Leadership teams are increasingly excited about one core idea: AI answering questions directly instead of showing lists of links. But what’s still being decided is the strategy that brands need to adopt to thrive in this new era of Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO.
At Stacker’s Cited 2026 summit, Jen Cornwell of Tinuiti, Michael Farr of Paylocity, and Lianna Kissinger Virizlay of Allison Worldwide discussed the dramatic shifts seen in the GEO space over the last year. While clients and leadership teams may have initially needed more convincing on the importance of GEO, many are now actively pushing agencies and internal teams to move faster and spend more on these strategies.
Here are the top takeaways from their panel at Cited.
With so much noise still surrounding the topic of GEO, it can be easy to get distracted by the latest measurement insights or tools. There’s a wealth of data points that come with GEO, but the challenge lies in making sense of them.
No one has a definitive measurement and attribution framework yet: Right now, teams are measuring their impact by triangulating across multiple tools like Scrunch, Profound, and MuckRack — plus testing prompts across multiple platforms to avoid a "bias bubble" or blind spots.
At Cited, Michael said he avoids these traps by using objective sets built by other people. He says this gives him confidence when presenting to the C-Suite “that we’re seeing something real, not just performing for ourselves.”
KPIs depend on what matters for your business & category: Jen said that while GEO measurement is still somewhat of a gray area, Tinuiti’s core KPIs are influence and sentiment. Mentions, citation rates, share of voice, sentiment, and accuracy are also top KPIs. Accuracy — measuring whether the AI platform is saying something true and current about your brand — is one of the most important metrics, yet it’s the hardest to automate.
Platform metrics vary — but that might not matter: A brand can have very different visibility across platforms. These aggregate scores can be misleading, so don’t panic. Teams should agree on how heavily they weigh individual platforms.
| Try it out: Segment sentiment analysis into branded vs. non-branded prompts, since "best/top X" prompt sets skew artificially positive. |
"GEO can't be just one team's job" was the refrain throughout this panel. Since GEO algorithms rely on multiple inputs to determine which brands are most trustworthy, teams need to work together for the strategy to be effective.
MuckRack’s most recent report showed that 84% of citations are still driven by earned media. As a result, historical silos between teams are disintegrating to help the brand perform better, with a particular focus on integrating PR into broader marketing efforts.
With AI search, Michael said he can’t do his work in performance marketing without collaborating with the brand side. And investing in a brand’s success “can’t be done with the same SEO toolkit from five years ago,” he said. Collaboration is no longer a one-off project; it needs to be a cultural shift.
PR is becoming more strategic: Since earned media is now indisputably the most influential way for brands to be seen, PR teams are encouraged to be even more deliberate in building a narrative. They’re also focusing their energy on tailored distribution strategies — for instance, they might use Stacker to compound authority for stories that have strong local angles, versus using embargoes or exclusives with a select list of publishers.
| Try it out: To sell cross-functional GEO strategies internally, the most effective internal pitch is a simple narrative. Try "We're mentioned, competitors aren't," rather than a rigorous ROI model. |
So early into this era of GEO optimization, Lianna issued an apt reminder: Once something is in a model's training data, you can't just ask for it to be removed. The only lever is to "flood the zone" with better, more accurate content over time so that LLMs can ingest it and shift the narrative.
Get into an experimenter mindset to influence AI, then audit whether it worked and what to do differently next time.
| Try it out: Look across platforms to understand how a brand is showing up and what platforms and publishers are driving the most visibility. Next, divide and conquer with your team. For example, the earned media team can focus on Wikipedia attribution since editors need media articles as sources. |
While we don’t yet have clear answers on how to quantify the impacts of GEO, the panelists did have ideas on what to consider on the road ahead:
Melanie Vernoia is a proud mom, military spouse, and co-founder of Stacker who brings a people-first approach to her leadership. As the Head of Partner Management at Graphiq, a startup later acquired by Amazon, she honed her partner management and process acumen. Now, as VP of Accounts Brand Partnerships at Stacker, she has dedicated her career to helping brands and publishers tell meaningful stories that reach wide audiences.