Key takeaways
• We still have remarkably little visibility into the prompts real users enter into AI systems, making audience insight and understanding more critical than ever.
• GEO appears to reward reputation and authority as much as website content.
• Specialist trade publications often have influence beyond their readership because they provide genuine information gain.
• Attempts to manufacture authority through GEO shortcuts have so far proved less durable than many expected.
• The strongest GEO strategies increasingly resemble good communications strategies rather than entirely new disciplines.
When GEO first entered the communications vocabulary, much of the conversation centred on algorithms.
How do AI systems retrieve information? How do they choose sources? How do we optimise our content to appear in their answers?
Those questions remain important. But after a year of following the rapid development of AI-powered search, testing different approaches and watching how the wider industry has responded, our biggest takeaway is not about technology at all.
It is that GEO has reinforced many of the principles that have always underpinned effective communications.
We still know remarkably little about what people are asking AI
For years, marketers became accustomed to extraordinary visibility into search behaviour. Keyword tools could tell us what people searched for, how often they searched, and how difficult it might be to rank for a particular phrase.
That transparency largely disappears inside AI systems. Unlike traditional search, there is no public database revealing the millions of prompts being entered into ChatGPT, Gemini, or other generative search platforms every day.
Modern GEO tools have evolved quickly with platforms, such as Semrush, now offering AI visibility scores that help organisations benchmark how frequently they appear across selected prompts. These insights are valuable, but they remain samples rather than complete pictures of AI behaviour.
It’s surprising after a year how much uncertainty still exists and, ironically, that makes something else more valuable: genuine audience understanding.
If we cannot see every prompt, then speaking to customers, sales teams, and technical specialists becomes one of the most reliable ways of anticipating the questions AI users are likely to ask.
GEO appears to reward reputation as much as content
Much of the early GEO discussion treated AI visibility as a content challenge. Publish more. Optimise more.
But the reality appears more nuanced. AI systems rarely form an opinion about an organisation from a single source. Instead, they synthesise information from across the wider digital ecosystem.
Your website contributes, but so do trade media articles, conference presentations, industry reports, social conversations, and third-party commentary.
AI also doesn’t distinguish between marketing, corporate communications, or digital teams. It simply absorbs the collective evidence available about a brand. That makes consistency across functions increasingly important.
The question is no longer simply:
“What does our website say about us?”
It is increasingly:
“What does the internet collectively understand about us?”
Small trade publications continue to punch above their weight
This has been one of the most encouraging findings for industrial communicators.
Over the past year, we have repeatedly seen highly specialised trade publications cited within AI-generated answers. Many serve relatively small audiences and viewed through a traditional marketing lens, they can appear insignificant beside larger media brands. Yet AI systems seem remarkably interested in them.
One explanation is information gain — content that contributes something genuinely useful, distinctive, or insightful rather than simply repeating existing information. Specialist trade journalism often excels at exactly that. It may not attract millions of readers, but it frequently provides the richest technical context available on the open web.
For industrial organisations, this reinforces something we have long believed: influence and audience size are not always the same thing.
Authority is proving much harder to manufacture than many expected
Every major shift in digital marketing produces a wave of shortcuts. GEO has been no exception. Over the past year we have seen AI-only landing pages, prompt bait, AI-generated content farms, and other attempts to manufacture visibility.
Prompt bait is perhaps the clearest example. Imagine an agency publishing a blog post titled “The Top 10 Industrial PR Agencies” and conveniently ranking itself first. The article exists primarily to influence future AI recommendations rather than genuinely help readers.
These tactics may generate short-term attention, but, so far, they appear less effective than many anticipated. Authority still seems remarkably difficult to fake. The organisations consistently appearing in AI responses tend to have developing years of specialist expertise, credible third-party validation, useful original content, strong media coverage, and a reputation that has been earned rather than engineered.
The biggest surprise is what hasn't changed
Perhaps that is the most reassuring lesson of all. Twelve months ago, many people assumed GEO would require an entirely new communications playbook. Instead, it increasingly appears to reward many of the things effective industrial B2B communicators have always focused on.
That’s developing genuine expertise, answering real target audience questions, building trusted relationships with industry media, publishing useful thought leadership, and creating original insight rather than repeating what already exists. In short, building authority.
The technology will continue to evolve. Measurement techniques will improve. New tools will emerge. But one year into GEO, the biggest surprise is that success still seems to belong to organisations prepared to invest consistently in credibility rather than shortcuts.
Because ultimately, AI systems appear to value what human audiences have valued all along: information that is useful, trustworthy, and genuinely adds something new to the conversation.
Hannah Kitchener
Associate Director
About the author
Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.
