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Generative AI is everywhere now. You see it in content, campaigns, customer experiences, and even internal workflows. It promises speed, scale, and efficiency, but there’s a harder question sitting underneath all that progress; Do your audiences actually trust it?

Trust in the Age of AI: What Consumers Really Think About AI Generated Content

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIN to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?
The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

What Is Data Analytics? [Beginner’s Guide 2023]
How can I grow my business? 
How do customers interact with my newly launched product?
How do I increase the productivity of my employees?
How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?
We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.

Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.

Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

Social Media Management Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

If your brand lives online, so does your reputation, and it’s always one post, review, or news cycle away from a PR crisis. That’s why PR monitoring is a necessity. You need to know who’s talking about you and what they’re saying so you can take quick action, for better or worse.

How to Choose the Right PR Monitoring Platform

PR monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing what is being said about your brand, company, or key people across news outlets, social media, blogs, and other public channels.

PR monitoring helps you measure public perception, spot potential issues early, and evaluate the impact of your PR efforts. It sounds a lot like media monitoring and social listening, but there are a few nuances to note:

PR monitoring focuses specifically on how your brand is being perceived in the public eye, often combining elements of media monitoring and social listening.

Media monitoring tracks mentions of your brand across news outlets, blogs, and press channels. 

Social listening gathers insights from platforms like X, Instagram, and Reddit to understand what people are saying in real time.

PR monitoring brings these together to give a broader view of your brand reputation. 

The key goals are to track sentiment, measure media coverage, and catch early signs of a crisis so you can respond quickly and strategically.

PR monitoring is important because with the non-stop news cycle and algorithm-driven social feeds, brand perception can shift overnight. Brands need a constant finger on their pulse so they can manage their images proactively. PR monitoring can help by protecting brand reputation, tracking media mentions, measuring PR campaign effectiveness, real-time crisis alerts, and competitive benchmarking.

Your reputation is your most valuable asset. PR monitoring is a crucial part of brand reputation management, helping you understand how your brand is viewed by the public, media, and stakeholders. That way, you can reinforce the positives and address the negatives before they spread.

Your brand can show up anywhere – podcasts, blog posts, press releases, news articles, and viral social content. Monitoring lets you see where and how you’re being mentioned, giving you a complete picture of your digital presence.

PR campaign impressions are easy to track, but they’re only part of the story. PR monitoring digs deeper so you can see which campaigns gained traction, how they were received, and what kind of media coverage they actually generated. You can use real data to refine your strategy and prove ROI.

Real-time crisis alerts and damage control

The faster you spot a brewing issue, the faster you can contain it. Monitoring tools flag spikes in negative sentiment, unusual activity, or damaging coverage, giving you a head start on damage control before a story spirals.

What you monitor for yourself, you can monitor for competitors. See how your brand compares to others in your industry on media reach, sentiment, and number of mentions. These side-by-side insights can help you better spot trends, gaps, and opportunities.

TIP: Don't miss our free guide to Mastering Media Relations for Crisis Communications for more information on how to monitor your brand reputation and reach out to journalists that matter when a crisis hits!

PR monitoring tools sweep public data sources (e.g., social media, blogs, press wires, forums), searching for mentions of your brand, products, or competitors. It pulls this data into a platform to give you a centralized view of your media coverage, including PR key performance indicators (KPIs) like:

Share of voice (how much you’re mentioned compared to competitors)

Sentiment (how people felt about your message)

Message pull-through (how often your messaging appears in coverage)

AI tools take that raw PR data and distill it into usable insights. For example, natural language processing helps you understand whether all that chatter is praise, sarcasm, complaints, or something else. Machine learning models surface anomalies, like a sudden jump in a niche forum, so you can act accordingly.

In the past, PR pros had to search for, collect, and compile this data manually. Today, automated tools provide broad, high-speed coverage across multiple channels. There’s some manual setup involved, but then you can collect insights and get real-time alerts automatically.

PR media monitoring is largely driven by technology. Here are some of the top tools that make PR monitoring a faster, more efficient process.

Meltwater’s AI-powered media intelligence suite provides a single source of truth across billions of sources and data points. PR pros can monitor for an unlimited number of keywords, then get real-time insights and alerts wherever those terms show up. 

Content breadth: Meltwater monitors mentions on all major social platforms, print sources, broadcast, and other media such as blogs, review sites, and podcasts

Sentiment analysis: understand the sentiment behind a message surge so you can be better prepared to address it

Real-time alerts: Be alerted to spikes and surges so you can spring into action quickly and mitigate crises early

GenAI Lens: offers visibility into how LLM models are representing your company

Get in touch to watch a product demo and find out more!

