Artificial intelligence is writing your brand story in real time, forcing marketing leaders to face a choice: either proactively control the narrative or cede the conversation to algorithms and aggressive competitors. From startups to global giants, brands broadly fall into three categories: those that fear invisibility in the digital world, those eager to ensure information accuracy, and those that still doubt AI has produced any substantial impact. Regardless of which camp they belong to, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) face a formidable task.

Today, buyers no longer rely on brand websites or traditional search bars to research purchasing decisions. Instead, they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude: "Who can be trusted?" The question is: does your brand appear in those answers?

Recently, in an SEO industry community I lead, I asked communications leaders about their views on AI visibility. 80% of respondents said they are actively experimenting with generative engine optimization (GEO) strategies, but only 20% have integrated it into the core of their communications strategy. This gap precisely reveals the current state of brand discovery.

From media relations to machine relations

CMOs experimenting with GEO are adapting to a new audience: machines. Because AI engines prioritize credibility, the paid media outcomes that once earned headlines can now equally earn AI citations. Treating machine relations as a core pillar of modern PR strategy is essential for winning in generative discovery, as brands must continuously feed content to the underlying models. Growth-stage companies are, for the first time, earning their way into AI answers through their own efforts, while enterprise brands must safeguard existing narratives against drift, decay, or hallucination erosion.

Most early GEO projects focus on a single simple question: does the brand appear in AI answers? But visibility is merely the entry ticket. The more critical question is: will buyers take action based on the answer. Visibility gets the brand mentioned, but verifiability gets the brand recommended.

Here are five steps CMOs should follow to close the gap:

1. Ask the machines what they think of you

Conduct a brand visibility audit using adversarial prompts that simulate the challenging questions buyers might ask. How do engines present your brand across different category, brand, and product prompts? At which narrative points do competitors dominate?

Profound, an AI visibility platform, found in analyzing overlapping domains across engines that citation overlap between engines is only 11%. This means a brand may dominate in ChatGPT yet be nearly invisible in Perplexity. Therefore, CMOs must test each ecosystem individually.

2. Provide authoritative content for machines

Paid media holds the largest share of AI citations. As public large language models replace traditional search, Gartner predicts that by 2027, PR and paid media budgets will grow threefold. Why? Because over 95% of links cited in AI answers come from non-paid sources, and Muck Rack's analysis of one million links shows that 89% of AI citations come directly from paid media.

AI engines trust what humans trust: facts, reviews, and third-party validation from machine-crawled sources such as news outlets, analyst reports, and digital communities. Today, every media placement serves a dual purpose: winning the trust of human readers while feeding the algorithms that cite it.

3. Leverage communities to amplify reach

Shared media builds the trust and authentic connections that engines value most. Reddit is currently the most-cited single source across major AI engines, driving 40% of AI answers—more than Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia combined.

Reddit excels at peer-to-peer conversation, where consumers hold enormous influence over brand trust. Take one of my clients, a well-known forensic psychologist, who hosted Reddit "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) sessions in subreddits like r/parenting and r/divorce, providing expert answers and practical advice to users. This built a loyal community following and a level of trust that money cannot buy.

4. Optimize third-party profiles

Clean up your brand's footprint on third-party platforms. Platforms like Clutch, Crunchbase, G2, and Wikipedia serve as the foundational seed data for large language models to understand brand entities. Wikipedia alone accounts for nearly half of ChatGPT's top citations. The bottom line: CMOs need to shift strategy from keyword stuffing to entity-anchored communications, making the brand, structured data, and executive expertise the most trusted citation sources for AI.

5. Answer questions immediately

Owned content must be built for machine extraction to drive brand discovery. Incorporate these four best practices into your marketing playbook:

  • Lead with core facts:Place the primary answer or definition within the first 40 words.
  • Increase factual density:Prioritize unique statistics, proprietary data, and clear statements over corporate jargon.
  • Build semantic associations:Tightly bind your brand name to the industry terms and categories you want to own.
  • Open crawl access:Ensure your website is crawlable. According to Nikhil Kolar of Microsoft AI, currently four out of five websites block AI bots and crawlers through overly restrictive robots.txt files, blocking OpenAI or Perplexity user agents.

Don't expect SEO to do this work. Research shows that 60% of URLs cited by major AI engines do not appear in the top 20 organic search results on Google or Bing for the same prompts. Brands that earn citations often build topical authority through parseable answers.

Unify the narrative, everywhere

Fragmented paid media undermines AI visibility. When large language models encounter inconsistent or contradictory information across trusted channels, they bypass your brand and cite competitors with more coherent narratives. Conversely, a consistent narrative across channels can turn AI engines into your most powerful advocates. We helped a biotech client go from zero visibility to zero-click visibility in AI engines by unifying the narrative, covering high-trust sources, and deep customer validation. Today, that brand ranks first or second in AI answers within its category.

Measure model share, not just share of voice

Forrester reports that 94% of B2B buyers use AI during the purchasing process, while Gartner finds that 67% of buyers prefer a representative-free journey. This autonomy gives CMOs a greater mission: AI visibility metrics can finally link PR outcomes to revenue, something traditional share-of-voice metrics cannot do. By combining traditional SOV tracking with model share, CMOs can assess competitive gaps across LLMs while correlating AI recommendations with pipeline velocity.

Own the answer

Although my survey revealed a significant gap in GEO adoption, a recent Semrush survey shows that only 22% of respondents have fully integrated traditional SEO with AI search efforts. For brands, this operational disconnect poses a major risk: invisibility and market misrepresentation.

CMOs: the answers about your brand are being assembled right now in the engines buyers are actively using. The 20% of pioneers who place machine relations at the core of their communications strategy will dominate their categories. The remaining 80% will only read about them.