What on earth is GEO and AIO? We’ve created a guide to help the new marketing challenge
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Your website is ranking. Your brand is invisible. Here's why that's a problem.
You might be number one on Google and still not exist as far as AI is concerned. That's not a future problem. It's happening right now.
Open ChatGPT. Type in a question a potential client might ask about your sector. See if your brand appears.
If it doesn't, you're not just missing a ranking. You're missing from the conversation entirely. Increasingly, that conversation is where buying decisions begin, we are in the time of zero click rate. This is where a question posed through an AI tool produces answers but does not result in the user needing to click anywhere else. They are getting the information they wanted and you can’t track where they go next.
This is the uncomfortable reality faced by brands now that we've spent the last few months digging into. The result is our new essential guide to GEO and AIO. We tell you what they are, why they matter and why the PR discipline is so heavily involved in responding to this emerging marketing challenge.
But before we get to the guide, let's talk about why this is worth your attention.
The numbers are more alarming than the headlines suggest
You've probably seen the statistics being thrown around. But it's worth sitting with them for a moment, because they tell a more dramatic story than most people are registering.
According to SEMrush data from September 2025, 93% of searches conducted in Google's full AI Mode, end without a single click to an external website (this is the zero click rate we just mentioned). Not most. Ninety-three percent.
That's the extreme end. But even in more familiar territory, the picture is shifting fast. Standard Google searches without AI Overview produce a 34% zero-click rate. Add an AI Overview, which now appears on roughly half of all Google searches, according to McKinsey's October 2025 research, and that figure rises to 43%.
The direction of travel is unambiguous. AI is answering more questions, more completely, leaving fewer reasons to click anywhere at all.
And yet most businesses are still measuring success by rankings and clicks. And crucially, still pumping enormous amounts of marketing budget into ‘traditional’ SEO.
The thing about rankings
Here's where it gets genuinely interesting, and a little counterintuitive.
Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro and one of the most respected voices in search marketing, recently ran a large-scale experiment to test whether AI search rankings could even be meaningfully tracked. He recruited 600 volunteers to run identical prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI systems, collecting nearly 3,000 responses.
His finding: there is less than a one-in-100 chance that if you ask ChatGPT the same ‘best brands’ question 100 times, you'll receive the same list twice.
On the surface, that sounds like AI visibility is chaos: impossible to influence or measure. But Fishkin's conclusion was more nuanced:
"Brand presence was more consistent than I expected. You can track brand presence frequency with statistical rigour, if you run prompts enough times."
The insight isn't that AI is random. It's that the old mental model of a ranked position i.e. that you're number three, now let's get you to number one, simply doesn't apply. What matters is whether your brand exists in the pool of trusted answers at all, and how often it shows up when the relevant questions are asked.
That is a PR challenge, not an SEO problem.
Why AI doesn't discover new brands
There's a line from a recent Search Engine Land analysis that provides context:
"AI doesn't discover new brands — it selects from known entities."
This is the crucial distinction that most GEO content glosses over. Large language models are not search engines trawling the web for fresh information in real time. They are, in large part, working from patterns of trust established over time and what users are asking, crucially shaped by what credible third-party sources have said, repeatedly, about your brand.
Ahrefs research explains this: the factors that most strongly correlate with brand appearance in AI overviews are branded web mentions, branded anchor links and branded search volume. Three different metrics. One underlying concept: how often does the wider web talk about you, and in which sources?
As SEO expert Kevin Indig puts it:
"Visibility, not raw referral traffic, is becoming the main currency of organic search."
The businesses winning in AI search aren't necessarily the biggest. They're the ones with the most consistent, credible, multi-source presence across the web. Building that kind of presence is exactly what PR has always done.
GEO and AIO are not the same thing and this distinction matters
Part of the confusion around this topic is that GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AIO (AI Optimisation) are often used interchangeably, when they're actually describing different problems.
GEO is fundamentally a technical and content challenge. It's about how well your website, blogs and digital content are structured so that AI systems can find, analyse and choose to surface them. Think site architecture, metadata, clear entity associations, authoritative long-form content.
AIO operates at a different level entirely. It's not about your website. It's about your reputation and who’s talking about you. Take note, your reputation exists outside your own channels. AI systems draw from a far broader range of sources than most brands realise. According to McKinsey's research, a brand's own website typically accounts for just 5 to 10% of the sources referenced in AI-generated answers about that category. The rest comes from publishers, reviews, community content and earned media.
