Way back at the dawn of the GEO search era (Jan. 29 2025, to be exact), I sat on a panel at the Chicago headquarters of global PR agency Golin to discuss how brands could successfully surface their content in those coveted LLM search boxes.
The Golin exec sitting next to me shared something from the agency’s nascent research that we at Stacker soon confirmed to be true: Brand content that earns pickups in reputable news outlets stands the best chance of getting cited in LLM search results.
Curiously, Golin had also found the size of the media outlet didn’t necessarily predict the size of the GEO impact. Their ranking of outlets that gave brand content a GEO boost included some big players like USA Today, sure. But more often than not, small community news organizations were driving the best results.
That’s because the AI algorithms identified those bedrock community newsrooms as highly trusted information sources. It’s like the old adage about politicians: More people disapprove of Congress as a whole than the representative serving the district they live in. Same thing with news sources: Even folks who disparage “the mainstream media” tend to swear by the outlet delivering news about their community.
It's All About Trust
As with so many aspects of life, it all comes down to trust.
That’s what I want to emphasize to brand newsrooms looking for earned pickups that will have them flying high in GEO search results.
You can deploy every GEO optimization trick in the book, from executive summaries to FAQs and beyond, but none of them will mean much if your stories don’t pass the smell test with editors at those trusted news outlets. The content will be all dressed up with no place to go.
When SEO was everything, I gave similar advice to brands that wanted to syndicate evergreen service features answering the top 10 Google queries for the subject they were covering in masked FAQ form. That content might look great to a search bot, and it’s fine for owned media like corporate site blog posts, but it will make news editors roll their eyes.
I firmly believe, and my experience at Stacker bears this out, that the very best way to boost the GEO impact of your content is to report and write high-quality, journalistically sound, non-promotional stories that editors find compelling and readers find useful.
It’s as simple, and in its own way as challenging, as that.
Leverage Proprietary and Reputable Third-Party Data
The quest to create quality content and the desire to boost brand GEO dovetails in one key area: data reporting. Consider:
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Showcasing useful proprietary data that illuminates industry or societal trends.
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Commissioning large national surveys with reputable polling partners.
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Digging into reliable government and academic research that supports the thrust of your stories.
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Interviewing credible experts, both outside your organization and within it (as long as your SME has genuinely useful information to share with readers, like a cybersecurity expert with great tips on protecting your personal data online)
Do all of that and then share a detailed methodology along with, yes, some story structure optimization that makes it easy for the LLM crawlers to extract the information and attribute it to you, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for GEO success.
Think content that’s easy to find, easy to trust and easy to quote.
Brands like Intuit, SmartAsset, Redfin, Expedia, Oura, CarMax, Culligan, SoFi, Insure.com and Instacart are executing on that playbook every day, to great effect. And when they leverage proprietary data, they’re telling authoritative stories in a way literally no one else can tell.
If you’re already creating killer content that helps readers solve problems, answer pressing questions, stay informed on important issues and generally lead better lives, we’d be thrilled to help you get it in front of thousands of editors to maximize your readership along with your SEO and GEO reach.
Frank Sennett is the Executive Editor of Stacker Connect.
Featured Image Credit: Photo Illustration by Stacker // Canva
