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Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Guide

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

Media monitoring helps organizations stay informed about what’s being said across online news, print, broadcast, podcasts, and other media channels. Whether you're tracking brand mentions, measuring PR performance, monitoring competitors, or identifying emerging trends, our expert guides, best practices, and industry insights will help you build a smarter media monitoring strategy and make more informed communications decisions.

Discover expert media monitoring guides, best practices, and industry insights to track brand mentions, monitor competitors, and stay ahead of the news.

Media Monitoring: Guides, Best Practices & Industry Insights

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

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

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

AI adoption is no longer the challenge—trusted context is. Most organizations have AI tools, but many still rely on disconnected, stale, or unverified data, limiting the quality and trustworthiness of AI-generated outputs. Meltwater MCP brings trusted, real-time intelligence into AI assistants.

Your Best Context is Already in the Room

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

Crisis communications used to be something organizations prepared for as an exception a rare, high-stakes moment when an unexpected event might spin out of control, causing untold damage to the brand. At Meltwater Summit 2026, held in New York earlier this year, speakers made it clear that this mindset is outdated.

Today, communications professionals face ever present reputational risk. It can emerge from a Reddit thread, a geopolitical flashpoint, a synthetic video, a misunderstood legal filing, a polarized social issue, a customer community, or a narrative that is surreptitiously being shaped by inauthentic actors. 

The modern comms team’s job is to understand these threats better, align earlier, and respond with clarity.

As McKenna Kelley, Content and Media Manager at Jabil, put it during her session on real-time crisis monitoring, “When I say crisis, sometimes I’m talking about those really bad things that can happen, but sometimes it’s just sensitive topics that we need to be aware of, or things that are impactful to our brand. It’s not always that the house is on fire.”

That broader definition of crisis ran through the event. Here is what we learned.

1. Crisis monitoring has to match how people actually talk

2. The best crisis response may be preventing the crisis altogether

3. Speed matters, but clarity matters more

5. Evidence-based communication is becoming the new crisis standard

6. Human tone still matters, especially when trust is damaged

7. Crisis communicators need to size the moment

8. Protecting the comms team is part of crisis readiness

FAQ - Crisis communications in the AI era

One of the clearest lessons from Summit was that organizations cannot monitor for risk using only the language they use internally.

How is your brand actually being talked about online by real people? It may not be the way that your internal team talks about your brand.

For global companies, that means thinking beyond English-language keywords and official brand terms. Jabil operates in more than 25 countries, and Kelley explained that employees, community members and stakeholders may discuss the company in local languages, with misspellings, old brand names, slang, or even without naming the company at all.

Her advice: build monitoring around the real-world language of stakeholders, not just the corporate vocabulary of the brand. That includes local-language keywords, common misspellings, old brand terms, proximity searches and offline intelligence from people on the ground.

“Lots of things are online,” Kelley said, “but sometimes you do still have to talk to people in order to inform your crisis monitoring.”

The insight is simple but important: if your search terms do not reflect the way people actually talk, your crisis plan may never see the crisis coming.

Several speakers emphasized that crisis communications is about more than what happens after something breaks. The relationships and systems that allow teams to spot issues early and prevent them from escalating are also important. 

Kelley shared a Jabil example involving recurring media coverage around California Worker Adjustment and Retraining (WARN) notices. The notices were being interpreted by reporters as layoffs, even though employees were simply taking holiday time off. Her team used media monitoring to show the issue, then worked with HR and legal to rewrite the notices so they clearly explained what was happening.

This successfully caused the recurring coverage to stop.

The key is stakeholder trust,” Kelley said. “Many crises can be prevented, or at least mitigated if PR teams or comms teams know more sooner.

That same theme appeared in Kiki Cloutier’s session on Turning Crisis into Opportunity. Cloutier, Director of Communications and Public Affairs at the Police Association of Ontario, said real-time alerts help her team identify issues before they spiral.

“As soon as stories broke, we were there,” she said. “We have our key phrases already loaded in for both media and social media. Our team is notified, so this allows us really to spot the issues early.”

Crisis readiness, in other words, extends beyond the communications team, and depends on trust with legal, HR, executives, regional teams, member organizations, sales, government affairs and frontline teams. The earlier those groups share context, the more options communicators have.

Across the Summit, speakers challenged the idea that the fastest brand always wins.

