TL;DR

Communicators missed SEO the first time around because it felt too technical—and marketing took it. AI visibility is the same opportunity, only bigger, and the Lippincott CMO Outlook data shows we’re about to miss it again.

CMOs are pouring budget into AI while defunding the owned infrastructure that determines whether a brand surfaces in AI answers. Because if AI doesn’t cite you, you don’t exist. This is the playbook to engineer visibility instead of hoping for it—five moves, in order, from anchor content to measurement. None of them requires you to learn how to code. All of them require you to stop waiting.

Key Insights

Only 12% of CMOs rate their tech enablement “excellent” and just 11% say their organization is excellent at adopting new technology—yet AI is where the budget is going, paid for by cuts to the owned infrastructure that makes brands citable in AI answers.
95% of the links AI tools cite come from non-paid sources, and 27% come from journalism (Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse). You cannot buy your way into the answer. You have to be published, cited, and structured.
The definition of media just got broader: anyone with a newsletter, a trustworthy following, and credibility and authority is now considered media—because that’s what LLMs surface. Your media list should reflect that.
GEO is closer to SEO than the hype suggests: structured headings, themes over keywords, schema markup, and content organized around real customer questions. The skills transfer. The discipline is showing up to do it—including in the meeting with the IT folks.
Recency matters. OpenAI’s models heavily favor content published in the last 12 months, which means visibility is maintenance, not a monument—your 2023 media hit is not saving you.
Consistency is machine legibility: when your earned mentions and your owned content tell different stories, the models get confused—and confused models hallucinate or skip you.
When Martin Waxman ran the Future of Marketing Institute through the PESO Model® Diagnostic during our webinar, the readout told him exactly where his next dollar and hour belonged. A score isn’t a grade. It’s your blueprint.

A Visibility Engineering Playbook

A couple of months ago, I hosted an IABC webinar with my friend Martin Waxman, and he said something that has been rattling around in my head ever since, “It always bugged me that communications people missed out on SEO, because that really should be a communications initiative.”

He’s right. And it stings a little, doesn’t it?

Think back to when Marcus Sheridan was standing on every conference stage, telling us that answering your customers’ questions in owned media would save your business—it saved his pool company during the recession, after all, and he had example after example of how well it worked for other organizations, too.

That was a battle call aimed squarely at communicators. We’re the ones who know how to answer questions with credibility and clarity. We’re the ones who build trust in words.

And what did we do? We decided SEO felt “too technical” and handed it to marketing. Then SEO people started pitching bloggers and high-authority sites for backlinks, which, let’s be honest, was media relations done badly by people who’d never written a pitch in their lives.

That was our work. We just weren’t in the room.

I don’t want us to do that again.

Because the exact same shift is happening right now with AI—your buyers are asking their favorite AI tool who to trust, what to buy, and who leads your category—and the early evidence says we’re on track to repeat history.

The Contradiction That Should Scare You

Last week, we talked about the Lippincott “CMO Outlook 2026” study—the one that found that only 28% of CMOs feel they have real organizational influence—and I argued that the missing piece isn’t courage or a better long-term brand argument.

It’s an operating system.

This week I want to zoom in on the finding that I think is the buried lede: CMOs are funneling investment into AI while pulling money away from the owned infrastructure—websites, content, UX, loyalty—that determines whether they show up inside AI answers at all.

Only 12% rate their tech enablement “excellent.” Only 11% say their organization is excellent at adopting new technology.

What that means is that the money is going toward AI rather than toward the one asset AI actually needs.

That’s not a strategy. That’s buying a fancy new stereo and cutting the speaker wires.

And, not only can you not listen to music on your fancy new stereo, but if AI doesn’t cite you, you don’t exist.

Not to the buyer who asks ChatGPT for a shortlist. Not to the journalist prompting Claude to summarize the key players in your space. Not to the board member running due diligence through Perplexity before a meeting.

The good news?

This is fixable. Not with hope and not with a hack. But with engineering. I’ve been calling this work visibility engineering for a year now, and it has a manifesto, a growing body of practice, and—as of this year—a set of metrics to prove it works.

What it hasn’t had, until today, is a playbook in one place.

So I am here today to give you that playbook. Five moves, in order. None of them requires you to learn how to code. None of them requires you to learn new skills. All of them require you to stop waiting.

First, Understand What the Answer Is Built From

Before you can engineer your way into an AI answer, you have to know what the answer is made of.

Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse research analyzed more than a million citations across the major AI tools, and the findings should reorganize your priorities immediately: 95% of the links AI cites come from non-paid sources. Twenty-seven percent come from journalism.

You cannot buy your way into the answer.

The models also heavily favor recency—OpenAI’s models, in particular, prefer content published in the last 12 months. Your incredible media hit from 2023? The models have moved on.

Visibility isn’t a monument you build once. It’s maintenance.

And the definition of “media” just changed underneath us.

Martin had another pithy quote, where that is concerned, “The definition of media just got broader. Anyone with a newsletter who has a following that is trustworthy, who’s credible, and who has authority is now considered media.”

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are bigger than ever, sure. But the LLMs are also reading and citing trade newsletters, niche podcasts, Substacks, and LinkedIn voices with real expertise.

If your media list still looks like it did in 2019, you’re pitching a fraction of the ecosystem that trains the models.

Discoverability, Martin pointed out, is what media relations has always been at its core. He calls this whole discipline “SEO++”—the same skills as SEO, plus everything communicators already do. Which means nobody is better positioned to own this than you.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the playbook.

Move 1: Build the Visibility Engineering Anchor

Everything starts with owned media. We used to call this cornerstone content, but it’s essentially anchor content that answers the actual questions your buyers ask, in the language they ask them.

