Every person we talk to right now is asking some version of the same questions. Are we showing up in ChatGPT? What happens when someone asks AI about our brand? Is what we’re doing about this actually working, or are we just hoping it is?
We heard it enough times that it stopped feeling like a coincidence.
The problem with answering from anecdote
A handful of conversations can feel like a pattern, but it can also just be a coincidence wearing a pattern’s clothes.
That’s the position we found ourselves in earlier this year. Everyone was bringing us some version of the same worry about AI search, and it would have been easy to nod along, offer a confident-sounding opinion and move on. We’ve been in this industry long enough to have instincts about where things are headed.
But instincts aren’t data, and when a topic is moving as fast as AI search is right now, an instinct is really just a guess with better posture.
What we kept hearing
The questions were rarely abstract. They were specific, and they kept repeating.
Are we behind our competitors on this? How is AI search optimization actually different from the SEO work we’ve already been doing for years? What should we even be measuring if the old metrics don’t seem to fit anymore?
It turned out that the second question wasn’t just something professional services firms are wrestling with privately. Fifty-six percent of the professionals we surveyed told us they’re unsure how AI search optimization actually differs from traditional SEO. The confusion wasn’t isolated to the rooms we happened to be in.
None of these questions were coming from one industry or one type of client or one level of seniority. They were showing up everywhere. In-house teams and agencies, junior staff and executives, regulated industries and fast-moving ones.
A worry that specific and that widespread isn’t noise; it’s a signal.
Why this moment called for data, not opinion
AI search adoption became a stated priority faster than the industry built any shared way to talk about it, let alone measure it. Eighty-two percent of the marketing and PR professionals we surveyed told us AI search visibility is a top priority for their team over the next 12 months. The same share believe the firms that figure this out early will have a lasting advantage. Priority, in other words, was never the question; readiness was.
But even the acronyms are still sorting themselves out—GEO, AEO, LLMO, with recognition ranging from just 34% to 54% depending on which term you ask about. It’s not just that there’s no agreed-upon success metric. There isn’t even consensus on what content AI systems are actually reading to generate their answers, something 47% of the professionals we surveyed told us they don’t fully understand either. And yet, the pressure to have a strategy for all of it arrived almost overnight.
That combination—high urgency and low consensus—is exactly the environment where confident-sounding opinions do the most damage. Not because anyone is being dishonest, but because it’s genuinely hard to tell the difference between “I’ve thought about this a lot” and “I actually know this to be true” when the ground itself hasn’t settled yet.
The stakes of getting it wrong aren’t hypothetical, either. Fifty-six percent of the professionals we surveyed said they worry their brand, or their clients’ brands, could be misrepresented in AI-generated answers. Half said they’ve already seen it happen in the past year. We’ve even seen it happen ourselves.
What it took to find out
Last year’s “GEO Readiness Report” looked at 205 professional services marketers and leaders. This time, we wanted to know if what we were hearing held up across a much wider view, not just the people we happened to be talking to.
We partnered with our friends at Scrunch to create a report that looked at this from two perspectives: One from the platform that helps brands understand how they show up in AI answers and the other from those of us writing the content and pitching the media.
We surveyed 602 full-time marketing and PR professionals across the United States, in-house teams and agencies, junior staff and the C-suite, small businesses and large enterprises, across dozens of industries. We built the sample deliberately wide because a narrow answer would have just replaced one set of anecdotes with a slightly bigger one.
We were also careful about how we asked. It’s easy to ask someone if they have a strategy and get a confident yes. It’s harder and more honest to ask what specific tactics they’re actually doing day to day and compare the two answers.
Our study found that 91% of marketing and PR professionals say their organization has a clear, documented strategy for AI search visibility. But as we predicted, their confidence wavered as we dug deeper. Fifty-one percent said they are unsure whether their current AI visibility approach is the right one.
That gap, between what people believe about their own readiness and what they’re actually practicing, turned out to be one of the most important findings in the entire study, and we wouldn’t have found it if we’d only asked the first question.
The strategy wasn’t the only place we found a gap between belief and practice. Only 41% of respondents said they can confidently take AI visibility data and turn it into action, even when they have the data in front of them. Nearly half told us they believe their own organization moved too fast into AI visibility tactics without a clear long-term plan.
Where this leaves us
Thought leadership only works if the point of view underneath it is actually true. Research is how we make sure it is, before we say it out loud.
That’s not a new idea for us. It’s the same strategy we bring to every point of view we help a client put into the world: don’t just say something because it sounds right, know it’s right first.
This is also, we think, where research earns its place next to strategy and storytelling rather than sitting off to the side as someone else’s specialty. Those that will be trusted in the era of AI search won’t be the ones with the loudest opinions; they’ll be the ones who can show their work.
The gap between confidence and action won’t close on its own. It’s already closing for the teams doing the harder, less visible work. The ones treating AI visibility as a discipline rather than a check box. Right now, 62% of marketing and PR professionals believe their own organization is already behind the AI search curve. That’s not a reason to panic; it’s a reason to stop guessing.