PR pros who are looking for extensive PR monitoring, including LLM coverage. Meltwater also eliminates the need to have multiple different tools for PR activities, so it's ideal for teams looking to consolidate efforts and save time.

AI technology analyzes the data to automatically calculate share of voice, consumer sentiment, media exposure, social media mentions, and other KPIs. Overviews let you quickly grasp essential details, with the option to dig several layers deeper into what you want to know.

When spikes in conversations occur, Meltwater spells out what those spikes mean so you can see what’s driving interest. 

See how easy Meltwater makes PR monitoring! Just click here and fill out the form below to request a demo.

Google Alerts is among the most simplistic media monitoring public relations tools. You can set up alerts for any keyword, brand, or topic, then get an email digest of all the places where that term has appeared each day.

PRs just getting started with media monitoring. Google Alerts offers a great introduction to the process and helps you get a sense of where your brand is showing up.  

Mention (which has been acquired by Agorapulse) lets you monitor any term or brand on social media or the internet. It reviews over a billion data sources daily and gives you a rundown of all the places where your keyword shows up. You can also grab data from up to two years in the past to see how mentions have evolved over time.

Assisted query creation: for accurate and precise results

Customizable alerts: get alerts relevant to your needs so you can better strategize and execute fast responses

Identify key influencers: discover the voices driving the conversation

Mention has an Enterprise Suite starting at $599

Mention is well suited to PR pros and brand managers looking for actionable insights and contextual analysis on brand mentions, that is easily shareable with multiple stakeholders.

Awario focuses specifically on brand mentions. It monitors multiple corners of the web, including popular social media platforms, blogs, and news sites, crawling billions of pages daily. You’ll receive a notification when someone mentions your brand.

Always-on monitoring: be the first to know when conversations impacting your brand occur

Extensive analytics: track sentiment, top influencers, reach and more

Multi-language support: track mentions in any language

Awario has three different plans: Starter, Pro, and Enterprise

Teams that require wider language coverage for PR monitoring and are looking for deep analytics to help determine the best course of action.

Awario also helps distinguish between meaningful mentions and filler noise, so you only see the mentions that might affect your brand image or PR strategy. And as with similar tools, you can apply this media monitoring to your competitors.

Perceptions can change faster than your home page loads, but real-time insights help you stay ahead of a story instead of scrambling to catch up. Here’s how PR monitoring works, top tools, and how you can do it effectively.

What Is PR Monitoring? Tools, Tips & Benefits Explained

2025 saw rebrands from three major brands — Cracker Barrel, HBO Max, and Jaguar — but which one got the biggest buzz from online audiences? We used our consumer intelligence solution, Explore+, to dig into the data. 

What were the biggest corporate rebrands of 2025?

Which corporate rebrand got the biggest buzz in 2025?

Cracker Barrel, HBO Max, and Jaguar had three of the biggest corporate rebrands of 2025. First, Jaguar launched its rebrand late in 2024 — complete with a new typeface, color palette, and logos — which continued to generate buzz into 2025. Next, the streamer formerly known as HBO Now (and then HBO Max and then Max) re-rebranded as HBO Max on July 9. Finally, on August 19, Cracker Barrel announced its rebranded diner design, menus, and logo, removing the “Old Timer” character leaning on a barrel and leaving only the chain’s name. The announcement sparked backlash from conservative groups in the US, leading Cracker Barrel to scrap the new logo.

From January 1 to November 15, 2025, social media users mentioned the Cracker Barrel rebrand about 351,000 times, significantly more than they discussed Jaguar’s rebrand (about 43,700 mentions) or HBO Max’s (about 40,000 mentions). Social media discussions about the Cracker Barrel rebrand also generated significantly higher levels of engagement, peaking at about 7.8 million in July 2025 alone. 

However, the conversation around Cracker Barrel has one important caveat: Much of it was generated by bots, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. As Meltwater Chief Product Officer Chris Hackney recently told Marketing Brew, bots are now a part of the digital landscape brands are facing. “Are your customers listening to those narratives, and how do you react?” he said. “And at what speed can you react to put forward the narrative that you think is true and accurate for your brand?”

And unlike Cracker Barrel’s acute spike in mentions and engagement by far, our analysis found that discussions about HBO Max’s and Jaguar’s rebrands took place over longer periods of time. 