In a session on narrative attacks and disinformation, Wasim Khaled, CEO and co-founder of Blackbird.AI, warned that moving too quickly without understanding the dynamics of a situation can make things worse.

Just being loudest and fastest will get you into more trouble sometimes,

Khaled said. The goal, he argued, is to understand the signals, predict what may happen next and act “with the maximum amount of understanding.”

Dan Brahmy, co-founder and CEO of Cyabra, made a similar point in the “JARVIS” session. Using Iron Man’s AI assistant as a metaphor, he argued that brands need a calm voice in their ear before they react.

“He doesn’t just jump into it. He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t react first,” Brahmy said. “He acknowledges the situation, he understands, and only then he jumps into this.”

That is a useful model for crisis teams. Before issuing a statement, replying to a post, escalating to executives or correcting the record publicly, teams need to know what they are looking at.

Is this a real groundswell or manufactured amplification? Is it a bot attack, a customer issue, a media issue, an employee issue, a legal issue, or all of the above? Is the conversation still contained, or has it crossed into mainstream awareness? Is responding likely to clarify the issue, or amplify it?

Kelley suggested that before communicating internally about a crisis, communications professionals should ask four questions:

“How you communicate in a crisis can be just as important as what you’re actually communicating,” she said.

The Summit’s crisis communications conversations repeatedly came back to AI, synthetic media and narrative manipulation.

In the “Trust Under Pressure” panel, Radhika Shah-Meade, Chief of Staff at Blackbird.AI, framed the new challenge clearly: 

The question is no longer, what are people saying about us? The question is, what is real, what is being manufactured, what is moving and what should we do before our response makes it worse?

Khaled described narrative attacks as coordinated attempts to shape public perception. These attacks may use inauthentic coordination, generative AI, deepfakes or agentic swarms to push a narrative toward communities likely to act on it.

Charlie Baldwin, SVP, Insights and Analytics, North America Lead at WE Communications, warned that comms teams cannot treat artificial amplification as harmless simply because it is artificial.

“In some ways, it almost doesn’t matter,” Baldwin said, “because the perception is the reality, and that a swarm of bots can create the semblance of a true public groundswell.”

That means communicators need to evaluate both authenticity and impact. A fake account can still influence a real person, a synthetic video can still trigger genuine outrage, and a manufactured narrative can still create employee anxiety, investor concern, customer confusion or regulatory attention.

Michael McLoughlin, Senior Director, Corporate, External and Legal Affairs at Microsoft, described trust as something that is now “continuously computed, happening in almost real time.”

That changes the operating model for comms teams because trust can no longer be measured only through periodic surveys or post-crisis analysis. It must be monitored, interpreted and protected continuously.

A major Summit takeaway was that communications leaders need to bring evidence into the crisis room quickly.

Baldwin said every organization should be able to produce “within 30 minutes, a very clear, comprehensive, really importantly, non defensive, evidence based accounting of a situation.”

That does not mean waiting for perfect certainty, but rather grounding decisions in the best available facts: what is being said, who is saying it, where it is spreading, whether amplification looks authentic, which stakeholders are affected, and what level of business risk is emerging.

McLoughlin summarized the decision-making model as “both data driven… but also principle led.”

Data,” he said, “is the foundation for all these decisions that we make. But at the end of the day, we have to bring the data together with our principles in a way that creates clarity.

This is especially important when issues touch politics, social values, geopolitics, employees, customers or public trust. In those moments, data alone is not enough, and organizations also need pre-agreed principles that help them act consistently under pressure.

Technology may help teams detect issues faster, but speakers repeatedly emphasized that trust repair is human work.

In the session on reputation in real time, Heather Malec, Senior Director, Global Marketing Communications at Kaseya, shared lessons from navigating scrutiny and rebuilding trust in online communities, especially Reddit. Her warning was direct: “You can’t fake trust repair.”

She explained that when leadership asks comms to “fix this reputation problem,” there is often a deeper operational issue that must be addressed first. Communications can clarify, contextualize and humanize, but it cannot paper over unresolved stakeholder pain.

Heather also cautioned against defaulting to polished corporate language in community spaces. “A corporate response often doesn’t work,” she said. 

We needed to be human and actually show that we cared… We weren’t just there to paper it over.

Cloutier made a similar argument from the perspective of high-stakes public-sector-adjacent communications. When a crisis breaks, she said, “clear, consistent and empathetic communications really do shine.”

