In the conversation, Erik shared his insights on how this change is transforming communications - and why trusted editorial coverage, earned media and well-structured press releases are becoming essential for visibility in AI-generated answers.
The Answer Engine Economy describes how people are starting to get information from AI tools instead of traditional search results.
Instead of scrolling through a list of links, users now ask a question and receive a direct answer from an AI system. These answers are usually built using information pulled from trusted sources across the web.
For brands, this changes how visibility works. It’s no longer only about ranking high in search results. It’s about making sure your content appears in credible places so AI systems can find it, trust it and cite it in their answers.
AI tools often rely on trusted third-party sources when generating answers.
News coverage, expert quotes and mentions in credible publications help AI systems decide which information is reliable. That’s why earned media plays such an important role.
When a brand is mentioned regularly in respected media outlets, it sends strong trust signals. This makes it more likely that AI tools will recognize the information and include it when generating answers.
Press releases include many of the signals AI systems look for.
They follow a clear structure, include verified information and often feature quotes from company leaders. When distributed through trusted newswire platforms, they also carry strong credibility.
Because of this structure and reliability, press releases – especially those distributed via GlobeNewswire by Notified - are easy for both journalists and AI tools to understand, making them a powerful format for visibility in the AI era.
During the conversation, Erik shared insights from Notified’s SOAR Content Framework™, which helps teams create content that works well for both modern search and AI tools.
The framework focuses on four key principles:
When these elements come together, content is easier for AI systems to understand, trust and reference in their answers.
AI tools often pull information from trusted third-party sources when generating answers.
News articles, press releases and credible publications provide verified information that AI systems can reference with confidence. Because this content is structured and widely distributed, it sends strong credibility signals.
For brands, that means earned media coverage and well-written press releases can increase the chances of being cited in AI-generated answers.
PR teams can improve AI visibility by focusing on credible, well-structured content.
Publishing news through trusted distribution channels, earning media coverage and sharing expert insights all help build authority. Formats like press releases also make it easier for AI systems to understand and reference key information.
As AI search continues to grow, strong PR strategies will play a key role in helping brands appear in AI-generated answers.
Doug Simon: I'm looking forward to speaking with Erik Carlson at Notified. And just for transparency, we're actually a satisfied client, and we'll be getting into that a little bit as well. But I'd like to start, Erik, by finding out how you define the answer engine economy.
Erik Carlson: Yeah, Doug, I'm thrilled to be with you today and thank you for your business. I appreciate the plug. Look, I think the question that you're asking is so timely. We are at the nexus of one of the biggest generational shifts in how people get information. And I think it creates this environment where we're trading questions for answers. And that economy is essentially developing within LLMs. We'll talk a little bit about how the shift from traditional search is picking up steam. But at the end of the day, this is rewriting the rules for how, if you're a consumer brand, you sell to customers, and if you're a B2B brand, how you raise awareness and ultimately sell to different businesses. So, it's a really exciting time to be in the industry and to be innovative.
Doug Simon: Yeah, and you touched on the idea that it's evolved from traditional search. I mean, we've seen that impact in our own business, where we decided we need to have an AI-oriented product that's optimizing the satellite media tours that we do, or else what's the point? Because that's the whole thing of discoverability. So how are you seeing that transition? It seems like it's one of the fastest that we've seen, with all this dramatic change.
Erik Carlson: 100%, and I'd love to hear about how you identified the transition and the need to change your focus, shift your focus. For me, I remember the moment really poignantly. It was about nine months ago. I woke up in a cold sweat because I was looking at generally what we represent as ROI for our industry, which, if you know traditional PR, is placements and unique views. And I'm looking at the metrics on kind of our global dashboard for different campaigns across our client set, and I'm seeing it drop precipitously, particularly around web traffic, largely because of this concept of zero clicks, right? So, someone's searching for an answer natively in an answer engine or an LLM, getting the answer, seeing the citation, and not clicking out to the digital property. And that very basic concept flips the entire search community on its head.
And when we talk about the pace, right - and you mentioned that in terms of just pace and velocity of this change - if I go back to 2024, and I've done the research, less than 1% of searches were happening natively in LLMs. Last year, that number - and this is going to sound really small - was only 6%, but most of that traction happened in the back half of the year, particularly Q4. This year, if you look forward to 2026, the most conservative estimates show that 28% of all search traffic will happen natively in answer engines. And by 2030, that number jumps to 80%. So, this is an absolutely meteoric rise and a complete shift in the foundation of how we think about getting information out and representing the brand.
