GEO isn’t a campaign you launch and check in on once a quarter. As AI engines increasingly answer buyers’ questions without sending them to a website, PR, SEO, and content teams need to work from the same signals and adjust their work week after week.
SparkToro’s latest look at U.S. Google searches found that 68% of them end without a single click, based on Similarweb panel data from the first four months of 2026. Pew Research found a similar pattern one layer up. When an AI summary appears above the results, users click a traditional search result in only 8% of visits, compared with 15% when there’s no summary.
The data confirms the shift: an AI engine’s own answer is increasingly the only stop a buyer makes before deciding who to trust. That means the work of keeping your brand in those answers can’t be done by one team or on a quarterly schedule. It requires a shared view of what buyers are asking, what sources AI engines cite, and what changes from one week to the next.
What running GEO actually looks like
If the answer is the only stop, the work is keeping your brand inside it, and that turns out to be a weekly job three teams do together.
Working from one starting point
At our agency, PR, SEO, and content used to operate the way many agencies still do, passing a project down the line from one function to the next. We rebuilt that system so that all three teams pull from the same starting point, looking at the actual prompts buyers type into AI tools while researching a purchase in a client’s category.
To do this efficiently, we built internal tools to surface those prompts on an ongoing basis, so instead of guessing what someone is asking Claude or ChatGPT about a client, the team can see it directly.
That input shapes what each team does next, and it moves in both directions.
- PR uses it to decide which reporters and publications to approach, since AI engines rely heavily on third-party coverage when choosing whom to cite.
- SEO uses it to figure out which pages on a client’s own site need to exist or get rebuilt so they answer the question directly, and content drafts all those pieces, working with editors so the writing reads like it was made for a person rather than an algorithm.
A PR pitch this week accounts for what SEO flagged, and an SEO rebuild reflects the angle PR just placed, so nobody on either team is guessing independently anymore.
The weekly rhythm
We replaced our quarterly meeting cadence with a standing weekly loop. Early in the week, the team reviews what’s fresh, new prompts that are surfacing, and shifts in a client’s category. That shapes the pitching and content calendar for the days ahead.
Through the middle of the week, PR places pieces with media while SEO updates the on-site content that those prompts point to, and writers turn out pieces tied to the same core narrative rather than three disconnected assets. By the end of the week, everything that went out gets checked against where it’s actually landing.
That last step is where a lot of teams fall short because they assume monitoring means building a dashboard and glancing at it occasionally. We do it differently. Live searches only turn into monitoring when you log them. Each week’s answers get recorded against the prompt that produced them, identifying which brands were named, in what order, and how they were described.
As we deepen relationships with our clients, we recognize patterns and shifts in near real time. Reading live results tells us why the spot moved, whether it’s because of a new piece of coverage the engine is leaning on or a competitor’s page that now answers the question better. That reason becomes our focus for the following week.
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Why the old model breaks down
The old setup had SEO writing keyword briefs that got passed along to content teams, while PR worked in its own lane, focused on traditional media hits. That worked fine when the goal was a first-page ranking. It doesn’t work as well when the goal is to be the answer in an AI engine, because that answer is built from a mix of a brand’s own site, third-party coverage, and the consistency with which the same narrative shows up. Our writers and editors sit close enough to the SEO and PR teams that a new piece going out today already reflects what the other two groups are doing.
AI visibility lies with the people already writing, pitching, and optimizing for the questions real people ask. Authority builds through the same narrative reinforced across sources over months of work.
Do the work steadily, and the engines will treat your brand as a reference.