In moments of scrutiny, audiences are not only evaluating the message. They are evaluating whether the organization understands the concern, respects the audience and is willing to act.

Not every negative post is a crisis, not every spike requires a statement, and not every angry comment deserves escalation.

Cloutier called crisis communications “a sizing exercise.” She described moments when a colleague might say something is a crisis, but the reality is “there’s one tweet online, by someone who has 12 followers.”

Over-response can amplify an issue, and under-response can allow misinformation to spread. The communicator’s role is to understand magnitude, audience, credibility, velocity and potential harm, then advise accordingly.

This is where data and experience work together because, as Cloutier put it, “while this is a science, it’s also an art. So really do trust your gut.”

Kelley echoed that balance: “Data is so important… but as Gwyneth Paltrow said yesterday, I would also add your intuition is important.”

One of the more human insights from Summit was that crisis work takes an emotional toll.

Heather from Kaseya spoke candidly about teams that spend day after day reading negative commentary.

If you have a team that’s focused on your crisis communications or your reputation, they feel it personally,” she said. “The brand is not you.

Cloutier offered a similar reminder at the start of her session, encouraging communicators to keep something grounding nearby for difficult days. “Behind every crisis, there’s a comms person hiding underneath the table,” she joked,  a line that captured the pressure many communicators feel.

Crisis plans often include escalation paths, holding statements and stakeholder maps. They should also include sustainable team practices: rotations, breaks, role clarity, leadership support and permission to step away from the feed.

The clearest message from Meltwater Summit was that crisis communications has become a continuous intelligence discipline.

The new playbook looks something like this:

Monitor how stakeholders actually speak. 

Build cross-functional trust before issues break. 

Use data to separate signal from noise. 

Understand whether a narrative is authentic, manipulated or both. 

Communicate with evidence, empathy and clarity. 

Or, as Shah-Meade summarized during the disinformation panel:

Trust is no longer assumed. It’s something that organizations have to actively detect, protect and defend.

In 2026, crisis comms is about building the intelligence, relationships and credibility that make the organization ready before the moment arrives.

1. How has crisis communications changed in 2026?

How Modern Brands Can Detect, Navigate, and Defuse Reputation Risks

8 Lessons on Crisis Comms from Meltwater Summit 2026

At Meltwater Summit 2026, held in New York City at the beginning of May, over 1,400 communications leaders, marketers, technologists and brand strategists gathered to inspire and learn from each other. Across almost 40 insightful sessions, a broad range of topics were covered, but one big question was front and center for the entire event: what does PR and communications look like in the AI era?

When the event was over, one message came through loud and clear; AI is now reshaping how brands are discovered, how reputations are built, how crises unfold, how audiences consume information, and how communicators measure impact.

The future of communications belongs to organizations that combine AI-powered intelligence with human judgment, creativity and trust.

Here are the biggest themes and insights that emerged from Meltwater Summit 2026.

2. Authority is Becoming the Most Valuable Communications Currency

3. AI is Turning Communications Data into Strategic Intelligence

4. Communications Leaders are Becoming Business Strategists

5. Those Who Adapt Fastest Will Gain Advantage

Perhaps the clearest takeaway from the event was that communicators now have two audiences: people and AI systems.

Palmer Hutchins, VP Marketing at G2, used the analogy of finding a book in a library to explain how search behavior has changed: 

The librarian would take you to a row and say, here's the historical fiction row. Go find what you need. Now we've changed that. The librarian is gone. We've got a personal AI assistant who's saying, ‘Here are the three books you need based off that prompt.’

Gina Kleiner, Senior Director, Product Marketing at LinkedIn,explained what that means for brand discovery: 

LLMs are getting so good at answering users' questions that 60% of searches end in that chat. So that means people do not need to click off of that chat window to get more information.

For PR professionals, this change puts them at the heart of the customer journey. Success is no longer measured solely by whether a journalist covers your story or whether a prospect clicks a link, so brands now need to ensure they are represented accurately inside the answers generated by AI systems themselves.

LinkedIn's Gina Kleiner & Meltwater's Chris Hackney in conversation at Meltwater Summit 2026

If the SEO era rewarded keywords and backlinks, the AI era increasingly rewards expertise and authority.

