The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson · www.mollymcpherson.com

PR in the Age of GEO: How to Make Sure AI Gets Your Story Right

November 12, 2025·35 min·2 clips

Gallant explains that a New York Times placement is now irrelevant for OpenAI because of the lawsuit, forcing PR teams to target lesser-known outlets that actually influence AI.

1. The PR Breakdown Podcast features MuckRack CEO Greg Gallant discussing how generative engine optimization (GEO) is changing public relations and corporate communications. 2. Host Molly McPherson is a PR strategist and MuckRack partner; Gallant is the CEO and co-founder of MuckRack, a corporate communications platform used by Fortune 500 teams and PR agencies. 3. The core thesis is that GEO—how AI platforms discover and cite information—is the next major shift for PR professionals, paralleling what social media was in 2009. 4. Gallant traced MuckRack's founding to 2009, when he was trying to solve the problem of identifying which journalists to pitch, after previously launching the Shorty Awards in 2008, which he says was the first social media award show. 5. He describes two 'tidal waves' that shaped MuckRack: first, social media expanding the number of publications from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands; second, AI now determining what information reaches people. 6. Gallant's origin story includes pitching podcasting to CNN.com while commuting to their Atlanta headquarters and being turned down, then starting his own founder-interview podcast in 2005, interviewing LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman when LinkedIn had under 50 employees. 7. He met Ev Williams, whose company Odeo failed before Williams pivoted to Twitter, which prompted Gallant to register the handle @Gregory on Twitter and Instagram early. 8. Gallant argues PR professionals were doing the core work of SEO—earning backlinks from credible outlets—without framing it as SEO to clients, allowing the SEO industry to capture that budget line instead. 9. He says GEO is more powerful than SEO because AI indexes recent content, sometimes articles from five minutes ago, while Google's ranking changes slowly. 10. A key complication is that AI answers vary by user: if Gallant asks ChatGPT about himself, it produces a favorable answer because it has his account memory, whereas a different user would receive a more neutral or different description. 11. Gallant describes MuckRack's Generative Pulse product, which lets users set up batches of AI prompts representing likely customer questions, then runs those prompts daily across all AI platforms, recording citations and sentiment. 12. The New York Times is suing OpenAI, meaning ChatGPT cannot index Times content; Gallant says this forces PR teams to think about which outlets have licensing deals with which AI platforms rather than defaulting to traditional prestige. 13. He notes the Times does have a deal with Amazon, so a Times placement may still influence Amazon's AI products even if it does nothing for OpenAI. 14. Gallant says an earned media agency he spoke with reported their business was getting noticeably busier in 2025 because clients were realizing earned media now drives AI citation, adding a new value layer to press coverage. 15. He frames GEO measurement as solving PR's longstanding problem of proving ROI to CFOs: Generative Pulse stats let teams show quantitatively how press coverage influences what AI recommends. 16. On misinformation risk, Gallant acknowledges AI hallucinates and predicts market and political pressure will force AI companies toward better sourcing, which he believes will increase the value of credible earned media over time. 17. He compared the current GEO moment to early social media, saying insurgent brands that figure it out first can leap from number 15 to number three in AI mentions before incumbents develop a strategy. 18. McPherson describes the episode as both a product explanation and a strategic briefing, with a conversational format between two self-described early tech adopters. 19. PR professionals, corporate communicators, and brand strategists looking to understand how AI now distributes information about them will find this directly applicable. 20. Listeners who want technical depth on AI architecture or who are not in the PR or communications industry may find the episode too narrowly focused on the PR use case.

As heard by us

A clear GEO briefing for PR teams trying to stay visible in AI systems.

GEO comes across as a live shift in communication, PR, media, journalism, and reputation work rather than a shiny label. Greg Gallant, Muck Rack's CEO and co-founder, gives the discussion a practical anchor by tying GEO to the way AI systems pull from news stories, blogs, and…

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Why you'd press play

If GEO is changing how information gets found, this gives you the PR-and-comms playbook.

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