Buyers no longer research purchasing decisions on a brand's website or in a traditional search bar. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude who is trustworthy. The question is whether you are in that answer — which makes AI visibility a CMO problem.
This summarizes a guest perspective by Jennifer Schenberg, CEO at PenVine, published by Marketing Dive.
When Schenberg polled communications leaders in an SEO industry group she leads, 80% said they were actively experimenting with Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), but only 20% had made it core to their communications strategy. That gap defines the state of brand discovery today.
CMOs experimenting with GEO are adapting to a new audience: the machines. Because AI engines prioritize credibility, the same earned-media results that once won headlines now win citations. Growth-stage companies earn their way into AI answers for the first time; enterprise brands defend established narratives from drift, decay and hallucination.
Most early GEO programs asked one question: does the brand show up? But visibility is table stakes. The better question is whether buyers act on the response. Visibility gets a brand mentioned; validation gets it recommended.
Run a brand visibility audit using adversarial prompting — the skeptical questions a buyer would actually ask. How do engines represent you across category, brand and product prompts? Where do competitors own the narrative?
When AI visibility platform Profound analyzed overlapping domains across AI engines, it found only 11% citation overlap. A brand can dominate in ChatGPT while remaining virtually invisible in Perplexity, so each ecosystem needs its own test.
Earned media represents the lion's share of AI citations. Gartner predicts 2x growth in PR and earned media budgets by 2027 as public LLMs replace traditional search. More than 95% of links cited in AI answers come from nonpaid sources, and Muck Rack's million-link analysis found 89% of AI citations come directly from earned media.
AI engines trust what humans trust: facts, reviews and third-party validation in the sources machines crawl — news outlets, analyst reports, digital communities. Every placement now does double duty, earning reader trust and feeding the algorithms that cite it.
Shared media builds what engines reward most. Reddit is currently the single most-cited source across major AI engines, driving 40% of AI answers — more than Google, YouTube and Wikipedia combined. For one client, a forensic psychologist, hosting AMAs in subreddits like r/parenting and r/divorce built expert credibility and community trust that money cannot buy.
Clutch, Crunchbase, G2 and Wikipedia serve as foundational seed data for how an LLM understands a business as an entity. Wikipedia alone accounts for up to half of ChatGPT's top citations. The shift is from keyword stuffing to entity-anchored communication, making the brand, its structured data and its executive expertise the most trusted sources available to cite.
Owned content must be built for machine extraction:
Do not count on SEO to cover this: studies show 60% of URLs cited across major AI engines did not rank in the top 20 organic results for the same prompt.
Fragmented earned media sabotages AI visibility. When LLMs encounter inconsistent or contradictory messaging across trusted channels, they bypass the brand and cite a competitor with a more consistent story.
Forrester reports 94% of B2B buyers use AI during the purchasing process, and Gartner finds 67% prefer a rep-free journey. That autonomy lets AI visibility metrics tie PR results to revenue in a way share of voice never could. Integrating traditional SOV tracking with share of model lets CMOs evaluate competitor gaps across LLMs while connecting AI recommendations to pipeline velocity.
A Semrush survey found only 22% of respondents have fully integrated traditional SEO and AI search efforts — an operational disconnect that shows up as invisibility and misrepresentation.
For the mechanics of concept-to-source association, see Entity SEO: AI Search Looks for the Source of a Concept, Not a Keyword; for platform-level choices, see Reddit or YouTube for AI Visibility; for measurement standards, see IAB Publishes AI Visibility Measurement Standards.
Earned media. More than 95% of links cited in AI answers come from nonpaid sources, and Muck Rack's million-link analysis found 89% come directly from earned media.
Yes. Profound found only 11% citation overlap between engines, so a brand can dominate ChatGPT while being invisible in Perplexity.
A measure of how often a brand is recommended inside each LLM, used alongside share of voice to connect AI recommendations to pipeline velocity.
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