The Rise of the Answer Engine Economy

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TRANSCRIPT:

DOUG: 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: Yeah. Well, Doug, I’m thrilled to be on 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, you know, we’re trading questions for answers. And that economy is essentially developing within LLMs. You know, we’ll talk a little bit about how the shift from traditional search is picking up steam, but the end of the day, this is rewriting the rules for how, you know, if you’re a consumer brand, how you sell to customers, and you know, if you’re a B2B brand, how you raise awareness and ultimately sell the different businesses. And so, it’s a really exciting time to be in the industry and to be innovative.

DOUG: 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, or 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: 100%. And I’d love to hear about how you identified the transition and the need to change your focus or shift your focus. For me, you know, I remember the moment really poignantly. It was, you know, 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, you know, is traditional PR placements and unique views. And I’m looking at the metrics on our 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 kind of basic concept flips the entire search community on its head. And when we talk about the pace, right, you mentioned it 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 the answer engines, and by 2030, that number jumps to 80%. So, this is, you know, an absolutely meteoric rise and a complete shift in the foundation of how we think about getting information out and representing your brand.

DOUG: Yeah. 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 appear as PR top pros talking on the segment, our epiphany came one day after you had your epiphany. So, we were a bit late to the game, but it was really the same thing. We kept hearing, you know, GEO, you’ve got to be findable through AI search. You have to be discoverable. And then the next wave of that was earned media, which is the number one thing that’s driving it. We do earned media. So, we’d better figure out a solution if we’re going to really try and make it work for clients. So, we asked ChatGPT, what are 11 possible partners we could have that could have different things? Went through a whole bunch of them. One wanted to charge us $46,000 a month. That wasn’t going to work because we didn’t want to raise our prices as an obstacle. And now we have a platform that we’re able to utilize that we’re able to identify the questions people are asking. And the funny thing is, you know, what’s 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? And that raises the question now, which you’ve become a great expert in, which is the importance of making earned media searchable.

ERIK: When you look at, you know, I call it the hierarchy of preference within LLMs. There are a lot of statistics out there that’ll say, you know, 94%, 95% of all citations are nonpaid. That in and of itself is a great banner for the PR industry, but even within those non-paid citations, there’s 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? You know, below that, it’s really earned media, right? And on a really high domain authority site. So, you know, you’re talking about your Wall Street Journals, your Bloomberg’s, etc. But the long tail matters too. And what a lot of people fail to realize is that LLMs are essentially consensus engines. And 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, that raises the answer visibility of your brand to the top.

DOUG: And it’s also making press releases more credible and more important. You know, 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: Yeah, it’s a great question. It is a little bit of the renaissance of the press release, and I set that on 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, they’re really kind of high-quality food that the LLM or the answer engine feeds on, which is really two things. Number one, it is an authoritative source because it’s an edited piece of content, because it’s actually citable 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 to write with clarity and structure. So, if you think about the way a press release is written, from the headline clarity to the sub headline to putting components of timeliness and context around company quotes, which also had authority as well as what typically, you know, we have coached before even machines we’re reading press releases, customers to think about FAQs and 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 callable in terms of being able to source that information and index that information readily.

DOUG: 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 sort of 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: First, I think it’s recognized that it’s our moment as an industry to win and not let SEO experts claim to be the GEO experts, and pioneers of 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, 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, you know, educate themselves and others within organizations.

DOUG: Not everybody from our experience. Sometimes we’re surprised when we speak about AI. Oh, you know, is GEO so 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 to not really. Also, what we’ve seen, and I’ve heard this from some of the other folks is sometimes it’s a super priority at the top of the chief communicator as it goes down at its desperate. Some say go for it. Some are not. Then, when they’re working with agencies, some people at the agencies are all in, others are not. The interesting callback to us was, oh, this is great that you’re also giving sort of a 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: I think that’s a really great point. And so maybe if I take a slightly different angle, given your feedback, maybe this early innings, and maybe this is an opportunity to get ahead. So, I think it is now the time to educate yourself. And so, we’ve spent, you know, really the better part of the last quarter, a quarter and a half, trying to educate the market and create a framework. So, I’m someone who learns by doing. And 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, and in poring 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. And so, we took all of those learnings and distilled them into a framework that we call SOAR, right? So, structure, originality, authority, and recency. And we 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 not just writing for human audiences, but machine audiences as well, the number of citations and the way that you influence visibility, it can be essentially gained. 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, same information, typically other than the financials. So, you know, I looked for two examples. One example of a B2C company that everybody knows should have a ton of citations because it has a ton of followers and 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, and we picked a lithium-ion battery company. And what was crazy is when we graded it against the criteria that we built for SOAR, saw 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 as a result of that press release received was three and a half times what Costco received, which is fascinating because not a lot of people were searching for it. And so, I said, okay, maybe there was something going on in the industry that day, or it’s just lithium-ion batteries or a hot concept because of EVs or whatever. And so, we looked at another control in that same industry. A Q4 earnings press release that also did not follow the SOAR Content Framework™, and it was substantially lower. And so, you know, 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. I said force rank these for which you think are better in terms of driving LLM visibility based on, you know, whatever metrics ChatGPT or OpenAI has. 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 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 be going to the LLM.

DOUG: Any final thoughts about the importance of really focusing on GEO? It’s a must-have now, right?

ERIK: Yeah. I’d be disappointed if I were talking to someone and they sat here, and they said, it doesn’t matter. It’s not that SEO’s going away. It’s not that we have to focus 100% on GEO. But, you know, you mentioned kind of 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 the pace. If we’ve learned anything over the last 25 years in this kind of internet revolution, every technology trend that comes is disintermediation faster, whatever that historical technology was. So, you know, 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 sitting here and 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 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: 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. Eric, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

ERIK: Thanks for having me. It was fun.