How to Align Social, SEO, PR & Content for AI Search Dominance

Most SEOs will recognize this feeling: hearing a major bombshell development in the search industry and being ~this~ close to smashing the “panic and freak out” button. We’ve heard "SEO is dead" at least a dozen times ourselves. And every time, it has turned out to be... not dead. Just different.

This time, the shift is real (but still not panic button-worthy). Search isn’t going away (people are actually searching more than ever), but the infrastructure underneath it has fundamentally changed.

Google's AI Overviews now appear in over 60% of search results. ChatGPT has 800 million WAU. Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Yahoo Scout... the list of emerging LLMs and AI chatbots grows every quarter.

This change shouldn’t keep you up at night, though. Here's what should: if you're still running SEO, social, PR, and content in separate silos, you might be in trouble. AI search engines care about your website, yes, but that’s not all they’re looking at. They synthesize information about your brand from everywhere:

• Your blog
• Your press coverage
• Your Reddit mentions
• Your LinkedIn thought leadership
• Your customer reviews
• Your YouTube channel

So if your teams aren't talking to each other? AI is going to notice.

Such is the case for a unified AI search strategy: one that aligns every channel into a single, coherent signal that large language models can trust.

What Are Search Strategies in AI?

Before we get tactical, let's make sure we're speaking the same language.

• Traditional search strategy was about matching keywords to pages. Find a term with good volume, build a page around it, get some backlinks, and hope Google ranks you on page one. It worked for a long time, and a lot of us got good at it.
• AI search strategy is a different animal. Instead of optimizing for a single algorithm, you're optimizing for multiple AI systems that pull information from across the entire web, synthesize it, and present a single answer. No "page one." No "ten blue links." Just one answer, maybe with a few citations if you're lucky.

That means your AI search strategy has to account for how LLMs discover, evaluate, and trust your brand. LLMs assess you through a web (haha, nice) of signals, namely:

• Owned content
• Earned media (or PR)
• Social presence (even more so now than before, according to our study)
• Structured data
• Customer reviews
• Messaging consistency

With zero-click searches growing and 80% of consumers relying on zero-click results for at least 40% of their searches, being the cited source matters far more than being the top link.

Had enough yet? Let’s add another layer onto this: as our platform coupling research, visibility studies (SaaS, Finance, Beauty), and AEO Periodic Table have shown, different AI models pull from different sources in different ways for different searches, so your strategy needs to account for those structural differences.

That's a much bigger project. And it requires every team, not just SEO, at the table.

The Silo Problem (& Why It's Killing Your AI Visibility)

Here's what we see all the time:

• A brand's SEO team is grinding away on keyword research and technical audits (without telling Content)
• PR is pitching stories to journalists without any awareness of what the SEO team is targeting
• Social is posting in a timely manner, but not in a way that connects to PR or SEO’s goals
• Content is somewhere in the middle, producing assets that serve nobody's goals particularly well

When it comes to AI search strategy, this fragmentation is a death sentence for visibility.

Let’s back up what we’re telling you with some data. Our most recent study of 6.1M citations across 10 AI platforms found that social citations grew 4x between September and November 2025, while overall citations grew 2-3x. By November, social citations were 4.17x the volume of owned content citations, with Reddit leading the charge (mind you, a platform that many brands don’t have direct control over).

Let that land for a second: the stuff you don't control is now being cited more than the stuff you do control. Meanwhile, BrightEdge research shows approximately 34% of AI citations come from sources brands can influence through PR, and nearly 10% come from social platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit.

What’s the verdict? Almost half of what determines whether an AI search engine mentions your brand has nothing to do with your website's on-page SEO.

If your PR team doesn't know which topics your SEO team is building authority around, they can't pitch stories that reinforce those themes. If your social team isn't amplifying the same narratives, you're missing the brand signals AI uses to assess trust. The key to a successful AI search strategy is cross-team alignment, not hammering in on one aspect of AEO and hoping it sticks to the wall like al dente spaghetti.

How to Build a Unified AI Search Strategy (Channel by Channel)

Okay, enough doom and gloom. Let's get into the actual playbook. Here's how to align your teams, channel by channel, around a shared AI search strategy that actually moves the needle.

1. SEO: The Foundation (Not the Whole House)

SEO is still the bedrock, as SEO is the foundation for successful AEO. Need proof?

