Microsoft's Bing search engine is heading into 2010 in the strongest competitive position Microsoft has built in search in more than a decade. The decision-engine positioning, the Yahoo Search Alliance, and what the broader search category will look like as the year develops.
Gartner predicts PR budgets will double by 2027 as AI answer engines replace traditional search — and 95% of what they cite is nonpaid earned media coverage.
Citizens Bank pays up to $171,000 for an Answer Engine Optimization Manager. See which Fortune 500 companies are hiring GEO managers in 2026.
AI companies face communications challenges unlike those of any previous technology category. The 2026 playbook: four pillars, the open-source vs closed-model debate, the earned media stack, and answer engine optimization — with Ronn Torossian on what most AI companies miss.
Chatbots grew up. Conversational AI — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot — is the new conversational marketing surface. Citation Share, GEO, and where brands actually win.
The third Generative Engine Optimization Conference sold out at the Ritz-Carlton. No cameras. No recordings. 150 operators on the record with each other. Everything-PR was in the room — and this is the record from the floor.
When an AI engine answers a buying question, the brand it names just ran an ad. The brand it omitted paid for the impression. Welcome to AEO.
The owned-content infrastructure AI engines retrieve from for buyer queries. Built well, it substitutes for the top-of-funnel programmatic display spend brand teams have been compressing for a decade.
Citation Share is the metric that describes the new decision surface — the share of AI-engine answers that name a brand inside a defined query universe. Share of voice and branded search are now upstream of where the consideration set is composed. The full methodology.
AEO is a content tactic measured per query. GEO is a communications discipline measured per category. The precise distinction, five requirements each, how each is measured, and the right sequence for building both.
