Report: From SEO to GEO: Why Media Partnerships Are Now a Strategic Advantage

If you’re still thinking in terms of SEO, you’re already behind.

We’re entering the era of GEO—Generative Engine Optimization—where visibility depends less on keywords and backlinks and more on how your content shows up in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude.

And that visibility? It starts with partnerships.

I’ve been getting a ton of questions lately about which newsrooms, publishers, and media platforms are training today’s leading LLMs—and what that means for brand communications, executive visibility, and thought leadership.

So I pulled together a Deep Research report that maps out the most impactful partnerships between AI companies and content providers.

Here’s the big insight:

If your media coverage doesn’t live in one of the ecosystems being licensed or scraped for LLM training, you’re essentially invisible in generative search.

Highlights from the report:

• OpenAI x The Atlantic, Vox, AP, Reddit, News Corp, etc.: These are shaping the answers you see in ChatGPT.

• Google x Reddit, Stack Overflow, and more: Integral to Gemini's grounding and fact recall.

• Perplexity x Financial Times, Seeking Alpha, Reuters, and Bloomberg: Premium answer quality tied to these data pipelines.

• Meta x Shutterstock and AI-assistive journalism tools: A growing play in multi-modal retrieval.

It’s no longer about ranking on page one of Google. It’s about training the algorithm that writes the answer.

📄 Read the full Notion report here: bit.ly/4pZ5yv3 

Whether you lead PR, corporate comms, or executive strategy, this is your cheat sheet for making smarter media investments in the age of AI.

We’re not just optimizing for clicks anymore. We’re optimizing for inclusion in the model.

Are your earned media placements doing that?