PR and MarCom pros now face a dual mandate: measure SEO and GEO

PR and marketing communications professionals now need to understand and measure the impact of both SEO and GEO — generative engine optimization — according to a new piece published by The Logan Banner.

That single framing carries a real shift. For two decades, comms teams could treat search visibility as someone else's desk. The web team handled rankings. PR counted clips and impressions. That division no longer holds, and the article's premise makes the reason plain: audiences now meet brands inside AI-generated answers as often as inside traditional result pages.

What's actually changing?

GEO is the practice of shaping how generative engines — the systems behind AI summaries and conversational answers — represent a brand or topic. SEO covers the familiar territory: rankings, crawling, links, on-page structure.

The article's argument is that communicators need working fluency in both. The mechanism is simple. Journalists, analysts, and buyers ask questions. Increasingly, an AI system answers first. If that answer draws on coverage a PR team placed months ago, the team's impact is real but invisible under old measurement.

Clip counts don't capture an AI summary. Share of voice in trade media doesn't map to a chatbot's citation behavior. The measurement gap is the story.

The takeaway: visibility has split into two channels, and comms owns only one set of metrics for them.

Why does measurement need to change?

The piece positions measurement as the hard part, and it is. SEO has mature tooling — rank trackers, analytics platforms, established KPIs. GEO does not. There's no settled equivalent of a ranking report for how often a brand appears in an AI answer, or in what context.

That forces a practical question on every comms team: when a stakeholder asks whether the latest campaign moved the needle, what do you show them? A traffic graph captures SEO outcomes. For generative engines, teams are still assembling the answer.

The takeaway: measurement frameworks built for search alone undercount work that lands inside AI answers.

What should teams do next?

The article's guidance is directional rather than prescriptive. PR and MarCom pros should build literacy in how search and generative engines surface information. They should audit what their measurement stacks can and cannot see. And they should treat earned media placement as an input to machine-generated answers, not just as audience reach.

None of this replaces conventional PR evaluation. It extends it. The same press release, expert commentary, or feature story can now produce value in two places at once — a ranked page and a synthesized answer.

The takeaway: understanding both channels turns comms work from a one-output job into a two-output job.

The bigger picture

The piece lands at a moment when job descriptions are quietly rewriting themselves. Comms roles increasingly list SEO and GEO literacy among expected skills, and measurement conversations increasingly include AI visibility alongside media impressions.

For brands, the stakes are asymmetric. A strong ranking can be monitored and defended. An AI answer's characterization of a brand is harder to track and harder to correct. That asymmetry is why the article frames understanding — not just tooling — as the first requirement.

Watch this space for whether standardized GEO measurement practices emerge, and how quickly comms teams move from awareness to accountability.

By Olivia Hart