One of the clearest messages from Summit was that AI models appear to prioritize credible experts over corporate messaging alone. During Authority Wins: LinkedIn, UGC & the New Rules of AI Search Visibility, Meltwater Chief Product Officer Chris Hackney shared research analyzing 9.5 million LLM responses across major AI platforms.

Most of the citations, three quarters of them, came from the creators. Not necessarily giant influencers, these are domain-expertise individuals.

LinkedIn's Gina Kleiner explained why individual expertise wins out in LLM citations:

This person is creating content based on their unique expertise. That content is going to be prioritized by an LLM more than content on a similar theme that's posted by someone who doesn't have that credibility and that expertise in that given space.

The implication for communications teams is significant. Executive thought leadership, employee advocacy and subject-matter expertise are no longer just reputation-building activities. They are becoming discoverability strategies. 

Because AI systems increasingly determine which information gets surfaced, the brands that cultivate visible experts can build significant advantage over those that rely solely on corporate channels.

For years, communications teams have been measured by outputs: coverage volume, reach, frequency. But one of the clearest themes at Meltwater Summit was that AI is accelerating a shift toward something much more valuable: intelligence.

Speaking during Modernizing Communications: Building for a New Era, Sara Myles, Director of Communications Measurements and Insights at McDonald's, argued that data is becoming one of the communications function's most important strategic assets.

It moves us from comms as a way to amplify accomplishments, to using data as a strategic advantage.

As AI makes it easier to analyze vast volumes of media coverage, social conversation, customer feedback and market signals, communications teams are increasingly able to surface insights that influence business decisions, not just communications decisions.

Myles reinforced this point with a challenge to the industry:

"This is our time. This is the call to action to make the case for data. Don't be using these tools without data."

That perspective echoed throughout the Summit. AI's value isn't simply in helping teams create more content. Its real potential lies in helping organizations understand what customers, journalists, creators and stakeholders are saying—and what those conversations mean for the business.

As Meltwater’s Nate Pallen noted during Mastering LLM Visibility:

What people say about you online matters more than what you say about yourself.

In the AI era, communications leaders have a unique opportunity. They sit at the intersection of reputation, culture, customers and market perception. With the right data and AI-powered insights, they can move beyond storytelling and become strategic advisors to the business.

Another recurring theme was the evolution of the communications function itself.

During Modernizing Communications: Building for a New Era, Sarah Elizabeth Graham, Head of Comms and Experiential Marketing for Patreon argued that communicators need to think beyond traditional outputs and focus on business outcomes:

Comms people should be some of the most influential people in an organization because we know what's happening across every single facet of the business. 

The session repeatedly returned to a central idea, that communications teams must become more strategic, measurable and tied to organizational performance.

Sara Myles of McDonald's described how her career began in analytics and intelligence rather than traditional media relations:

While my peers were packing press kits or helping call press, I was helping Starbucks understand what was being said about them in the public domain so that they could shape its strategy.

That perspective reflects a broader trend across the industry. AI is generating more data, more signals and more opportunities to connect communications activity directly to business impact. There’s a real opportunity to rebuild the communications department as a strategic intelligence function, rather than simply a content production team. 

Throughout Summit, speakers emphasized that AI is not replacing communications professionals, but rather changing the rules under which they operate. One statistic shared during Beyond the Algorithm: Mastering Your Brand's Identity in the Age of AI captured the pace of change:

According to the experts at McKinsey today, 50% of people use AI search, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, to look up products and find brands.

The technologies will continue to develop, consumers will adapt their search behavior, and media consumption will evolve. 

The brands that come out ahead won't necessarily be the ones with the biggest budgets or the largest communications teams, but those who are smart about adapting their strategies in the face of these changes. 

The Meltwater Blog

8 Lessons on Crisis Comms from Meltwater Summit 2026

Five Things we Learned About AI-Era PR and Communications at Meltwater Summit 2026

How Digital PR Affects AI Visibility and Search Outcomes

How to Create a Crisis Communication Plan (Step-by-Step)

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

PR Measurement Guide: 15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

AI in Public Relations: 4 Ways PR Teams Gain Strategic Insight

Earned Media Value: A Practical Guide for PR Teams

From Coverage to Insight: How AI Assistants Turn Media Mentions into Strategic Recommendations

Top Crisis Communication Tools 2026: Equip Your Team to Handle Any Challenge

How Polarization Is Reshaping Public Relations in 2026

What Is Crisis Communication? Plan, Examples, Strategy