TL;DR
AI Visibility has changed the role of marketing and comms pros across paid, earned, owned, and shared media. It’s no longer just about optimizing for SEO with keywords—now we have to create content that AI finds credible enough to cite by ensuring our four streams work as a system, boosting credibility. Here’s what communications professionals are trying to figure out in the process of all of these changes.
Key Insights
- AI visibility has changed the role of marketing and communications. Success is no longer just about ranking in search results—it’s about being cited by AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
- SEO and AI visibility are different disciplines. Traditional SEO focuses on keywords and clicks; AI visibility focuses on credibility, authority, and earning citations in AI-generated answers.
- You don’t need original data to be cited. Organizations can increase visibility by publishing expert interpretations and insights on topics they want to own.
- The PESO Model® is more important than ever. Paid, earned, shared, and owned media must work together as a connected system that reinforces the same messages and sources.
- Create a single source of truth. Every major claim or topic should have an authoritative page on your website that all content and channels point back to.
- Marketers and communicators are now optimizing for both people and AI. The brands that build trustworthy, interconnected content ecosystems today will be more likely to shape how AI describes their category in the future.
What AI Visibility Means for Marketers
Does anyone else feel like they’ve done things one way their whole career, and suddenly, seemingly overnight, everything changed?
Kind of like how, one day, we all wore skinny jeans, and then the next, it was considered “cheugy” and “millennial.” Wide leg, baggy, and even barrel (I’ll admit, I love them) jeans are the new way of denim.
Now, all of my skinny jeans sit at the back of my closet, begging to be let out, with the optimistic theory that one day they’ll come back in style.
The other thing that sits at the back of my closet is virtually everything I once knew about SEO. I’m not getting rid of the knowledge, but it has been pushed back to make room for the new.
Once upon a time, Yoast or SEMRush was your best friend. You chose a keyword with high search volume and low competition density, and you built a strategy to rank for that keyword on the first page of Google.
Your title and meta title mentioned the keyword; your meta description and your slug were present every 100 words; you threw in some supporting keywords; and your job was more or less done.
Then you sat back and watched the magic happen, and getting to tell your boss you ranked 1-5 for a high-volume keyword felt like Christmas morning.
Up until relatively recently, this was true for owned, earned, and paid, and is increasingly true for shared media as Google started to crawl social. But the rise of Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini has reshaped how we find answers, and now Google is following suit.
At its Google I/O conference a few weeks ago, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around an “intelligent search box.” Instead of receiving a list of links in your search results, your question will be dropped into an AI-powered interactive experience.
The new search box will expand to accommodate longer, more conversational queries, similar to ChatGPT.
If you’re not new here, you know Spin Sucks has been on top of the concept of strategizing your content to show up in AI search for almost a year now. It has gone by a number of names, but ‘round these parts, we call it Visibility Engineering.
Gini has become nothing short of an expert in Visibility Engineering, and she and Sukhi Sahni, a fractional CMO and industry expert, teamed up with Sarab Kochhar, the senior communications officer for global communications at the Gates Foundation, to host a Ragan workshop on this topic.
Turns out, I’m not the only marketer who feels like her job changed overnight.
Despite keeping up with what experts like Gini say (she is my boss, after all), we still feel a little confused. Attendees had a number of fascinating, pressing questions about visibility engineering—here’s what they asked.
What We are Wondering About AI Visibility
“Is GEO the same as AEO?”
Yes and no.
AEO, or answer engine optimization, is the original term for the answers surfaced in featured snippets, voice search, and “People Also Ask.” GEO, or generative engine optimization, is newer and way more specific, referring to being cited or named within LLMs.
Almost 60% of searches end without a click. If your content is not structured to be cited by LLMs, you are not just “ranking lower” as you would in the past for a poor SEO strategy.
You won’t be a part of the conversation at all.
“We don’t have original data. Does that mean AI will never cite us?”
You don’t need to own the data, but you do need to own the interpretation. Would you want people talking about you with no accurate source to back up their claims?
If the expertise already exists, ensure it has a permanent home on a domain you control.
Here’s what you can do to properly own the interpretation of your brand.
“We post on LinkedIn, send newsletters, and have a news site. Why aren’t we showing up?”
Having an online presence is important, but it’s not the same as being visible. You may have checked paid, earned, shared, and owned off your list, but the work doesn’t stop there—it needs to be a connected system. Many teams think they’re running the PESO Model®, when in reality they’re just running four siloed content streams.
You can assess whether or not your PESO operating system is actually working congruently by taking the free PESO Model Diagnostic.
Earned media references the same claim, shared links to the same source, and owned points to the same page.
Two things you can do right now:
- 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.
Does Wikipedia matter for AI visibility?
Up to half of the answers AI provides about your organization are shaped by Wikipedia. The problem is, most teams don’t write their company’s Wikipedia page. They don’t have a relationship with the editors, they don’t audit what gets reverted, and the page serves as a huge answer bank that the comms team has no control over.
When it’s done right, however, it’s the most leveraged PESO play possible. Wikipedia turns past earned media into permanent AI visibility.
What should I do next to increase my AI visibility?
Now you know your job looks a little different than it did yesterday, but luckily, your skillset is more relevant than ever. Who you’re communicating with has just changed. By taking the first step to build an operating system that turns the four individual streams of content into a single system that AI can read, you’ll define how your category gets described in AI for years.
AI Visibility FAQs
Click here to see what else we are asking about AI Visibility right now (with the answers).
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