Not keyword-stuffed content. Not content written for robots.

Martin and I hit this hard on the webinar: you write for humans, and the LLMs make the connection. The models are trained to surface what’s credible, useful, and clear, which is exactly what good owned media has always been.

To do this well, pull the 20 questions your sales team, your customer service inbox, and your event booth hear over and over. Organize your content into pillars derived from those questions. Then publish against them consistently—remembering that recency bias means “we wrote about that in 2024” doesn’t count.

This is Marcus Sheridan’s playbook, a decade and a half later, with higher stakes.

They ask. You answer. The machine cites.

Move 2: Structure It So Machines Can Read It

Here’s where communicators historically bail out, and where I’m going to hold your hand and not let you go.

The technical gap between SEO and GEO (generative engine optimization) is much smaller than the hype suggests. Structured headings and subheadings. Themes instead of keyword density. Schema markup and structured data so the models understand what your page is, not just what it says. Clean site architecture.

It’s the same fundamentals. We covered a version of this in the visibility gap article a few weeks ago.

But there’s one line from Martin that I’d put on a sticky note above your desk, “PR people need to work with the IT folks.”

I know. I know!

But the technical/human bridge is exactly where this gets won or lost. You don’t have to implement the schema yourself. You have to know it exists, ask whether your site has it, and sit in the meeting where it gets prioritized.

The comms team that shows up to that meeting owns AI visibility. The one that says “too technical” hands it away—again.

Move 3: Earn the Citations

Owned media makes you findable. Earned media makes you believable to humans and to models.

Remember that 27% of AI citations come from journalism. Every real media placement is now training data. But the redefined media landscape means your earned strategy needs two tracks. It needs the traditional outlets that anchor authority, and the new media—the newsletter authors, podcasters, and credible individual voices the models also read and cite.

That second track should feel familiar. It’s relationship-building with people who have audiences and credibility. It’s literally the job. The only thing that changed is that the payoff now includes being structured into an AI’s understanding of your category.

One more thing: make sure your earned mentions and your owned content tell the same story. When third parties describe you one way, and your website says something else, the models get confused—and confused models hallucinate or skip you.

Consistency isn’t just brand hygiene anymore. It’s machine legibility. No more bios for each occasion and one message for the website and another for your pitches.

Make everything consistent!

Move 4: Distribute Through Shared, Accelerate With Paid

Shared media does two jobs in this system. It distributes your anchor content and earned media wins to the humans who reshare them (some of whom are the new media from Move 3—see how this compounds?).

And shared media lets you listen to the questions and objections that keep coming up. Those are next quarter’s anchor content. And so the flywheel moves on.

Paid is the last move, not the first—and it’s small and surgical. Put modest money behind the owned content that’s already earning citations, to accelerate what’s working.

When Martin ran his own organization through our PESO Model® Diagnostic live during the webinar (more on that in a second), that was literally the first action item that surfaced. He needs to use a small paid investment to boost the anchor content that was already carrying the whole system.

Paid can’t buy you into the answer. But it can speed up everything that gets you there.

Move 5: Measure Like an Engineer

Engineers don’t hope. They baseline, they measure, they re-measure, and they build.

You need to do the same.

Your baseline is where you actually show up today. Which sources cite you? How does that compare to your competitors?

From there, you track the four metrics that matter for AI visibility—LLM visibility, citation frequency, narrative share of voice, and credibility loop close rate—and you report them next to pipeline, not next to impressions.

And this is where I get to tell you about my favorite moment from the IABC webinar. I mentioned a minute ago that Martin volunteered his own organization—the Future of Marketing Institute, the student-run group he works with at the Schulich School of Business—as a live guinea pig for the PESO Model® Diagnostic.

His read-out was 50% overall. Owned scored 67%. Earned 54%. Shared 10%. Paid 5%.

Was that a bad score? Nope. It was a useful one.

In 60 seconds, Martin knew his owned foundation was solid, his earned was respectable, and his next dollar and hour belonged to shared distribution and a small paid boost.

That’s the whole point. A score isn’t a grade, even though we were trained all throughout school to think of it that way. In this case, it’s not. It’s your blueprint.

This Is a Discipline, Not a Hack

I have one more Martin quote to share, “Every time we talk to a machine, we’re coding with words. We’re building something with words.”

Building things with words is what communicators have always done. Visibility engineering isn’t a new job—it’s the job you’ve always done, with an engineering discipline wrapped around it.

Anchor content. Machine-readable structure. Citation-worthy relationships. Systematic distribution. Real measurement.

Run together, they’re not five tactics—they’re an operating system that feeds itself.

We can’t sit back and be reactive this time. Martin said that too, and he’s right. We have to be proactive and show how what we do provides this new type of value.

Communicators sat out SEO and spent 15 years watching marketing take credit for discoverability.

Not this time. This one’s ours.

And one caveat before you sprint off: this playbook gets you into the answer. It doesn’t control what the answer says about you—whether the description is accurate, current, and fair.

That’s the other half of this discipline, and it’s an article of its own coming in a few weeks.

Start Your Visibility Engineering This Week

If you want to know where you stand before you build, start with the PESO Model® Diagnostic. It scores your paid, earned, shared, and owned media as a system—the same instrument Martin used live on the webinar. It’s free, it’s scored, and you can take it as often as you’d like.

And if you’re ready to make visibility engineering a real capability—for yourself or your team—that’s exactly what the PESO Model® Certification teaches: the anchor content, the structure, the earned strategy, the measurement, all of it, with worksheets that mean you finish with the work done, not a pile of ideas.

Or shoot us an email! We’d be happy to help you figure out where to start.

We missed SEO. We’re not missing this.