Found in AI Ep 69: SEO and PR Have Finally Gotten Married
Brand visibility doesn’t mean what it used to. For years, SEO and PR operated in completely separate lanes. One chased rankings, the other chased coverage. AI search collapsed that wall. Now, getting cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews depends on whether other people are talking about you, not just whether your own pages rank.
Cassie sits down with Basha Coleman, lead program manager on HubSpot’s content strategy and operations team and an SEO and AEO consultant with seven years of experience, to talk about what brand visibility actually looks like in an AI-first search environment.
In this episode:
- Why SEO and PR are finally operating as one function, and what that means for your strategy
- The most undervalued citation channel most brands are completely ignoring
- What actually counts as “news” if you’re a B2B software company
- How to measure success when AI answers the question and the click never happens
- Why top of funnel content matters more than ever, even though you can’t track it
- Whether AEO and GEO are really just brand work, and Basha’s “yes, and”
Transcript: SEO and PR Have Finally Gotten Married (And AI Search is Why)
Cassie: Welcome back to Found in AI. I’m Cassie Clark, AI search optimization expert and fractional content strategist, and this is the show where we talk about what’s actually changing in AI search so you don’t get left behind.
Today we’re talking about brand visibility — specifically, what it means now that your buyers are getting answers from ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of scrolling through Google results. The short version: SEO and PR have finally stopped flirting and gotten married. And if your content strategy hasn’t caught up to that yet, this episode is for you.
My guest today is Basha Coleman. I’ll let her introduce herself.
Basha: Yeah, well hello, I’m Basha Coleman. I currently work full-time for HubSpot and I’m a lead program manager there on our content strategy and operations team. This sits in our media department, so whenever you see our HubSpot blogs or our newsletters or any of our YouTube channels, that is going to be the team that I work on and do operations for. Somewhere in the background, you probably won’t see me on camera. In my spare time, I have a marketing agency and so I do SEO and AEO consulting and that’s been really fun. I’ve worked with businesses across the spectrum in market research, cybersecurity, healthcare — it’s just been running the gamut, but it’s really how I enjoy spending my time.
Cassie: How long have you been in SEO consulting, that part of it?
Basha: That has been, I would say, a better part of seven years.
Cassie: So when did you start really feeling the crunch with, oh, this is different, like we are moving to AI engines and not just Google?
Basha: Oh, let me see. I feel like that happened in phases. So the first phase was probably end of 2022 going into 2023, where it’s like, okay, these new AI tools are out, what are they capable of? Just something to kind of be aware of. We thought they were cool, like a little novelty.
How Brand Visibility Has Changed in AI Search
Cassie: In your view, how has brand visibility changed now that audiences are asking these chatbots and not just Google?
Basha: Yeah. So years ago, I always thought there was an intersection of SEO and PR that wasn’t talked about enough, and I thought that was really evident in the music industry, where PR really was the brand machine. But we didn’t really see it that way in tech. The brand team did its own thing. SEO and demand did its own thing. And the two never really crossed. But now we’re really seeing that relationship form.
I cannot remember who on LinkedIn I saw talking about it, but they were like, SEO and brand are finally like, they used to kind of flirt with each other, but now they’re married. And I think that’s exactly what’s happening. And so brand visibility means having other people talk about you now. Before it used to be, how can we make ourselves rank number one in Google? And now it’s how can we get other people who are already ranking top 10 to talk about us? And that’s a very different way to switch your mind around to try to gain brand visibility.
Why Local News Is an Underrated AI Citation Channel
Cassie: So if I’m an SEO and I’m listening to this, I’ve listened to the podcast before, Qwoted is a big thing, that’s a way we can get mentioned. But what are your tips? Do you have anything different that the audience might like to hear about?
Basha: Yeah, I think one of the most overlooked or undervalued channels is going to be local news sources. A lot of people forget, people are still interested in watching the news, listening to the radio, things like that. And LLMs really like those because it’s that social proof aspect. You can do your editorial things, but for the most part, people don’t really fake news. So getting placed in your smaller publications, your smaller newspapers, digital publications, stuff like that is going to be really big. And usually it can be less expensive than doing traditional advertising, which doesn’t have as much of an impact on brand visibility when it comes to AI engines anyway.
Cassie: What counts as news? If you are a brand and you’re thinking, okay, well, local news, I do software, no one here cares about software. So what counts? How would we go about getting a news station to pay attention?
Basha: So of course you don’t want to lead with, we just got a new CEO, we want to write up about that. Nobody cares about that really. But if you have some new data or new research from your team that’s come out, and only you have this research, that can be very interesting to a news organization. Even if it’s something related to tech, that could be interesting to someone watching the news because they can’t get that from anyone else but you and this news station.
