On a recent episode of The B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan, Wendy White, CMO of Daxko and a former Microsoft and Intel marketing leader (and former US Army psychological-operations officer), gave us insights from her viewpoint on a range of topics regarding marketing shifts in a world dominated by AI, and ultimately, how to think strategically about the business.

I really enjoyed listening to the latest interview:

What stood out to me the most was a very solid integrated view of the whole marketing function, with interesting callouts on the importance of partnerships, her global teams, and how she’s looking at and reporting on AI visibility. The strongest piece, however, was about speaking the language of peer executives in business strategy and finance, something I’ve been personally trying to grow in. Listen to the episode first, and see some of my notes below!

I’ll be honest, I’ve never heard of Daxko, but in looking into the company more, it reminds me a lot of one of the first companies I worked at, Active Network, which owned a portfolio of sports software companies. Active Network was acquired by Vista Equity Partners, so there’s something that PE firms like about sports software.

I do think a little bit of context on Daxko helps. Some recent highlights:

This summary article by yours truly summarizes my favorite ideas from her playbook and stress-tests it against research from HBR, McKinsey, and the studies now measuring how LLMs actually choose what to cite.

My favorite highlights from the pod:

  • Daxko’s CMO Wendy White, believes that PR and earned media are “back” because earned media is the raw material LLMs cite when they recommend brands.
  • She built a new brand scorecard and presented it to her board: AI visibility, brand sentiment on Reddit and G2, and share of citation. (Many can reuse this approach)
  • My outside research shows earned media drives roughly 84% of AI citations (Muck Rack), while 68% of Google searches now end without a click (SparkToro).
  • HBR frames the shift as moving from “from search engine optimization to generative engine optimization” (Puntoni, HBR).
  • The CMO move: treat AI visibility as a board-level metric and fund the digital PR that earns it.

What is AI visibility?

AI visibility is how often, and how favorably, your brand appears in answers generated by AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude. It’s the AI-era successor to “where do we rank?”, except the answer is synthesized rather than clicked.

The Numbers Show Traditional Google Search Clicks are Dropping. Is SEO Dead?

Marketing leaders feel the ground shifting in traditional Google Search, often optimized with SEO practices.

  1. In 2026, 68% of Google searches end without a click (SparkToro)
  2. Google’s AI Overviews have cut click-through rates for the #1 organic result by 58% (Ahrefs).
  3. AI Overviews now appear on roughly 48% of searches and on 99.9% of informational queries (Search Engine Journal).

So “is SEO dead?” is the wrong question. SEO didn’t die but we need better metrics to track what’s happening.

1. “PR is back,” and this time it’s a ranking factor

White’s sharpest line was about a channel most CMOs spent the last decade defunding:

“When I was first a CMO 15 years ago, PR was incredibly important. We had a dedicated PR agency. It was all about that earned media, and then there was a trough where that all went away, because everybody was self-publishing. And lo and behold, 2026, PR is like one of my top things again.” — Wendy White, CMO, Daxko

Her reason was more nostalgia than mechanics, quite frankly:

“How can I get authoritative earned media in my industry and outside my industry? Because it’s a leading source of content for the LLM.”

Why this holds up:

  • Earned media accounts for roughly 84% of all AI citations, with journalism alone making up about 27% of cited sources (Muck Rack, May 2026).
  • When brand content is distributed through third-party news outlets, citation rates jumped from an 8% baseline to 34%, a 325% lift (AuthorityTech).
  • HBR’s Stefano Puntoni (Wharton) describes the same transition: the move “from search engine optimization to generative engine optimization favors brands whose information is structured, trusted, and easy for AI systems to synthesize” (HBR, Feb 2026).

This is the argument behind our own take on digital PR for SEO, AEO, and AI search: earned coverage is now an AI-visibility input, not just an awareness play.

Key takeaway: Owned content tells the model what you say about yourself. Earned media tells the model what credible third parties say about you, and that’s what gets cited.

2. AI visibility vs. SEO: the terms a CMO needs to keep straight

You don’t need to win the jargon war. You need to know what each term points at.

TermWhat it optimizesThe question it answers
SEORanking in the ten blue links“Where do we appear in results?”
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)Being the answer an engine returns“Are we the response?”
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)Being cited inside AI-generated text“Does the model quote us?”
AI visibilityThe brand-level outcome of all of the above“How often and how well do AIs surface us?”

