SEO tried to make the website more important, PR makes the company more important
By Michelle Lyng, CEO & Founder, Novitas Communications
When software can research, compare, summarize and recommend without requiring a user to visit 17 (is it just me?) different websites, spending thousands of dollars every month trying to move from position six to position three starts to look like spinning your wheels.
Twenty Years of Chasing Page One
For the last two decades, companies have paid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms to solve one problem: How do we get Google to put our website higher on the page?
Google effectively owned the front door to the internet, and it still controls roughly 91% of the worldwide search-engine market, according to Statcounter. Historically, where you appeared on Google’s page made a huge difference.
A Backlinko Analysis of roughly four million Google search results found that the number one organic result captured an average 27.6% click-through rate and was about 10 times more likely to get clicked than the result in the number ten position. Fewer than 1% of searchers clicked through to Google’s second page.
Companies responded accordingly. They optimized page titles and metadata, researched keywords, and built backlinks. They commissioned hundreds—sometimes thousands—of pieces of content designed around what people typed into a search box.
What Matters Today
Now, that model is beginning to break because Google’s role in this transaction has changed. Instead of Google directing people to the place or website where the answer lives, Google (along with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and a host of other AI tools) is providing the answer directly.
Google claims its AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly users (sincerest sympathies to those battling the Google AI Overview misinformation). Its AI Mode also surpassed one billion monthly users in just one year.
That alone is why many companies should ditch SEO as a growth strategy. We could stop the blog here.
Yes, keep your website and keep the technical work necessary to make it work, but take a hard look at SEO, the keyword-driven content factory, and the obsession with rankings. Consider shifting that money toward creating independent evidence that your company, organization, or issue matters, which is what AI appears to value far more.
Reputation is overwhelmingly the domain of public relations. I realize that a PR CEO advising to ditch SEO and embrace PR seems a bit like a realtor telling you it’s a great time to sell, but, in this case, it’s true.
It’s not because of ChatGPT. It’s because Google has changed, steadily converting its own search-results page from a telephone book into an encyclopedia. It works because users no longer must visit 17 websites to get a thorough answer, even if the websites may remain the source of information. Users already have stopped visiting websites.
Nobody’s Clicking Anymore
According to a Pew Research Center study, a review of 68,879 Google searches conducted by 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 found that when an AI-generated summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result only 8% of the time. In contrast, when there was no AI summary, they clicked nearly twice as often (15%). Just 1% of AI summary visits resulted in users clicking a source link, and users ended their browsing session nearly 26% of the time compared with 16% of the time after traditional search results.
Read that again. That should fundamentally alter the way businesses think about search.
Ahrefs studied 300,000 informational keywords in 2025 and found that Google AI Overview results correlated with a 34.5% reduction in click-through rate for the page ranking first organically, compared with similar searches without an AI Overview.
AI Doesn’t Read Google’s Rankings
Here’s the twist: AI search isn’t simply replicating Google rankings.
Ahrefs analyzed 15,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity and compared the URLs cited by AI engines with the top Google and Bing results for the corresponding queries.
On average, only about 12% of AI-cited URLs appeared in Google’s top ten results for the original prompt. Across Google and Bing together, average top-ten citation overlap was roughly 11%. Perplexity showed greater overlap, but the larger finding remained: an AI citation and a traditional search ranking are far from the same thing.
That makes sense when you understand how generative search works, and it is an enormous shift.
The competition used to be: which webpage ranks highest for this keyword? Now, the game is which people, companies and sources appear repeatedly across the information environment surrounding this subject? It’s like going from looking at information in 2D to seeing it in 3D.
Reputation Is the New Ranking
And that is where PR enters the equation. For years, PR professionals had difficulty quantifying the value of having credible third parties repeatedly associate a company or an executive with a particular subject (i.e., being a subject matter expert). Now, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is making that value more tangible.
Muck Rack’s May 2026 What Is AI Reading? study analyzed more than 25 million links appearing in responses from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini across 17 industries. Its key finding is notable: 84% of the citations came from sources Muck Rack classified as earned media. Only 0.3% came from paid or advertorial media. Journalism itself represented approximately 27% of all citations.
This is why the PESO (paid, earned, owned, and shared) model is so critical.
Muck Rack’s definition of earned media is broader than newspapers and television coverage. It includes third-party websites, blogs, industry analyses and other sources the company classifies as independently published rather than owned or paid media.
Increasingly, this research suggests that the digital footprint most associated with AI visibility looks far more like reputation than traditional SEO, and that’s what PR has always built. PR has been building the plane for GEO before we even knew the destination – we just knew it was somewhere great.
Content Worth Referencing
The answer to SEO was to create more content. The answer to GEO is to create more content worth referencing. It’s an argument for substance over quantity.
So, what kind of content is working? I would recommend investing in creating information that drives conversation. Here are a few examples:
- Original research
- Actual news
- Executive thought leadership with a real point of view
- Media relationships
- Expert commentary
- Proprietary data
- Industry analysis
- Trade-media visibility
- Local-market credibility
Where to Invest
This flip is fascinating. Whereas SEO tried to make the website more important, PR makes the company more important (as we’ve been preaching).
So, carry on, keep the website healthy. Keep the facts accessible.
Then, take the money you’re spending trying to convince an algorithm that you’re important and invest it in giving people something genuinely interesting to discuss.
