Nobody puts PR in the corner
PR builds the conditions under which people choose to believe: through conversations that earn trust rather than demand attention.
Right now, the communications industry is having an urgent conversation about Generative Engine Optimisation. When someone asks an AI system a question relevant to your organisation or your field, do you surface? Are you cited accurately? Are you the reference the machine reaches for?
The question has sent a wave of anxiety through communications, marketing and digital teams. Specialists are being hired. Technical frameworks are being built. And PR, the discipline that has been answering this question for thirty years without calling it GEO, is once again being invited to contribute to a conversation it started.
GEO did not create new requirements. It made existing ones machine-readable for the first time. Authority, cited by credible third parties, sustained across communities and channels over time. Not as a campaign or moment, but as a consistent presence which has been earned. These are not SEO attributes. They are not content marketing attributes. They are the outputs of a discipline that has spent thirty years building the conditions for earned belief.
The organisations currently hiring technical GEO specialists to solve what is structurally a reputation and credibility problem are making the same category error that has been made, repeatedly, for thirty years. To understand why, it helps to see the pattern.
A familiar pattern
When I started out in PR, in the early 1990s, I joined the APG at a specific moment: Countrywide, the agency I had joined, was the first PR firm in the UK to employ a strategic planner. The room was overwhelmingly advertising and media planners. I was one of very few PR practitioners in it. From the beginning, what distinguished PR from every adjacent discipline was this: we were not broadcasting at audiences. PR is the author of the conversation - that holds across media, stakeholders, communities and time. You cannot buy a conversation. You can buy reach, attention, placement. Conversations are entered into voluntarily. That is the distinction advertising has never been able to cross.
By the mid-2000s I was building what we called Advocacy Ignition at Weber Shandwick: a global planning process for driving earned influence through digital and social media. This was 2006. The industry would spend the next decade inventing names for what we were already doing.
In 2011, I moved deliberately to a media agency as Head of Strategy: I wanted to understand how ‘the other side’ thought. What I found was a room where channel strategy was decided before the content question had been answered. In PR, the two had never been separable. Where content is experienced - which media, channel, which community, which trusted voice - is part of the message itself.
The behaviour change years reinforced this further. In 2010 I worked on what became the strategic foundation for This Girl Can. The following year I was devising the behaviour change strategy for the London 2012 Olympics: working out how to get enough people to change enough journeys so the Games could actually happen. These were not communications briefs in any conventional sense. They were briefs about changing what people believed and did, at scale, through the right conversations with the right communities in the right sequence. Other disciplines have since claimed the language of behaviour change. The work predates the claim.
By the early 2010s, when brands discovered that digital channels demanded content rather than just conversion, 'storytelling' became the discipline of the decade. PR had been doing it since the discipline began. Other disciplines claimed the language.
The dominant narrative in the industry right now positions GEO as a new discipline, with PR as one useful input among several. That framing is wrong, and it will cost organisations real money and real credibility if they follow it.
GEO: PR by another name?
GEO is not a new discipline. It is the structural logic of PR, made legible to a machine. What is new is not the logic. It is the measurement. For the first time, the question of whether you have built genuine authority in your field has a binary, machine-readable answer. You surface in the AI-generated response, or you do not.
Traditional search could be gamed: keywords, backlinks, technical optimisation. AI-generated answers cannot be gamed in the same way. The machine is asking a fundamentally different question: whether the world genuinely regards this organisation as an authority, whether trusted sources reference them independently, and whether there is depth and consistency to their presence across time. You cannot buy your way to a yes. You can only earn it.
That is what PR has always been doing. Not as a contributor to someone else’s framework, but as the originating discipline that GEO is, structurally, an expression of.
PR earns relevance and trust across communities and cultures by authoring the conversation that matters: the currency that makes influence possible, reputation durable, and discovery inevitable.