Speaker 1Today's episode dives into a topic that is brand new for a lot of small business owners, but is about to become impossible to ignore. GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, and how it can supercharge the impact of the media coverage you work so hard to get. I'm joined by Digital PR Director Ellie Sumner from Prosperity Media, an SEO and digital PR agency that specializes in using research-driven PR campaigns and backlinks to boost brands' visibility in search. Ellie breaks down in simple, non-techie language what digital PR is, how it differs from traditional PR, and why backlinks and online mentions are now critical signals for both Google and AI models like ChatGPT and Perplexity when they decide which brands to surface. We talk about how AI services. We talk about how AI research is changing the way people discover products and services, why conversion rates from AI recommendations can be more than four times higher than from traditional search, and what that means for small businesses. If you're a small business owner who is already pitching for earned media, the good news is you don't need to start from scratch. You just need to get more strategic about how that coverage appears online and where it's published. In this conversation, Ellie shares practical. Beginner-friendly tips on choosing the right publications, chasing those all-important links, reverse-engineering AI search results, and setting your brand up to be the trusted answer these new search engines recommend first. Hello, and welcome to Medium Magnet, the podcast for female founders and women-owned businesses, startups, and side hustlers who want to learn how to grow their business and grow their business, leveraging the media and free PR. I'm Liz Nabel, and I'm your host, personal publicist, PR strategist, and dedicated hypewoman. My goal with this show is to give you a behind-the-scenes tour of how the media works, to break down the barriers between your business and the big mastheads so you can see how easy it is to get featured simply by giving journalists what they want. At Media Magnet, you'll also get access to the top journos, editors, writers, and PR experts. We're here to help you get featured in the media, and we're here to help you get featured in the media. We're here to help you get featured in the media. people would search for um a product or a service or a recommendation would be through google but now with the i guess even in the last just 12 months with the incredible like evolution of ai and how much it's being used now by everyone not just ai experts but like consumers brands products services tell us a little bit about how that search process is changing and how geo plays into that and also more importantly what is geo um explaining again because this is a new subject for a lot of the listeners
Speaker 2yeah and it's still honestly new to kind of everyone in the space are constantly adapting learning new things about um these lms and ai search so it's kind of new for everyone but for geo stands for generative engine optimization and we're basically this is basically just a strategy focused on making your brand visible in ai generated search results so when people are searching on places like chat gpt or perplexity trying to get your brand to be featured in their answers and which is really important as while google still holds a major share in search ai is expected to overtake that by 2028 and places like chat gpt which is the fastest growing platform in the world so people are coming to that more and more 70 percent 77 percent um a nice stat here is 77 percent of chat gpt users say they use it as a search engine so people are coming to chat gpt perplexity these models to search what they would typically search on google and over a third have said that they've discovered new products or brand through chat gpt and this rises even more to gen z who are using these platforms more than other generations so it's a real real growing area of people discovering new products services brands by searching on these platforms
Speaker 1so what so first of all that sounds like a huge kind of crossover between the way people are starting to search for brands and products and services like a quite a quick um rise in popularity but also why would you want your brand or your business to get featured in those um in those search engines in terms of perplexity or chat gpt is it a very similar function to like how you would traditionally search
Speaker 2google yeah so a lot of people now especially the younger generations are searching starting their kind of searches on chat gpt so for example someone there's kind of two ways so someone might be searching for online shopping on there and before i was doing some research into stats and actually 13 percent of people have said they're doing online shopping on these ai models so someone might start a shop there and say something like where is the best place to buy a new mattress and then the llms will pull all their kind of sources that they've been trained in and it will come out with the answer and if your brand is on the list of the best places to buy a mattress people are more likely to click through discover your brand and actually the conversion rate is 4.4 times higher on chat gpt than traditional search engines so people are seeing more conversions on and why is that do you think i think it's because people are doing wider searches so with google someone might type in mattresses and then they're searching through lots of different results but then on things like chat gpt and perplexity people are kind of being more conversational asking their engines what are the best mattresses which are the comfiest what's at the best price point they kind of delve into a bit deeper and they start their journey they ask more questions and they're kind of the very trusted these search engines among users because it's like having a conversation with someone yeah so