For example, HBO Max’s July 2025 rebrand was being discussed as early as April, when the platform, still known as Max, changed its brand colors. The following month, Warner Bros. Discovery announced the forthcoming name change. By early July, volume of and engagement with the discussion was at a three-month low, making for a seamless re-rebrand. Consumers were used to it before it happened, best illustrated by the Warner Bros. Discovery press release stating simply: “It's good to be Home.” Meanwhile, in summer 2025, there was a resurgence of discussion of Jaguar’s 2024 rebrand with announced changes in company leadership, highlighting how brand perception is ongoing, with multiple opportunities to clarify messaging and positioning.  

Rebrands are a long-term game requiring long-term, intentional engagement with audiences to get right. Phased or gradual changes can smoothen the process. Meanwhile, dramatic spikes in conversation and controversy don’t always translate into genuine engagement. In the AI-age, bots are a constant threat, needing to be analyzed and assessed accordingly. Ultimately, rebrands are costly investments that can turn into expensive lessons. It’s imperative that brands test the waters, validate sentiment, and truly understand their audiences before committing.  

Which companies had the biggest corporate rebrands in 2025?

Cracker Barrel, HBO Max, and Jaguar had three of the biggest corporate rebrands of 2025. Jaguar launched its rebrand late in 2024 with a new typeface, color palette, and logos which generate into 2025. Max re-rebranded as HBO Max on July 9. Finally, on August 19, Cracker Barrel announced its rebranded diner design, menus, and logo. Backlash from conservative groups in the US led Cracker Barrel to scrap the new logo.

Which rebrand generated the most social media buzz in 2025?

Cracker Barrel generated the largest buzz on social media, with about 351,000 mentions of its rebrand. That is significantly more than mentions of Jaguar’s rebrand (about 43,700) or HBO Max’s (about 40,000). 

What was the sentiment around corporate rebrands in 2025?

Cracker Barrel had the highest positive sentiment at 16% and HBO Max had the lowest negative sentiment at 40%, showing that even when rebrands generate controversy or fluctuating buzz, certain measures of success can still be achieved.

Get the hard data on how much buzz your brand generates online. Tour our solution listening solution or fill out the form below for a free demo. 

2025’s Biggest Rebrands: Lessons from Cracker Barrel, HBO Max, and Jaguar

As generative AI reshapes how people research, learn, and make decisions, a new discipline is emerging: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Just as SEO helped brands get discovered on Google, GEO ensures they appear accurately and positively within AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. With millions of consumers now turning to generative engines instead of search engines, GEO is fast becoming essential for marketing and PR professionals looking to influence how their brand shows up in this new discovery layer, where conversations, not clicks, determine visibility.

What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

Why should marketing & insights teams care about GEO?

How does GEO work? Key mechanisms & signals

Which media sources to prioritize for GEO

What's the difference between GEO and SEO?

8 essentials of generative engine optimization

Increase your GEO readiness with Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of ensuring that AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Llama, etc., provide accurate, positive, and up-to-date information about your brand when users ask questions. These platforms are referred to as Generative Engines, Answer Engines, or Large Language Models (LLMs). They are increasingly used by consumers to research purchases and make decisions.

GEO is a way of making sure that AI platforms give people the right information about a company’s brand and products. 

For example, if a person asks ChatGPT: “What is a good family car for camping trips?” then the auto manufacturers would want ChatGPT to suggest their SUV models, and list the benefits. To make sure that happens, the auto brands need to use GEO.

GEO ensures your brand shows up correctly within these AI-generated responses.

The practice of GEO involves several steps, but it is mostly focused on creating, structuring, and publishing content in the best way to influence the responses given by AI Generative Engines. 

In this article we’ll go into the detail of how GEO works, why it’s important, and how you can use it to make sure your brand is featured positively in AI platforms.

Sometimes, generative engine optimization (GEO) is referred to as answer engine optimization (AEO). Learn more about the differences and similarities of GEO and AEO, and take a look at the best AEO tools.

For a long time marketers have been able to rely on the fact that consumers almost exclusively use Google to research buying decisions. So they have been able to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure their brand’s website appears in the organic search results, or use paid search advertising to buy ads on relevant search results. 

This is a highly effective way of targeting the right audience at the right time. But now things are changing.

LLMs aren't just another channel. They sit on top of this ecosystem. They synthesize everything into a single conversation.

Allie Konchar, Partner & Chief Client Officer, Omniscient

Changing user behavior: AI + conversational search

Increasingly, consumers are using tools like ChatGPT to research their buying decisions. Data from Meltwater’s 2026 Global Digital Report shows that ChatGPT.com is now the fifth most visited website on the web.

