There’s been a mix of panic and optimism around GEO this year. Brands are working out how to show up in LLMs, agencies are building capability at pace and LinkedIn has done what LinkedIn does and turned it into a daily debate about whether comms has changed forever.
A recent conversation with industry peers made me think about what has actually changed. Underneath the new acronyms, platforms and ways of finding information, the job of good comms still looks remarkably familiar: understand people, find the story, earn attention and build trust.
What has changed is the number of places that story needs to work and the value now being placed on getting it right.
Consumers have never had more competing for their attention. At the same time there are plenty of signs that they want less of it. WGSN has been charting consumer exhaustion alongside a renewed appetite for simplicity, small moments of joy and community.
For brands, that doesn’t mean disappearing. It means being more disciplined about what deserves people’s attention in the first place.
We’re seeing something similar in publishing. Volume has been the name of the game for years but now there’s a renewed focus on original, distinctive stories that audiences actively choose to engage with.
That changes how we think about packaging a story too. A strong local story might find its audience first through a publisher’s Facebook feed. A striking visual might lead on Instagram, with the fuller story sitting behind it elsewhere.
So the question isn’t simply: what’s the press angle?
It’s: what’s the story, who needs to care about it and where should they see it?
The same applies to campaigns more broadly. Creator relationships are becoming longer term and stretching well beyond a single social post. Brands are borrowing audiences through partnerships. Activations are moving between IRL and online. Stories that begin in earned media can become part of e-commerce, social or search activity.
Those things shouldn’t be separate workstreams. The best campaigns start with a strong human insight and a clear story, then work out how that story should live in different places without losing what made it interesting in the first place.
And this is where the conversation around GEO gets interesting.
LLMs haven’t made reputation, authority or good storytelling less important. They’ve exposed just how valuable those things are.
A brand is now being pieced together from what appears on its own website, what the media says about it, how people talk about it, the authority it has built around particular subjects and the consistency of those signals across different places.
PR, social, search and digital can’t sit in separate boxes when consumers, and now AI, are joining the dots between all of them.
That’s why at Tigerbond we don’t see GEO as a standalone technical fix. It sits alongside the work we’ve always done: building authority, creating stories people care about, understanding communities and making sure brands show up in the places that matter.
Comms hasn’t suddenly become important because AI arrived. What has changed is that the things our industry has always been good at are now directly linked to how brands are discovered as well as how they are perceived.
The channels have changed. The fundamentals haven’t.
Brands still need to show up where people are, tell stories worth paying attention to and do it consistently.