• BrightEdge’s research has confirmed that AI Overview citations increasingly overlap with organic rankings, growing from about 32% to nearly 55% over 16 months
• Google commands roughly 89% of U.S. search market share, and organic search still delivers significantly stronger conversions than any other channel

So yes, your SEO still matters, especially technical SEO. Your structured data markup, your internal linking architecture, your alt text and content architecture; all of it. But here's what's different now:

Your SEO strategy has to serve double duty. Every page that’s optimized for traditional search also needs to be readable, parseable, and extractable by AI crawlers. That means:

• Structured formatting with clear headers
• Concise, direct answers to specific questions
• Schema markup for authors, organizations, products, and FAQs
• Fast, mobile-friendly page experiences

Pro Tip: If you need a more in-depth AEO playbook than the one above, you’re in the right place, just the wrong article. Try here instead.

If you don’t believe us, believe the king of search: Google's own guidance from May 2025 said it plainly. Make unique, non-commodity content that fulfills people's needs, and you'll be positioned well for both classic and AI search results.

The role of your SEO team: They can’t just think about keywords anymore. They need to think about entities (the people, brands, products, and concepts that AI systems connect across the web) and semantic relationships. And they need to be feeding insights to every other channel about what topics and questions your brand should be owning.

2. PR: Your Secret Weapon for AI Citations

If there's one channel that's been sleeping on its AI search potential, it's PR. And that's quite a shame, because digital PR might be the single most powerful lever for AI visibility that most brands aren't pulling.

When an AI Overview appears in Google, click-through rates on the top organic listing drop from about 26% to just 7%. But if your brand is cited in that AI Overview? That's where discovery now begins.

There are similarities in how we talk about these two things, too: AI search engines pull from sources they deem credible, clear, and relevant. That sounds a lot like what good PR produces: expert quotes in industry publications, data-backed stories in trusted media, thought leadership that positions your brand as an authority.

The role of your PR team: They have to stop pitching in a vacuum. They must work with the SEO team to identify the topics and entities your brand needs to own. Then, they can pitch stories to the publications that AI search engines actually cite.

(Not to plug our own product, but this is where tools like Goodie become invaluable, because they show you exactly which domains are getting cited across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for the topics that matter to your business.)

3. Social: Not Just Engagement Anymore

The entrance of social into the AEO-sphere is the newest one, and we found out about it through one of our very own studies (which led to a really good platform coupling article, if you’re really wanting to get into the nitty-gritty).

Our research revealed a few key datapoints:

• Social citations grew from roughly 719 per day in September 2025 to over 3,200 per day by December 2025
• Social's share of non-competitor citations jumped from 2.1% to over 7% in just three months
• From September to November 2025, social platforms were generating 4.17x more citations than brand-owned content

This evidence is too powerful to call a “blip”. What we’re witnessing is a structural shift in how AI systems source their answers.

If you haven’t read the platform coupling article yet (or don’t plan to; even though you should), I’ll summarize it for you: not all social platforms work the same way across all AI models. Certain social platforms are structurally tied to specific AI ecosystems:

• YouTube citations, for example, are 82.5% concentrated in Google's AI surfaces (AI Overviews, Gemini, AI Mode)
• X is (unsurprisingly) almost exclusively a Grok source, with 99.7% of its citations coming from that single platform
• Reddit and LinkedIn are the only truly "universal substrates," cited meaningfully across all 10 AI models that we tracked

The role of your Social team: This may start to sound familiar: they’re gonna have to meet your audience where they are, but this time, based on the LLM they use, not on their demographic’s preferred social platform. Here are some tips:

• On LinkedIn, publish thought leadership that reinforces the same topics your SEO and PR teams are targeting. Remember, we’ve dubbed LinkedIn a “universal substrate,” meaning it’s cited by most LLMs about equally.
• On Reddit, engage authentically in the communities where your industry is discussed. Reddit is the other universal citation source, appearing in every AI model's top references. But "engage authentically" is the key phrase here.
• On YouTube, create video content that demonstrates expertise. YouTube has overtaken Reddit as the dominant social citation source overall, growing from 18.9% of social citations in August to 39.2% by December 2025.

The through-line: your social content should reinforce the same themes, expertise, and brand narrative as every other channel.

4. Content: The Connective Tissue

Content is where all of this comes together. Your blog posts, guides, case studies, and landing pages are the connective tissue that links your SEO strategy, to your PR narratives, to your social presence.

But here’s our word of caution re: content and copywriting (you should have seen it coming). Be wary of writing content for machines and not humans, or worse, generating a 3,500-word how-to guide in 45 seconds and slapping a page title and meta description on it.