Doug Simon: And some of those numbers don't even count when you search on Google in the traditional way. That's an AI answer that you're getting. And I appreciate that you wanted to know our origin story in this space. And because we only have PR's Top Pros talking on the segment, our epiphany came one day after when you had your epiphany. So, we were a bit late for the game. But it was really the same thing.
We kept hearing, you know, GEO, GEO - you've got to be findable through AI search, have to be discoverable. And then the next wave of that was earned media is the number one thing that's driving it. And we're like, we do earned media, so we better figure out a solution if we're going to really try and make it work for clients.
So, we asked ChatGPT: what are eleven possible partners we could have that could offer different things? We went through a whole bunch of them. One wanted to charge us $46,000 a month. That was not going to work because we didn't want to raise our prices as an obstacle.
And now we have a platform that we are able to utilize that allows us to identify the questions people are asking. And the funny thing is, what is new is old again, because it's always been about: hey, what is the information people want to know? And can you find a way to give it to them?
The question now - which you have become a great expert in - is the importance of making earned media searchable.
Erik Carlson: When you look at - I call it the hierarchy of preference within LLMs - there are a lot of statistics out there that say 94% or 95% of all citations are non-paid. That in and of itself is a great banner for the PR industry. But even within that non-paid category, there is a hierarchy of where you want your information to show up.
At the very top, encyclopedic sources rank really high. So that's Wikipedia, that's Encyclopedia Britannica. Those are hard to influence, right? Below that, it's really earned media on high domain authority sites. So, you're talking about your Wall Street Journal, your Bloomberg, et cetera. But the long tail matters too.
And what a lot of people fail to realize is that LLMs are essentially consensus engines. So, it's not enough to land your content in one location or post your content on your own site, which might have good digital authority. It's really about creating this consistent sense that if an LLM goes out and looks for content in an earned media source to answer a question, it can trace that content back to your site, create that consensus, which creates authority, and then ultimately raises the answer and the visibility of your brand to the top.
Doug Simon: Yeah, it's also making press releases more credible and more important. The pendulum always seems to swing. So, what do people need to know, however they're creating press releases and distributing them, to make them more AI-ready?
Erik Carlson: Yeah, it's a great question. It is a little bit of the renaissance of the press release. And I said that in a PRWeek interview like a year and a half ago. A couple of people made fun of me, but I think it's kind of come true.
And the reason that press releases are so good for LLMs - the really high-quality food that the LLM or the answer engine feeds on - is really two things. Number one, it is an authoritative source because it's an edited piece of content, because it's actually citable out to multiple distribution partners, and largely because it's coming from a high domain authority site, whether that's us or one of the other larger newswires. That really checks the box.
The other components are actually things that we've been coaching PR professionals to do for years, which is write with clarity and structure. So if you think about the way a press release is written - from headline clarity to the sub headline, to including components of timeliness and context around company quotes, which also have authority - as well as what we have typically coached customers to include, even before machines were reading press releases, such as FAQs, answers, and very clear breakouts of relevant information.
All of that content, the way it's structured - and we'll talk about the framework that we developed in a minute - all of that structure is really, really good for machines and becomes very crawlable in terms of being able to source and index that information readily.
Doug Simon: For me - and I don't hold a grudge - but I do think back to when the web was becoming big, and PR had a huge opportunity there and sort of missed out on that a little bit. I think everyone is somewhat in agreement on that. Social media - PR, I think, put up more of a fight to be a part of it. But now we've got AI.
So, what can PR do to not miss this moment when it comes to visibility for clients?
Erik Carlson: First, I think it's recognizing that it's our moment as an industry to win and not let GEO or SEO experts, excuse me, claim to be the GEO experts and pioneer the next horizon. At the end of the day, it's a team sport, right? And I'm not diminishing that. But when you go back to the statistic that I shared - that 95% of sources cited within answer engines are earned media or owned - non-paid or shared - that is PR, right? So, understand that you are in a position of strength operating within a PR department today.
The second thing I think is that you have to be an expert on this. Everybody is racing to educate themselves and others within organizations.
Doug Simon: Not everybody, from our experience. Sometimes we're surprised when we speak about AI and then ask, “Is GEO important to you?” We're expecting that to be a gimme question - of course you're going to get a yes - but sometimes we've gotten a “not really.”
Also, what we've seen - and I've heard this from some other folks - is that sometimes it's a super priority at the top with the chief communicator. As it goes down, it gets disparate. Some are all-in, some are not. Then when they're working with agencies, some people at the agencies are all in, others are not.
