Hallow’s Director of Organic Marketing writes, "Performance marketers need to collaborate with their brand and comms
teams to reach audiences in places where they can’t bid their way into.”
Most folks in the SEO space have an opinion on AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) vs.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) vs. SEO.
Is all that is required to succeed in AI Search just time-tested SEO fundamentals?
Or must Search
professionals drastically reimagine their programs to thrive in ChatGPTland?
With either approach, SEOs must become more comfortable than ever in collaborating
with their Brand and Comms colleagues (and vice versa!) across a number of fronts to achieve success in this rapidly evolving space.
Brands will struggle to achieve
organic visibility without the partnership of search teams and Digital PR efforts across a number of fronts.
Journalism Citations
Unlike traditional
SEO, where the content that matters most is the content on your domain, Generative AI models operate much differently.
Your content–and how it’s structured–matters, but
content *about* you, from journalistic outlets, carries major weight.
In this new landscape of AI Search, there are no shortcuts or substitutions for being cited by trusted journalism outlets.
For this performance
marketers are beholden to PR professionals.
Podcasts
It would be difficult to imagine crafting a PR strategy entering 2026 and not thinking strategically about
podcasts. They’ve become so prolific and so influential, across
countless niches.
They could also be a key to organic discovery in this new world of AI Search.
In April 2024, reports revealed that OpenAI transcribed more than a million hours of
YouTube videos for its training model. Google has since shared that it trains its own
models on YouTube videos as well.
When podcasts run on YouTube, and publish transcripts, it’s a gold mine for LLM models.
Whether
your brand runs its own podcast or someone from your brand appears on an industry podcast, it’s clear there are AI Search implications.
Whereas so much web content
has been over-SEO-optimized to death, podcasts offer more authentic, conversational sharing and insight that would be valuable to LLMs.
Another environment where
performance marketers must cross the aisle and lean on their brand and PR counterparts is in the internet’s biggest gold mine of authentic conversations: Reddit.
Reddit
Reddit has been an area of focus across holistic search for the past few years.
First, traffic to Reddit has skyrocketed in recent
years:
The 10x growth
has come at the expense of all sorts of other websites for various queries. Someone searching for something two years ago who may have ended up on your brand’s website now are much more likely
to end up on Reddit, seeing conversations about your brand.
This is just traditional search. Reddit conversations also are a huge source material for LLM models that power generative search. So SEOs must contend
with Reddit.com eating into their traffic, as well as consider how Reddit might help inform the responses when people search with ChatGPT,
Claude, etc.
So if your brand is not represented prominently and favorably, it’s a double whammy for organic visibility.
The
social listening and community engagement aspects of Reddit fall squarely into the Comms and Brand marketing buckets of responsibility.
SEO Shaping PR
In
what ways can Comms professionals look to SEO colleagues to lead in this evolving landscape?
A simple start is with your next press release or post on the company’s
website.
The SEO team is not the first cross-functional partner you’d think of to review brand-related content. However, SEOs understand content formatting,
structure, and technical components like schema.
In the world of AI visibility, punchy writing from a brand copywriter probably can’t shine the way you’d
hope if it’s buried within a release or otherwise poorly structured.
Why Does It
Matter?
ChatGPT aims to reach 1 billion users by year’s end, meaning
10% of the world’s population will be using a tool that paid marketers cannot currently reach.
The ability to run ads in ChatGPT seems inevitable (OpenAI itself has acknowledged the possibility.) But it’s not currently a reality.
Performance marketers need to collaborate with their Brand and Comms teams to reach audiences in places where they can’t bid their way into.
The
time is now. If you’re on the performance marketing side of the house, it’s time to align with your Brand team. If you’re on the Brand/Comms side of the house, grab time with your
SEO team and start showing how your work might trace more directly to your company’s bottom line.
If you’re interested in submitting content for future
editions, please reach out to our Managing Editor, Barbie Romero at Barbie@MediaPost.com.