Google's Liz Reid, VP of Search, said it in late 2025: low-quality content that just repeats what's already out there without adding something new will be downranked. So your content strategy for AI search needs to prioritize original research, first-party data, expert perspectives, and genuinely useful information that can't be found anywhere else. It needs clear, structured formatting. It needs to connect thematically to your broader brand narrative. And it needs to be updated regularly, because AI systems show a real bias toward freshness.

The role of your Content team: Find every major topic your brand wants to own, and create an interconnected content ecosystem for it. A pillar page with comprehensive coverage. Supporting blog posts on specific subtopics. FAQ content that directly answers the questions people (and AI) are asking. Video and visual assets. And make sure it's all internally linked in a way that signals semantic relationships to both traditional search engines and AI crawlers.

Let’s put it all together, shall we?

How to Dominate AI Search Results

Domination is a strong word, but we can go there. Here's the playbook:

1. Audit your current AI visibility. Before you change anything, understand your starting point. Where does your brand appear in AI search results? What's the sentiment? How do you stack up against competitors? A platform like Goodie gives you this information across every major AI engine (without the effort of prompting each one individually).
2. Align your teams around shared topics. Identify the 10 to 15 core topics your brand needs to own, informed by keyword research, customer insights, competitive analysis, and business priorities. Then make sure your SEO, PR, Social, and Content teams are all building toward them in a coordinated way.
3. Don't forget the technical foundations. Make sure AI crawlers can actually access your content. Check your robots.txt. Consider implementing an LLMs.txt file. Ensure your site loads fast, works on mobile, and has clean, crawlable architecture. Table stakes, but you'd be surprised how many brands get it wrong.
4. Create an integrated content calendar. Map out how each channel reinforces your core topics. When your content team publishes a pillar page, your PR team should be pitching related stories. Your social team should be posting supporting content. Your SEO team should be building internal links and optimizing structured data.
5. Invest in original research and data. Nothing builds AI citation authority faster than being the original source of a statistic or insight. If you produce original research that others reference, you become a "core source" that AI systems cite repeatedly.
6. Monitor, measure, and iterate. AI search engines are evolving, and new engines are still emerging. Use your AI visibility monitoring tool to track what's working, catch drops quickly, and adjust in real time.

The Convergence Is the Strategy

Here's the thing we keep coming back to: we're not watching the death of search. We're watching the convergence of channels. The assets produced by Search, Social, PR, and Content teams are all being judged by AI engines on the same core signals: authority, originality, and trust.

That means a winning AI search strategy is one that finally breaks down those silos and builds a consistent, recognizable, and expert entity across channels. That's harder than gaming an algorithm. But if you can pull it off? You won't just show up in AI search results. You'll be the answer.

And if you're wondering where to start, Goodie was built for exactly this moment. It helps you see where your brand stands across every major AI search engine, identify the gaps, and take action. Because you can't win a game you're not even measuring.

AI Search Strategy: FAQs

What is the 30% rule in AI?

You've probably seen this question floating around, and it's worth addressing because it connects directly to how you should think about AI in your marketing workflow.

The 30% rule in AI is a widely cited framework suggesting that AI should automate roughly 30% of your work, specifically the repetitive, rule-based tasks, while humans handle the remaining 70% that requires creativity, strategy, and judgment. Starting with 30% automation gives you quick wins without the chaos of trying to automate everything.

How to do AI search optimization?

Here's what to prioritize:

• Nail your structured data. Implement schema markup for your organization, authors, products, FAQs, and reviews.
• Write in extractable formats. AI engines synthesize information by pulling specific passages from your content. Write clear, concise answers to specific questions. Use descriptive headers. Keep paragraphs focused on a single idea.
• Build H-E-E-A-T signals everywhere. Helpfulness, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are the primary signals AI uses to evaluate whether your content is worth citing.
• Optimize across platforms, not just Google. Google AI Overviews favor concise, structured answers. ChatGPT prioritizes comprehensive topical coverage with strong entity relationships. Perplexity leans toward content rich in facts and comparisons. Your content needs to work across all of them.
• Monitor your AI visibility. Don’t optimize blind; you can't improve what you can't measure. Goodie's platform tracks where your brand appears across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and more.
• Prioritize freshness and accuracy. AI systems show a measurable bias toward recent, accurate content. Add "last updated" dates. Refresh data regularly. Cite credible sources.