Speaker 1they're so they're warmer customer or they're warmer prospects i guess when when they're deciding when they're coming to that point where they're making a decision they're far more likely to go ahead and purchase that mattress that's been recommended to them because they trust that ai i guess is more sophisticated in its in its search functions and it's yeah like you say it's sort of like asking a friend for a recommendation it feels personal yeah exactly
Speaker 2and they often like on if you're on google you have to click into different sites and you're opening a lot of tabs and reading information whereas on these um ai search engines you've got it all there in front of you it's summarizing it so it's a lot easier to kind
Speaker 1of navigate right okay so next step how does getting traditional media coverage um you know featured in the news um or you know covered in the media help you be more searchable um on these ai models how does that work like where's that relationship there can you explain a little bit
Speaker 2more about that yeah so these ai engines will cite reliable sources and this is why pi is so beneficial because it creates credible content the ai systems trust so having your brand mentioned online and then you can use it to create your own content online helps build these trust signals and then when a user's typing in relevant queries your brand will then come up hopefully and the honestly the the results change every day it depends what's what's they're pulling from but that's the goal um so things like having um highly reputable coverage so looking at positive coverage and looking at the context of coverage so where your brand is mentioned in relevant content so if you're if you sell products product roundups um is a great is a great place to be featured because they'll directly take an article that says like the best microwaves and kind of regurgitate it in their in their results it's also good to have expert commentary as this helps um develop trust expertise authority for your brand any spokespeople which then again helps come up in the search and having um your brand mentioned a lot online as well so the frequency of mentions really helps um outperform competitors the more the more you get online the more likely you are to be generated in these and ai and these ai generated answers
Speaker 1so i know in the past um and you're the expert here not me but from correct me if i'm wrong so a google search is completely separate from the search engine so you can search for things like search engine optimization and then you have your social media platforms are they now all included in those searches that happen on those ai platforms how does that work
Speaker 2yeah so the ai platforms come from social media and use social media as a source so one example of something we've done in-house is um with one of our clients is they're a small business accounting software and we did a study on the best places to start a small business and they if you go if you search on these platforms the best place to start a business in australia it actually pulls in one of their instagram posts that they posted about the study so it is it is pulling in information from social media as well as on blogs as well as then the earned media so yeah absolutely
Speaker 1so it seems like it's just a far more sophisticated search platform than google was although i know they're they're now in competition um that you know with chat gpt and perplexity in those sorts of places so it's like a race a race for them all and i'm sure they'll evolve um even before this podcast episode goes to air it'll probably change um so what would be your advice for small business owners like for a lot of my community a lot of my my clients my students i teach them how to get earned media so traditional media coverage newspapers magazines podcasts radio tv is that still the way for them obviously they have the benefit of being in those traditional media outlets but i mean it sounds like you can really double down on the outcome of being for being featured in there because it's now going to you know help you accelerate the way you show up in ai how would you sort of what's your opinion on how that works and and the way to do that well
Speaker 2yeah so firstly if you're selling a product or a service that might be relevant to journalists like product roundups they're great um to be featured on lms love when there's like a listicle of the best xyz so if you can get featured on them that's great there is some news publications can't be crawled by the um lms so that basically means they can't access the information on those websites it just kind of depends on the bot they use but there is a website called mrs digital ai crawl access checker and you can just put the website in and it comes up with which public and which ai platforms can um crawl it so you can kind of see who you should be targeting by doing that um i'd make sure to try and hit publications which are really high authority so we're looking at um tier one press like news.com but also really if you're in a niche these high authority niche sites so if you're i'm trying to