords still matter. But they're not the whole story anymore.
There's a newer concept called GEO, generative engine optimization, and it's how artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity find a brand, understand it and decide whether to recommend it.
The old question was simple: will someone find us on Google? The new one is a little more unsettling: does AI even know we exist, and if it does, would it vouch for us?
This was the part of the webinar where I started furiously taking notes. The presenter laid out five stages that describe where a brand sits in the eyes of AI:
- Invisible: AI has no idea the brand exists
- Ignored: AI knows the brand is out there, but never brings it up when it's relevant
- Misaligned: AI mentions the brand but gets something wrong or mixes it up with a different company entirely. This one stood out to me because it sounds harmless, but isn't. Bad information spreading through AI is worse than no information at all
- Aligned: AI describes the brand accurately and names it in the right context
- Trusted: AI treats the brand as a go-to source across a wide range of questions
Burnett cited a study that found of 1,000 organizations, most landed in one of two buckets: Aligned or Trusted (61.7%) or Ignored (31.9%). Very few organizations are fully invisible or actively misrepresented. PRSA Idaho also checked its own tracked terms and found more than half of its AI mentions falling into the Aligned or Trusted categories.
PR work is quietly becoming AI training data
This was the line that made me sit up. Press mentions, Wikipedia pages and structured bios used to be thought of as mainly brand awareness plays, things that built reputation over time. Now, they double as raw material AI systems pull from and cite directly.
The presenter summed up the topic in a way I haven't stopped thinking about: SEO plus PR equals SEO for AI. That's the core of AI visibility. Backlinks used to be how authority passed from one site to another, but now GEO uses the same currency, trust, notability and credibility, except it's AI models doing the weighing instead of a search algorithm.
One detail worth filing away: Reddit and LinkedIn show up far more often in AI citations than you'd expect. If you're thinking about where to place content, consider starting there.
How to improve your brand's AI visibility
The webinar wrapped up with some useful, low-lift ideas. I'm planning to try a couple of these myself.
Check your robots.txt.
Some major sites, including the New York Times, block AI crawlers outright (ChatGPT-User and ClaudeBot among them). If a site blocks the bots, its content simply can't be cited, no matter how good it is.
Keep your NAP consistent.
Name, address and phone number need to match everywhere online. This mattered for traditional local SEO for years, and it still matters now.
Try a 30-day sprint.
Pick 10 to 20 questions your ideal customer would type into a search bar or ask an AI assistant. Build a short, dedicated page answering each one: a direct answer near the top, a few key points, supporting details and schema markup underneath.
Build a brand fact book.
One document, one source of truth, with approved descriptions, proof points tied to real sources and dates and standard boilerplate language. The goal is that anyone pulling information about the brand, whether it's a journalist or an AI model, lands on the same accurate story every time.
I entered the webinar thinking I understood SEO reasonably well. I left realizing there's a whole new layer of AI visibility to keep up with, and that the brands paying attention early are going to be a step ahead.
This blog post was written by B2 Communications' summer 2026 PR intern Elena Bretoi.