So, one of the interesting callbacks to us was, “Oh, this is great because you're also giving a sort of bottom-up push to the importance of it from their team,” because that's going to force them to ask, “Hey, what are we doing here?”
Erik Carlson: I think that's a really great point. And so maybe if I take a slightly different angle given your feedback - maybe it's early innings, and maybe this is an opportunity to get ahead. So, I think now is the time to educate yourself.
We've spent really the better part of the last quarter, quarter and a half, trying to educate the market and create a framework. I'm someone who learns by doing. So, we partnered with a brand visibility platform for AI back in September and October to really be able to look at the number of citations for press releases and other types of content.
In pouring over that data since the time, we implemented that about six months ago, we've actually garnered over 150 million citations for published content. And each one of those citations tells us something in terms of the format, the structure, things that are working, things that are not working, and ways to optimize your content.
So, we took all of those learnings and distilled them into a framework that we call SOAR — S-O-A-R: structure, originality, authority, and recency. We've built a case study around it, and it's based on empirical data. Essentially, the punchline behind this is that if you optimize for those four variables - as you're thinking about writing not just for human audiences but machine audiences as well - the number of citations and the way you influence visibility can be essentially gamed. Right? And that's a negative term, but I'll give you one example which blew my mind.
So, I looked for a control group, and we were talking before we started the podcast about how we also do investor relations. Many of our press releases are quarterly earnings announcements - kind of dry, boilerplate, the same information typically, other than the financials.
Doug Simon: Yeah.
Erik Carlson: So, you know, I looked for two examples. One example of a B2C company that everybody knows that should have a ton of citations because it has a ton of followers, a ton of shareholders - a household name. We picked Costco. Everybody loves and knows Costco.
The other one that we looked at was essentially a B2B company that nobody had heard of, with limited followers. We picked a lithium-ion battery company. And what was crazy is when we graded it against the criteria that we built for SOAR, the score in terms of compliance for those structure, originality, authority, and recency elements that the lithium-ion battery press release had was through the roof compared to the score of Costco, right? It was structured much better for machine readability.
The number of citations that press release received as a result was three and a half times what Costco received, which is fascinating because not a lot of people were searching for it. So, I said, okay, maybe there was something going on in the industry that day where lithium-ion batteries were just a hot concept because of EVs or whatever.
So, we looked at another control in that same industry - a Q4 earnings press release that also did not follow the SOAR framework - and it was substantially lower.
And so, I'm a finance guy. I think I mentioned that to you. I get really into the statistics. I ran a regression analysis and actually asked ChatGPT. I loaded over 200 press releases and said, “Force-rank these for which you think are better in terms of driving LLM visibility based on whatever metrics ChatGPT or OpenAI uses.”
Right. So, it gives me the list, and then we ran that against our empirical data with the number of citations. It was a 0.89 coefficient, which basically means the lines matched one for one.
And so that told me we've kind of figured out the secret sauce in terms of making content machine-readable. Now it's all about educating the market so that when you write something, you're not just showing up for the human audience, but you're controlling what you can control - because some people are just going to the LLM.
Doug Simon: Any final thoughts about the importance of really focusing on GEO? It's a must-have now, right?
Erik Carlson: Yeah, I'd be disappointed if I was talking to someone and they sat here and said, “It doesn't matter.” It's not that SEO is going away. It's not that we have to focus 100% on GEO. But you mentioned the web era. This is akin to sitting here in 1995 and saying Google is never going to catch on and it doesn't matter.
By the way, the trend - the adoption curve of GEO relative to Google - is 3x.
Doug Simon: Way faster, yeah.
Erik Carlson: Three times the pace, right? And if we've learned anything over the last 25 years in this kind of internet revolution, it's that every technology trend that comes along is disintermediate faster than the historical technology before it.
So, if I'm sitting there as a PR professional, if I'm sitting there in a marketing department, if I'm sitting there as an executive, I'd be saying there's a massive opportunity to rewrite the rules of visibility. It's not about how much you spend and how much you've spent to optimize SEO.
There is a new foundation. Wipe the slate clean and take advantage of what is essentially a re-rack and stack of the order of operations and brand visibility for the next two, three, four, and five years. And guess what? The brands that take advantage of that are going to be the brands that win over the next decade.
Doug Simon: And I think it'll be critical for people at agencies or brands to watch this segment - one of the most important pieces that we've done. Erik, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Erik Carlson: Thanks for having me. It was fun.
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