think of like if you're maybe like a motoring if you've got a motoring brand you'd want to hit the motoring sites um and publications that your audience would read so it's not dissimilar to traditional pr in that way when you're writing any press releases or pitches to pitch out just be really careful with how you're wording everything you want to make sure that what you're writing is exactly how you want your brands to be portrayed um so that if journalists are kind of copy and paste which they often will do into the story it's exactly how you want to kind of put it into the story so it's not dissimilar to traditional pr in that way be seen on the um answers to the search queries on the ai search um but same as traditional pr just positioning your brand spokespeople as go-to commentate commentators on industry trends and any news tracking you can do to gain that authority and trust around your spokespeople um and then there's also another another way we do it is that we think about what um you know what you're doing and what you're doing and what you're doing and what you're and your customers might be searching outside of the product so um with the example i gave earlier out of the campaign we did on the best cities to start a small business the client we work on specifically targets small business owners so we kind of try and um raise awareness of the brand with the small business owners before they come to decide what accounting software they need so thinking about what questions outside of outside of your brand they may be asking like if you're looking for a mattress it might be how do i get a better night's sleep for example yeah and kind of doing a study around that data-led campaigns um any like unique data that you can push out that might um be relevant to these queries that people are searching will help be featured on these these
Speaker 1platforms yeah so i mean i think the good news here because for a i know from their feedback they feel you know a lot of these new kind of developments that come through in marketing and advertising and media feel like they've got a whole new kind of process to follow so much more content to get through so much education to learn it sounds to me like everything is very very similar to as it always was we're just using those ai platforms to amplify those search results is that correct
Speaker 2yeah so it's very similar tactics just being more thoughtful about how you want to appear in those results and what results you want to appear in
Speaker 1yeah so it's even more important to i mean the good news is obviously those traditional media outlets we're still pitching them the same way we're still following up with them we're still building relationships with journalists um and looking for ways to you know hijack the news and infuse our business or our brand into what's already happening in the news cycle that's all still the same but there's there's more ways you can leverage that media coverage once you've got it and one of those ways is obviously this these geo searches um that ai platforms have enabled us to do do you have any sort of top tips outside that pitching traditional media and getting those authority and credibility um pieces out there um of ways business owners could i guess simply appear in those searches more often or um be be more searchable in these new ai platforms yeah so
Speaker 2that's another thing you can do is push for a link and just make sure everything you're kind of writing on the website is kind of ai crawler friendly if you just do a quick search on on google or on the website you can get a link back to your site and you can get a link back to these ai platforms of how to kind of write your website content to be crawlable for lms it will give you like a step-by-step simple breakdown of how to do that and just apply that to your website so it can be pulled in easily
Speaker 1the irony is you've got to ask ai how to do it and then it tells you how to do it and then you do it to help it tell you better how to do it um so any any other like i guess key takeaways from what you're seeing on the ground obviously you've got your finger on the doing this all day every day about what 2026 will bring in this space are you expecting things to just continue at this kind of lightning speed through next year um or any sort of new things we need to be aware of on the horizon that could change the way we do things or is it just going to be more and more people using these ai platforms to discover your business or
Speaker 2your brand yeah i think things are probably going to change very rapidly so it's hard to say but it will definitely be increased in the importance and reliance on ai search among consumers so just keeping up doing everything you can to be featured on these um people will be doing a lot more different competitors will be doing a lot more of this as well i imagine a lot of people are asking about it and getting brand mentions online is one of the biggest things people are talking about so yeah i just it's not too hard i just recommend just kind of keep going with the people you are but just make sure everything you do is kind of how you want to appear in these search results um in terms of your wording of your brand and what you want to be known for and just keep building authority because yeah essentially the more authoritative you can kind of come across the more likely you are to be featured on on these search engines is
Speaker 1the only way to build kind of authority and reputation and credibility still just through those traditional media outlets that then land on these ai platforms that you can see you can do other
