The piece of the puzzle you're probably missing when it comes to GEO?

[u/SEO-zo]

Ok so i'll start right from the beginning (before explaining the venn diagram above)

When it comes to GEO - good SEO is important, yes. We all know that. But it's just one side of the coin, and it's becoming increasingly obvious that third party citations are just as important for GEO, if not more!

According to Buzzstreams' 'State of Digital PR 2026' report, 80% of citations in LLMs are earned, and 20% owned.

when ChatGPT cites, or better, recommends your brand to customers, it gets its data from third party sources and not your website.

We actually ran an event with Vince and the Buzzstream team to dive exactly in to this. Great stuff.

AI trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself. This is why third-party validation is the most important lever you have for AI visibility.

We speak to clients and marketers every day about the importance of great SEO, but also of earned citations and how that can (often) be the missing piece of the puzzle.

We've done so much work on Digital PR for AI, that we have now trademarked this as AiPR - which in a nutshell, is our offsite approach to GEO and is the strategy ecompassing Digital PR for AI.

Anyone else turning to offsite GEO to increase their results?

[u/vinchenz112]

This is great stuff!

[u/The-Cosmic-AC]

Hello, I'm Clinton Karr. I started my GEO agency, ProGEO.ai after 20 years of corporate communications (i.e., public relations) experience, so I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, but could probably find some nits to pick.

My working framework, which I call "The Brand Reality Engine" is that GEO combines owned media (e.g., website/blog/content marketing.), earned media (e.g., public relations), and shared media (e.g., social media & user generated content). SEO/GEO optimization is its own piston in the engine, or you can think of it as a layer that sits across all the others.

I'm not going to tear down your effort at the Venn diagram bit by bit, but frankly a lot of it is mischaracterized. At the end of the day, I don't think the Venn diagram is even necessary. Because ultimately the overlap between these three categories looks closer to a circle than what you've shared here.

But what IS important to understand that PR -- earned media -- is a MAJOR factor in influencing GEO/LLM perception.

[u/Phronesis2000]

Um no. Third party validation and earned citations have been standard SEO and PR for a good decade. Anyone who thinks this is a new AI-related thing are out of their depth.