Cassie: It’s interesting that you say that because I did test out the press release. That was a big thing, put out the press releases. And I went through PR Logs first and then EIN Newswire next. And after it hit EIN Newswire and the 700 different local news places, it was within hours that all of this was showing up in the AI engines. And it was very specific phrasing from the press release. So it’s interesting that you say that.
How HubSpot Uses a Media Ecosystem as a Moat Against AI Search Instability
Cassie: So going back to HubSpot for a second — HubSpot has been the best example of software being a media house. How does maintaining an ecosystem like that with the podcast and the newsletters and the videos serve as a moat against the shakiness of AI search?
Basha: It gives you way more outlets to generate demand. And so as a software business, we still have a responsibility to bring in revenue, bring in leads, bring in people who are going to buy the software. It’s not an ad-supported media network. And so the good thing about that is that we can be more selective and experimental with what we want to do. So you have the channel of YouTube where you can generate leads that way, but you also have a newsletter where you can generate subscribers. Maybe not technically leads, but it’s still a lot of visibility and that’s really shareable content. It’s really cool to see how each of these feed into one another when you’re building it around specific brands for specific audiences.
How to Measure Success When AI Answers the Question and the Click Never Happens
Cassie: How should companies be measuring success when an AI provides the answer directly and those traditional click-throughs are gone?
Basha: So then you go bottom of funnel. You’re looking at leads, you’re looking at signups if that’s how your product is set up. I like to think top of funnel is kind of more fragmented than it used to be. And so you really just have to look at your bottom line numbers, which is hard, especially because we talked about brand earlier — we never had to measure bottom of funnel metrics for brand-level work. People look at you kind of crazy if you try to do that, but that’s just where we are now. Which means you might not be able to attribute leads to every single piece of content you do or every single play you run. And we just have to be okay with a little ambiguity in that way. As long as the bottom line number is going up, keep doing what you’re doing.
Cassie: Do you think top of funnel is going anywhere? Should we still be creating that content?
Basha: Absolutely. Because the top of funnel content is what the LLMs need to give these citations, to give the answers. They’re not going to look at a white paper necessarily and talk about you from that. They’re looking at the news sources. They’re looking at other competitors talking about you, and that’s how they’re generating these answers. So I don’t think it’s invaluable to do brand work. It’s more important than ever. We just can’t really track its success anymore. And so it just puts the onus on marketers to stop forcing attribution where it doesn’t fit. We like our charts, but we’re just getting into an era where that probably doesn’t make sense at this time.
Is AEO and GEO Just Brand Work?
Cassie: I’ve heard other people on LinkedIn making the connection — AEO, GEO is mostly brand. Do you agree with that?
Basha: Yes, and. So I agree that AEO, SEO, GEO work is brand, but it’s not only for brand. It’s for bottom of funnel too, because these LLMs can also, at the same time of recommending you, recommend somewhere for them to sign up for your newsletter or your podcast or subscribe to your YouTube channel right there in the conversation. So you’re doing both top of funnel and bottom of funnel work in the same five-minute interaction with your chosen LLM. We can’t separate the two. We need both because they’re both happening in the same conversation.
Whereas before in traditional search, it was kind of on the user to make the connection. They would search a brand term or they’d search a broad term and find your brand. And then they would go through that journey based on how your website was functioning. But now AI is doing that for you. It’s kind of removed the whole burden of research from the user and it just does it, which is both nice and also kind of scary at the same time.
Brand Authority, Social Listening, and What Metrics Actually Matter Now
Cassie: Final question — we used to optimize for keywords and now we seem to be optimizing for trust. Does brand authority become the only metric that matters here or is there something else we should be looking at?
Basha: No, I don’t think brand authority is the only thing that’s going to matter. Like we talked about before, bottom of funnel metrics — leads, signups, revenue. We still need to be looking at that more closely than we ever have. But also just looking at human sentiment. What are people saying about you? Social listening tools are still going to be really important because AI is not going to tell you that. How your brand is being perceived and digested by your audience is going to be important because just because the numbers look good, people could still not be a fan or not actually trust you. And so you still want to optimize for that.
What to Do This Week
Cassie: That’s it for episode 69. Before you go, here’s what I’d actually do this week coming out of this conversation.
First, go prompt ChatGPT or Perplexity with your brand name and see what comes back. Is it accurate? Is your newsletter mentioned? Is your expertise framed the way you’d want it to be? That’s your baseline.
Second, if you don’t have proprietary data or research you’re pitching to local news and digital publications, put that on your list. That’s one of the most underrated citation plays in AI search right now.
And if you want this kind of breakdown every week, the Visibility Report newsletter is free — link is in the show notes. Or if you’re ready to do a full audit of where your brand stands in AI search, head to cassieclarkmarketing.com.
Until then, stay visible.
