For Erin Bruehl, the VP of Communications at fintech platform Current, GEO has brought a level of clarity in reach that has never been possible before.
Historically, PR and communications teams have reported on impressions for campaigns, which measure the total number of times a piece of content — whether that's a news article, press release, social media post, or a piece of owned editorial — has potentially been displayed to an audience.
However, the problem with impressions is that they're not very scientific: they give an idea of a publication's entire audience, not the specific number of people who actually saw that content.
"With GEO and AEO — this concept of citations and visibility — for the first time we get some real data on the people who really saw it," Erin told Stacker in a recent interview.
AI monitoring platforms can tell you things like how many times your brand was mentioned in an LLM response, and how many times your brand content was cited. This evolution is opening an opportunity for comms and marketing teams to further prove their impact and gain additional insight to inform future campaigns.
Erin shared more about her career journey so far as well as her tips for monitoring citations and demonstrating their importance.
From the US Open to Fintech
Erin owns all things internal and external communications at Current, including corporate comms, media relations, messaging, executive and product comms, and editorial.
She came to the brand journalism world via the United States Tennis Association and the US Open, where she was the senior writer and assistant managing editor and then led all social media content, strategy, and campaigns. She then spent three years leading brand promotions, content, and strategy for Priceline. She started her career as a sports journalist at various publications in and around New York City.
The throughline of it all? Storytelling.
"I'm still telling stories," she said. "I'm just doing it in a different way."
At Current, that means crafting company narratives in the fintech industry and also speaking to members or potential members. The narratives and focuses are very different depending on the audience, but it means relying on those storytelling skills to maintain the values of the company no matter the format.
"It's getting to tell the full journey and expanding the audience, talking about Current and all of the services we're providing that are truly making a difference in people's lives," she said.
Turning Storytelling Into Data
Erin said the GEO moment also brings a new opportunity to apply that storytelling approach to how she talks about her own work — through data.
She has built a set of custom agents that are tied to specific Current stories that have been distributed on the Stacker network. For each of those stories, she asks Claude what prompts those stories would be likely to surface for, then adds those prompts to her monitoring set. She typically adds 10-15 of these prompts per story. An agent provides suggestions on how to make the story content more friendly to LLMs, increasing its chances of being cited.
Her custom agents then pull in however many citations each of those stories earned, giving her a better idea of the content that is actually driving increases in brand visibility. That information informs a monthly report showing the top-cited URLs and the prompts that Current has the most visibility on. The data is also split out by AI platform.
Erin said that she maintains the same set of prompts in perpetuity. And since Current's editorial tends to cover consumer-focused topics — things like affordability and financial planning — observing how those stories perform over time gives the team some interesting insights into how the general public is feeling about their finances. Current provides mobile banking services, mostly for Americans who live paycheck to paycheck.
"It's pretty amazing because there were stories that were published last year that all of a sudden in the last month, I saw them skyrocketing up to the top," she said. "It's really exciting that their value continues to live in that way."
How to Get Started With Prompt Monitoring
Erin offered a few tips for those building prompt monitoring sets for their own brands.
- Find the topics that are relevant to your company. AI platforms like Claude and ChatGPT are looking for signs of authority. Since Current is a financial services company, its content covers financial topics in order to build the kind of authority that is both relevant to its brand and likely to be trusted by AI.
- Experiment with the platforms themselves. Rather than guess at how an AI platform would word a prompt, Erin asks Claude itself for advice. Since the idea of tracking citations and presence is so new, there are few experts and lots of trial and error. What agents can you then build to simplify processes or use for measurement? "These fields are changing, these tools are changing, and so I would focus on using the AI tools to get what you want to track and then figuring out a tool, or building custom agents, to help you measure them," she said.
- First decide on the goals that matter most to you and your brand. For Current, what mattered most was getting proof that someone was actually reading the content that the team was putting effort into producing. Other teams might care more about using content for customer acquisition. Those are very different goals that will require different forms of measurement — and different forms of content.
Even beyond AI visibility, recognizing the differences between the various types of content is important for understanding what they can realistically achieve. Some content types are best for building brand awareness, while others are effective at acquiring new customers.
"If you're making content for brand awareness and to provide value, acquisition should be a benefit, but if you're looking for it to be the goal, it's hard to ask your content to do everything," Erin said.
Madeline Stone is the Content Manager for Editorial & Insights at Stacker. She was previously a longtime business and tech journalist at Business Insider and a content and communications consultant for startups.
