Neville Doyle.
Neville Doyle, Strategic Client Partner, Ideally
Ask ChatGPT a question about your category and the answer you get back has already been decided. Stitched together from sources the model trusts, weighted by credibility, and largely blind to anything you paid to place.
Recent Muck Rack analysis found 94% of citations in generative AI tools come from non-paid media. Earned coverage alone accounts for 82%. Paid is a rounding error in the systems that increasingly determine which brands show up and which don't.
Gartner predicts PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027 as AI eats traditional search. That is a structural shift in where attention lives, and most comms teams are not built for it.
This is the territory of GEO, generative engine optimisation. The practice of showing up inside AI-generated answers. The mechanics are simpler than the acronym suggests: answer engines reward sources that are credible, citable and referenced consistently across the web. A brand running a steady programme of proprietary research and thought leadership in quality outlets is building exactly the signal GEO rewards.
Every piece of credible coverage now does two jobs. It reaches today's reader, and it trains tomorrow's answer engine.
The research bottleneck has to go
PR has lived with the same problem for years. The research that gives a story real weight takes too long, costs too much, and can't be run often enough to sustain a programme. A bespoke study runs six weeks and a multiple of what most comms budgets can absorb on repeat. So research gets used once or twice a year, or never. Stories that could have landed a quarter ago sit in someone's drafts.
That model is finished. When 94% of AI citations come from earned media, the speed at which a brand can produce credible, attributable data becomes the new battleground for attention. And the constraint has shifted. Overnight, nationally representative research now costs a fraction of what it did. What limits a comms programme today is imagination and editorial judgement, not budget or timeline.
From single study to storytelling engine
Most brands still run one big study a year and call it a thought leadership programme. The brands that will win the GEO era are moving to something different: a storytelling engine built on three layers.
Planned tentpoles, quarterly research-led stories that anchor brand narratives. Reactive quick dips, fast-turn surveys tied to live moments in culture or the category, the stat that lets a brand step into a conversation already happening. And repeatable output, a consistent flow of evidence-backed stories that compounds over time.
Each study produces a new citeable asset. Over twelve months, a brand running three to four research-led stories per quarter builds a source library AI systems will draw from for years.
What it looks like in practice
Betty's Burgers built its Madman Burger to be a talking point, hot enough that customers signed a waiver before eating it. The launch campaign was designed to land from day one. But the team wanted a second wave, so they layered in a research moment through Ideally: a three-question overnight survey of 1,000 Australians, not about the burger, but about the appetite for extreme food challenges. The insight came back clean and pitchable. One in three Australians say they're eager to take on an extreme food challenge. That stat moved the story from product news into a behavioural conversation, and the campaign landed a five-minute prime-time segment on the Today Show, hosts taking on the challenge live with branded product in frame.
Clemenger BBDO's Fast Feels runs on the same thinking at a different cadence: real-time consumer reaction to cultural moments, turned into sharp public commentary. From the Tesla backlash to election day to surprise rate calls, it lets the agency respond to the market with evidence rather than opinion, and it has kept them in the conversation week after week.
The same play is opening up in slow-moving, low-interest categories. When consumers are as likely to ask ChatGPT as Google for a new telco, insurer or bank, first-mover advantage is real. The brands retraining how AI agents consider and rank them now will set the defaults everyone else fights against.
The choice in front of comms teams
The brands that win the GEO era will look more like newsrooms than campaign teams. A story every few weeks. A point of view backed by data. A growing library of evidence that earns coverage today and feeds the answer engines buyers will rely on tomorrow.
Every survey not run is a citation a competitor claims instead. The window to build that footprint is open, but it won't stay open. The brands setting up their storytelling engines this year will be the default answers in their category by the next.