Alex Myers is concerned about PR agencies’ warm embrace of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), a digital strategy to get brands noticed by LLMs and AI bots.
The founder and global CEO of brand communications agency Manifest believes that with rapid advances in AI technology, the “agency world” will have reckoning if it continues to focus on narrow specialisms—whether its PR, advertising, media, digital, social or others.
He told B&T that trying to sell shiny new AI services, like GEO, misses a trick when AI threatens to upend the role of agencies as we know it.
“Generative engine optimisation has been framed as SEO for AI. But talking about ‘search’ and AI is like pulling an F1 car with a horse,” he told B&T.
“We need to re-engineer the DNA of agency land, rather than just trying to astroturf it with AI puns, which is all GEO is.”
The GEO hype train has well and truly left the station and is building up a head of steam, and it’s not hard to see why. A recent Adobe study finds that traffic from LLMs to retail sites is expected to rise by up to 520 per cent. There have been myriad agencies repositioning their offering towards GEO services in anticipation of a AI gold rush.
Mark Lowe, the founder of the UK PR agency Third City, agreed with large parts of Myers’ message, but believes agencies still need to tackle the problem with how brands appear in LLMs.
“Our work in this area to date suggests that cracking LLMs is going to require skills more akin to brand strategy (feel) than to service/SAAS-based SEO solutions. Maybe it won’t be called GEO for long, but then, who cares,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
There’s only one channel: ‘culture’
For Myers, focusing on ‘GEO’ is akin to “dancing around the edges trying to sell stuff to clients instead of actually fundamentally thinking what AI means for agencies in the future”.
“It’s either terrifying or exciting, depending on your view on technology, but it’s a fundamental paradigm shift in media consumption of information. That means there needs to be a fundamental paradigm shift in how agencies work,” he said.
In an AI-powered world, the division of agencies into specialised services, a construct “created by the agencies that are trying to sell themselves” will become redundant, according to Myers.
“There is only one channel now, and that’s culture, and AI is facilitating that. So when you have PR agencies saying things like, ‘We’ve got to help brands rise up the algorithm’, well algorithms will be dead in a year’s time because AI doesn’t work like that.”
Myers points out that when large language models recommend brands or services, they don’t just surface one source, but produce answers from multiple sources, including a brand’s owned media, earned coverage, branded content, social media and other inputs. Currently, search algorithms rank and serve up a list of individual links that it believes is relevant.
Although search engines can be optimised, to a degree, Myers believes this isn’t the case with LLMs. He believes that “bringing down the fences” of agency silos will become even more important in an AI world where you can no longer control brand visibility or reputation by focusing on specific channels, whether it is paid media, earned media or social media.
Manifest operates in a channel agnostic manner that focuses on the creative idea first rather than which channels that idea fits.
“The truth is you need to bring down the fences and just see the creation and the maintenance of brands and cultural velocity of brands as your job as an agency,” he said. “So basically, remove the concept of channel and focus on how you’re going to shift culture. There is only one job for an agency, and that’s not to produce content. Is to make a cultural impact by any media necessary.”
For agencies, AI technology can be a huge opportunity but will require a rethink of an agency’s in-house skills, channel planning, production, geography and other factors. Those that will thrive will have “human creativity” at heart, because with “an explosion of AI-generated swill”, there will be a “premium on non-AI creative concepts that will rise to the top”.
“It’s about not decorating the house; you need to build a new one,” Myers said. “The term ‘agency; has never been more relevant. So we are agents, but not agents of the media anymore. We’re agents of change.
“Media can be anywhere, and it can be anything, and we can all produce it now. So I would say, double down on what makes agencies human. That’s where the value is going to come from, rather than what makes agencies ‘specialist’.”
Is media relations doomed?
This isn’t good news for traditional media businesses that do not diversify their distribution models. The same applies to PR agencies that largely focus on media relations or other services related to legacy media.
Myers believes that as media rapidly evolves, the news mastheads that survive will adopt an omnichannel approach, appearing in podcasts, social media and video, as well as traditional formats like news websites. His point was underlined in Deloitte’s latest Media & Entertainment Consumer Insights Report, the average weekly consumption of news and magazines dropped from 2 hours 50 minutes in 2024 to 2 hours and 5 minutes this year.
Myers describes the distribution of news as a complex system of water pipes that delivers content to audiences across multiple touchpoints. Deloitte’s report (see chart above) illustrates how complex and multifaceted news media consumption has become.
“And if you’re an agency, you need to be the same thing,” he said. “You’re producing ‘branded’ water, rather than ‘media’ water, and you need to make sure that it can exist in all of the plumbing, not just your channel of specialism.
“Realistically, in the future an earned media agency that’s focused on media relations will not last very long. There’s not an existential threat with the skills they posses or the stories that come from PR, comms and earned media focus agencies, but the media in which you are earning coverage is shifting, and it’s going through this at an evolutionary pace.”
The lesson for agencies is to not to squeeze AI into a familiar shaped box—such as GEO being the AI equivalent of SEO—or “look at how we can make money from our clients with AI”. He wants the industry to view advances in AI as an opportunity to reinvent the agency model for the future.
“We can choose to use all these new tools and opportunities to do what we’ve always been doing, but cheaper, or we can choose to do bigger, better things that we’ve never even dreamed of. And that’s harder and more exciting,” he said.
“That’s what is good and exciting about AI; it is managing to dissolve some of these fake paradigms and rules that agencies have created, these limits to creativity, or these realms that mean which budget track you’re on will dictate what the content you produce or what solution you you deliver.
“Indies are having their time, especially in Australia, and I think that’s because they live or die by the quality of the idea. Indies feel like the ones who are ready to surf this new wave.”