Speaker 2it's less kind of my area of expertise but if there's any kind of blogs um that have high offer higher authority um or like the smaller niche sites that you might not necessarily reach out to normally they can play a big role in in this um if what you can do is just go on these search and search engines and search what you want to be in so if you want to if you know you want to be in a search for the best mattresses i keep using that but just search like best mattresses on on chat gpt for example and see what comes up and then if sometimes it will list the sources and sometimes it won't so if it doesn't you can just say what sources did you use for this and then you can kind of see where they're actually pulling this information and then from there you can try and get featured in so if you see it's from a seven news product roundup you can then try and pitch the pitch to be in that but you might find that it's from a listicle on a blog and then you can kind of work out what sites you need to reach
Speaker 1out to from there right so sort of reverse engineer um yeah the answers first and then you mentioned before obviously traditional media outlets but then really reputable well respected trusted blogs like um i guess like a mark boris business blog or you know koshi's business builders is another really kind of trusted business um newsletter that i that i follow in my space so those i mean that's not traditional media technically speaking but i think if people are seeing you featured in those things and they trust that source then by way of association that builds trust in your brand
Speaker 2as well yeah absolutely and like koshi's business builders for example is a real high authority site so we often use um dr which means domain ranking and that's a number that ahs which is an seo tool will give you and it's out of 100 and it kind of ranks how authoritative your site is there is also a free one called moz so if people did want to kind of assess domain authorities of different sites you can download the moz keyboard and it will give you a number out of 100 and any site with an authority over about 40 i'd say is really worth going after because yeah it kind of measures how these search engines measure their authority and koshi's business builder for example i'm pretty sure their dr da is in the 60s 70s so it's a real high authority site to kind of
Speaker 1reach out to so that's moz m-o-z yes m-o-z.com.au i'm assuming i'm
Speaker 2not sure yeah i'm assuming so but you can you can get a like a google a chrome what do you call them chrome
Speaker 1yes exactly that's the word okay i'll pop it in the show notes as well guys i'll work it out after we jump off um Any sort of top tips or anything we haven't sort of covered before we go, I guess, in terms of small business owners who are possibly coming into this for the first time or this is quite new to them about how to get started increasing their results in that geo search function?
Speaker 2I'd probably say get your kind of in the about your brand section of your press releases or pitches in the exact way you want it. Do some Googling on how best to write this to make sense to LLMs and to encourage journalists to include that information. And then, yeah, do the reverse engineering, see which sites you need to try and target and, yeah, try and get on those high authoritative, high niche sites for your brand and go from there.
Speaker 1Amazing. Thank you, Ellie. This has been so informative. And if I'm going to pop your details in the show notes, but if anyone has any questions about today's episode, please feel free to reach out to me, Liz, at lizmabel.com. But, yeah, I'm going to try some of these tips and see how I go. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Ellie.
Speaker 2It's all right. I hope everything made sense.
Speaker 1Absolutely. I mean, I think it's mind-blowing for so many of us, but trying to keep it super simple and just, I guess, doing this piece by piece rather than coming at it and trying to do all the things at once. The good news is that we're still pitching for media exactly the same way that I've always taught, which is perfect. We're just getting more bang for our buck. That's how I see it anyway.
Speaker 2Yeah, exactly. And you're probably already doing stuff that would get in the LLMs anyway. It's probably just not realised yet. So it's always good to kind of dig about in them and try and find where your brand is maybe featured already. Awesome. Thank you, Ellie.
Speaker 1Thank you. This episode of Media Magnet was brought to you by my signature, group coaching program, the Media Masters Academy. The Media Masters Academy is a live online six-week course taught by me and designed to teach you how to become your own publicist and give you exclusive access to pitch the country's top journalists and editors. Doors open just three times a year. Check it out at liznabel.com along with a ton of free resources to help you get started taking your business from best kept secret to household name. Right now. If you love this episode of Media Magnet, please share it with your business buddies or on social media and tag me at at Liz underscore Nabel. And if there's a specific guest you want to hear from on the show or a topic or question you want to know more about, please tell me so I can make sure the show stays dedicated, especially for you. © transcript Emily Beynon
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