While search engines remain popular, many search queries now produce an AI generated summary that often provide enough information to divert users away from clicking through to websites, because their question has already been answered. McKinsey reports that around half of all Google search queries already produce AI generated summaries, and that number is increasing all the time. 

With conventional web search, consumers are performing research manually, trying to find trustworthy sources and sifting through information to reach the answers they seek. But with Generative Engines, the AI is performing the research automatically, using its existing base knowledge alongside supplemental information pulled from more recent online sources. A search engine shows users where to find answers, while a Generative Engine just gives them the answer. 

For marketers, the key takeaway is that few top-of-funnel consumers are visiting your website, because during the awareness phase their information needs are being met by Generative Engines. This makes it more difficult to move them down into the consideration phase. 

TIP: For more data around growing AI usage and online consumer behavior, download our 2026 Global Digital Report, featuring nearly 700 pages statistics to help inform your GEO strategies next year.

You already know that everybody is talking about AI, and all of your competitors are having the same discussions as you about what it means for their marketing strategy. Those who move decisively to implement GEO, ensuring their brands are represented clearly and positively in Generative Engines, will capture the largest share of those consumers who start their buying journey with an AI query. 

Those who ignore GEO will lose ground, as growing numbers of consumers turn from search engines to Generative Engines, the size of the audiences that can be reached through conventional search marketing will decrease. 

How do generative engines (LLMs) surface content?

It’s important to understand that while Generative Engines are based on similar technology, they all work a little differently. Broadly speaking they all use two different sources of knowledge to provide an answer to a query: 

<table class="table-primary alternate-color">
  <caption>How Generative Engines (LLMs) Surface Content</caption>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Generative Engine</th>
      <th>Primary Retrieval Method</th>
      <th>Sources Most Often Cited</th>
      <th>Sources Less Likely to Be Cited</th>
      <th>Notes on Behavior</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>ChatGPT</td>
      <td>Bing search + internal training data</td>
      <td>Reuters, AP News, Wikipedia, Encyclopedic sources</td>
      <td>Social media platforms (X/Twitter, Instagram)</td>
      <td>Prefers authoritative, neutral, structured sources with high trust signals.</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Google Gemini</td>
      <td>Google Search + YouTube + Knowledge Graph</td>
      <td>Reddit, YouTube, Google-indexed blogs</td>
      <td>X/Twitter</td>
      <td>Strongly favors user-generated content, community threads, and Google-owned properties.</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Perplexity</td>
      <td>Real-time web crawling + citation-first retrieval</td>
      <td>News publishers, reputable blogs, research papers</td>
      <td>Low-trust UGC</td>
      <td>Most transparent engine — always cites sources and updates in real time.</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Claude</td>
      <td>Internal training data + selected retrieval</td>
      <td>Academic sources, reputable news, long-form articles</td>
      <td>Short-form social media</td>
      <td>Prefers long-form text and well-structured explanatory content.</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Training data: All LLMs begin by being trained on a huge volume of existing content and data — we’re talking about dozens of terabytes (a terabyte is 1,000Gb). This training data comes from a wide variety of sources (including your website), and gives the LLM its base knowledge about the world. The LLM does not have any knowledge of anything that happened after its initial training. 

Live Web Search: To overcome the knowledge cut-off problem, the training data is supplemented with fresh information gathered from the internet. If the Generative Engine thinks that a user’s query would benefit from more up to date information than it already has, it fetches new content from trusted online sources and works that into its response. Google uses its own search engine to find fresh information, while ChatGPT uses various sources, including Microsoft Bing.

It’s also important to note that AI does not quote any of this content verbatim in its responses. Much like a human, it uses the information it has learned to inform its own answer, and that can include information from various sources, including the press, competitors, consumer reviews. So don’t expect it to always be on-message!

Another key point is that unlike a search engine, an LLM does not have an index of content which it searches to find answers. It would be impossible to search ChatGPT for all mentions of your brand — that’s simply not how it works. 

An LLM is more similar to a human brain, in that it has a lot of knowledge stored in patterns and relationships between words and concepts. It is extremely difficult, verging on impossible, to examine and understand the detail of an LLM’s learned knowledge because of the sheer scale and complexity; this is a challenge referred to as Black Box AI. 

But we do understand how Generative Engines work at a high level, and we can analyze the kind of responses they produce for relevant queries, which gives us insight into how we should optimize our content for increased visibility.

