The public relations industry spent the last twenty years adjusting to two disruptions. First, social media collapsed the distance between brands and publics. Second, content marketing blurred the line between earned and owned media. Both shifts rewarded firms that moved early and punished firms that waited for clarity.
A third disruption is already underway
Generative engine optimization — the discipline of shaping how AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, Claude, and Gemini describe and recommend brands — is on track to be the most consequential change to the PRfunction since the launch of the modern press release.
The numbers make the case better than any argument. Conductor’s 2026 CMO Investment Report found that ninety-four percent of digital marketing leaders plan to increase AEO and GEO investment this year, with fifty-six percent already reporting significant 2025 spend. Ninety-seven percent reported a positive impact. Adobe Analytics, cited in Bluefish’s Black Friday 2025 report, clocked an 805 percent year-over-year increase in AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites. ChatGPT has reached roughly nine hundred million weekly users, up fourfold inside twelve months. Gartner projects traditional search volume will fall twenty-five percent by the end of this year. Define Media Group has already documented a forty-two percent decline in organic search clicks across a sixty-four-site portfolio through Q4 2025.
This is not an emerging channel. This is the channel.
The PR advantage in the AI Discovery Stack
PR firms have a specific advantage in this shift that SEO agencies and pure-play GEO platforms do not. Large language models are trained and continuously retrained on the open web, and they weight authoritative third-party sources — earned media, expert commentary, Wikipedia citations, industry analyst coverage, and credentialed thought leadership — more heavily than brand-owned content. That is precisely the supply chain public relations has been operating for a century. The firms that recognize this earn a durable role in the AI discovery stack. The firms that outsource it to martech platforms or let SEO shops reframe it as a technical problem will lose accounts.
Implementing a practical GEO practice
A practical GEO practice inside a PR firm looks like four capabilities. Measurement — visibility auditing inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, and Claude, using either a platform like Profound, Bluefish, Peec AI, or Scrunch AI, or bespoke prompt tracking. Editorial sourcing — securing authoritative coverage, expert quotes, and category citations in the publications and forums that LLMs actually read, which increasingly includes Reddit, YouTube, and industry newsletters alongside traditional trade and business press. Owned-asset structuring — ensuring client websites, executive profiles, and long-form assets are parseable by AI crawlers and accurately describe entities, relationships, and category positioning. And reporting — showing clients, in a language they can take to a board, what share of AI-generated answers now describe their brand, how sentiment has moved, and which earned placements drove citation gains.
The firms that adopt all four inside 2026 will be defending their accounts through 2028. The firms that do not will watch their clients renegotiate with agencies that did.
Ronn Torossian is founder and chairman of 5W, owner of Virgo PR, and author of For Immediate Release. He publishes regularly at RonnTorossian.com and RonnTorossianUpdate.com on crisis communications and the evolution of public relations.