Which means if you want to influence what AI says about your brand, your own website is almost irrelevant. What matters is what everyone else is saying about you.
This is not a comfortable message for marketers who have spent the last decade perfecting their owned channels. But it is a clarifying one and it is reality right now if you choose to take action.
The iceberg most brands are ignoring
Think of your digital presence as an iceberg. Your website, blogs and social channels are the part above the waterline. They are important, visible and necessary. The technical foundations of your site, i.e. the schema markup, metadata, structured data, all sit below, out of sight but keeping everything afloat.
But the tip of the iceberg, the part that carries disproportionate weight with AI systems, is now more than ever influenced by earned media coverage. The articles that namecheck you in trade publications. The journalist who quotes your CEO. The industry report that cites your research. The third-party review platform that gives you four stars and 200 words of considered feedback.
These signals are what AI uses to decide whether you're a brand worth including in its answer. And they're also the hardest to fake and the slowest to build. This is precisely why the businesses building them now are creating a more future proof, durable advantage.
Sam Weston, head of AI and marketing at digital agency 80 DAYS, described this dynamic well in a recent interview:
"GEO is around managing your entire digital profile online and having a really clear ownership of all of the different channels where you're represented online. Credibility is increasingly important. A lot of these large language models are citing TripAdvisor, Condé Nast and Forbes — so having credible signals that what you say as a brand is reinforced by what others say is increasingly important."
So, what does this actually mean for PR?
It means that PR (by this we mean media relations in old school terminology) proper, strategic, media-driven PR, is no longer a nice-to-have alongside your SEO and content strategy. It's become central to how AI systems form their understanding of who you are and whether you're worth recommending.
Here's the practical reality. If a potential client asks an AI tool which businesses in your sector they should consider, the AI will draw on:
How frequently your brand is mentioned across credible online sources
Which publications have given you coverage, and how authoritative those publications are (you can judge this by assessing domain authority scores)
Whether multiple independent sources describe you consistently and positively
Whether named individuals from your organisation appear in sources that are well read offer influence
All of these things are the outputs of a well-executed PR strategy. Thought leadership placed in the right titles. Spokesperson profiles built over time. Award entries that put your name in front of judges and journalists. Consistent media relations creates a pattern of trusted association.
None of this is new. What's new is that the stakes in PR terms just got considerably higher.
A word of caution about the hype
This piece would be incomplete without acknowledging that GEO has attracted its share of noise, overpromising and snake oil.
Rand Fishkin's research is instructive here too. When asked whether AI rankings could be gamed in the same way some managed to ‘game’ traditional search, his finding was clear: the consistency required to appear reliably in AI answers comes from genuine, multi-source corroboration of your brand's claims - not from technical tricks. Attempting to manufacture that kind of presence artificially tends to fail, because AI systems are evaluating confidence across the entire web, not just your own content.
The good news is that this makes the field more level than it might appear. A smaller business with a genuinely strong PR programme and a clear, consistent positioning can outperform a much larger competitor that has neglected its external presence. We've seen it happen.
We've written the guide we needed to understand this on a practical basis
When we started exploring GEO and AIO properly, we found a lot of content that was either superficial (‘just add FAQ schema’) or so technically dense it assumed you already had a developer and an SEO consultant on speed dial.
We wanted to write something accessible. Something that explained the landscape honestly, acknowledged the uncertainty, and gave communications professionals and business owners a practical and helpful starting point.
The result is our free GEO and AIO guide, available now on the Purplefish website.
It covers what GEO and AIO actually are and why the distinction matters, how AI search is changing the way people find businesses, why media coverage is a critical factor in AI visibility, and five concrete things you can do right now to improve how your brand shows up.
Download the full GEO and AIO guide
If you'd like to talk through what this means for your business specifically, we're offering a limited number of free 30-minute AI visibility audits. No pitch, no obligation just a straightforward look at how your brand currently shows up across AI tools, and where the gaps are.
Sources:
SEMrush zero-click data (34%, 43%, 93%)
Rand Fishkin's SparkToro experiment
Search Engine Land "AI doesn't discover new brands"
Ahrefs branded web mentions research
Webflow: Kevin Indig "visibility not raw referral traffic"
Phocuswire Sam Weston / 80 DAYS