Tip: Learn more about the citation layer.

What content features improve GEO-visibility?

Bear in mind that when you’re optimizing content for Generative Engines, the goal is to write copy that is easier for AI to digest and incorporate into its responses.

Clarity: Avoid overly elaborate language. Do not use corporate-jargon. Keep it simple, professional, and to the point. Leave no room for ambiguity. 

Authority: Wherever possible back up your statements with data from reputable sources, quotes from experts or industry leaders, and reference-able proof points. 

Structure: Organize your pages well with clear titles, headings, and subheadings. Use heading tags (H1, H2, etc) correctly to specify the hierarchy of your content. 

Recency: AI platforms look for more recent information from trusted sources to supplement their base knowledge, so in both owned and earned media, aim to publish fresh content recently.

In many respects GEO shares principles with good SEO practice. If you write consistently high quality content which addresses the needs of your target audience, and structure it correctly on well designed, standards compliant web pages, you will succeed.

First you need to understand your starting point. Meltwater’s GenAI Lens is a tool that gives brands insight into how they are discussed by all major Generative Engines, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and Deepseek. 

With GenAI Lens you’ll be able to understand how your brand is already featured in LLMs, what source websites are used in those responses, and whether outdated or inaccurate information is being used. 

We know that LLMs pull content from the web, which they use to inform their responses. So whatever is said about your brand online will significantly affect how Generative Engines talk about your company. 

Start with your own website, this is the first place LLMs will look for information about your organization. But also focus on trusted, high authority third party sites like the mainstream news and specialist media within your industry, because these are the kinds of sources that LLMs will use. GenAI Lens can show you which websites the leading LLMS use to source information about your brand. 

Once you have a comprehensive audit of how your brand is currently portrayed online, you can perform a gap analysis against your desired messaging, and build a plan for how to reach that objective.

Tip: AI brand monitoring, AI media monitoring, and LLM monitoring will help you understand your online footprint. Learn how to track your LLM visibility and how to track LLM brand mentions.

An important difference between GEO and SEO is understanding how people search differently when using Generative Engines. Users interact conversationally with AI, and are likely to ask more complex questions in natural language, compared to simple keywords or short queries in a search engine. So it’s useful to get an idea of what kind of questions people will ask about your brand or industry, to help plan your GEO content.

Tip: Learn more about AI visibility for retail brands.

Unlike search engines, at present the leading Generative Engines do not share data on popular user queries, so it’s not easy to find out exactly what people are asking about your business. But you can look at popular keyword searches associated with your brand, and brainstorm the most likely questions people will ask Generative Engines. 

You can also use a social listening platform, like Meltwater Explore+ to analyze social media conversations around your brand and industry, to gain insight into common questions. Once you have mapped out all of the most likely questions people might ask, you can start creating content that answers those questions.

Tip: Learn how to connect social listening with generative engine optimization. 

Conventional SEO was built around search queries but GEO requires thinking in concepts, context, and authority — you need to focus on the intent of the query, rather than simply trying to match keywords. 

LLMs prioritize sources that provide comprehensive, well-structured, and contextually rich content. Focus your content strategy on:

Educational depth: Long-form resources that answer questions end-to-end. Publish explainers, FAQs, and data-backed insights that answer “how” and “why.”

Credibility signals: Citations, quotes, and data from reputable sources (analyst studies, thought leadership, or trusted media).

Rich media: Generative Engines pull information from videos and images as well as text content, so make use of varied content formats. 

Consistency across channels: LLMs learn from media, social, and owned content together; ensure your brand narratives are aligned across them.

The key thing is to ensure that your content is genuinely helpful in answering those questions you mapped out. If your content is too focused on sales messages, it’s less likely to be used by the LLMs.

TIP: Discover innovative AI-generated content examples to enhance your digital strategy.

You can optimize the content published on your website and owned channels, but LLMs also source information from trusted third party websites. That means digital PR has a key role to play in ensuring your brand is featured in high authority earned media, including news features, expert comment from your spokespeople, product reviews, and any other kind of brand story traditionally generated through a media relations campaign.

Tip: Learn more about the importance of earned media for GEO and about PR Pitch GEO optimization.

The tricky part is that unlike advertising, which can tell exciting and attention grabbing stories, PR professionals are limited to working only with the facts. But while you cannot always control the outcome of media outreach activity, ensuring that PR and GEO are aligned will help increase the volume of third party sources that feature the right messaging.

Tip: Learn how GEO is reshaping PR strategies.

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