White prefers “AI visibility” over “GEO” for a reason that matters in a boardroom: it’s framed around the brand outcome a CMO already owns, not an acronym an SEO team owns. That framing turns a technical discipline into a brand metric a board will fund. (For the tactical version of each term, see our AEO best practices for 2026.)

Why the urgency is real, in three data points:

  • AI Overviews appear on ~48% of searches and 99.9% of informational queries (SEJ).
  • Position-1 organic CTR is down 58% where an AI Overview appears (Ahrefs). (Worth knowing how the surfaces differ: AI Overviews vs. AI Mode vs. Gemini.)
  • Most searches now resolve inside the answer, not on your site (SparkToro).

3. The new brand scorecard White took to her board

This is the part worth copying. White didn’t add AI visibility as a side experiment. She rebuilt the brand-measurement matrix and walked her board through it:

“I kicked off the board meeting by telling the board that I was instituting a new brand measure for the company — made up of what I considered to be the leading indicators of brand in the market, and things that I could not measure before that I was measuring now because I had used AI to start doing that.” — Wendy White, CMO, Daxko

She named the inputs directly: brand sentiment “out in Reddit and on G2 — not just scores, but sentiment,” the split between direct/referral traffic versus SEO-driven traffic, AI visibility as a scored metric, and share of citation influence.

The 5-line AI-visibility scorecard for CMOs:

  1. Share of citation: how often AI answers cite you for your core topics.
  2. Brand sentiment: Reddit, G2, and review platforms, read for tone, not just star ratings.
  3. Direct vs. organic traffic: are people typing your name in because an answer mentioned you?
  4. Earned-media footprint: the volume and authority of third-party coverage feeding the models.
  5. AI Overview presence: whether you appear when AI summarizes your category.

Where you appear depends heavily on the engine, so the scorecard should be read per-platform:

PlatformCites sources in…Avg. sources per answerLeans hardest on
ChatGPT96% of responses~5Wikipedia
Gemini82% of responses~8Reddit
Claude55% of responses~13PubMed Central

Sources: tryanalyze.ai, Contently.

We pressure-tested this on real pages in our own AEO analysis of what ChatGPT actually cites, and the pattern held: cited pages skew toward third-party authority, not self-promotion. (Tracking the direct-vs-organic split cleanly is a technical SEO job, not a guess.)

Key takeaway: If ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia and Gemini leans on Reddit, “AI visibility” is really a question about third-party validation, which is exactly what earned media produces.

4. How you actually earn AI visibility

Here the academic research and the CMO agree. Princeton’s GEO study (Aggarwal et al., presented at ACM KDD 2024) tested nine optimization methods across roughly 10,000 queries and found the levers that move AI citations:

  • Adding statistics: up to +41% visibility.
  • Adding quotations: +41%.
  • Adding authoritative citations: +30%, and as much as +115% for lower-ranked pages.

Read those three again. Statistics, quotations, and third-party citations are the exact outputs of a competent digital PR program — original data, quotable executives, and coverage in credible outlets. HBR’s framing closes the loop: the brands that win are the ones whose information is “structured, trusted, and easy for AI systems to synthesize” (HBR).

The CMO playbook in four moves:

  1. Publish original data. Proprietary research is the most-cited content type. Be the source of the statistic.
  2. Earn third-party coverage. Digital PR turns your data into the journalism LLMs cite.
  3. Make executives quotable. Quotations are a measured ranking lever, not a vanity exercise.
  4. Structure for extraction. Clear definitions, tables, and answer-first formatting help models lift your content cleanly.

Volume alone is not the moat. White’s team produces content at scale (more on that below), but it’s the distribution through earned media that converts volume into citations.

(At GFD this is the core of our digital PR and digital PR for AEO work: original-research-led PR, fed by a content engine, built specifically to earn the citations that drive AI visibility.)

5. The uncomfortable part: AI visibility is an operating-model change

White is candid that none of this works as a tool purchase. It required reorganizing the team.

“We started telling people AI is not a choice. We started interviewing for it, we changed all of our job descriptions, and we changed our career ladder to include AI capabilities.” — Wendy White, CMO, Daxko

She tore out hand-off-heavy process — “Asana was killing us” — and pushed back toward vertically integrated generalists because “the thing that actually drags you down is the organizational lag and handoff between teams.” Her execution model runs on a “follow the sun” team and a board of 80-plus AI agents, so her mornings are about approving finished work, not kicking off projects: “Can you approve these six things? Not, can we start this project today?”

McKinsey’s research says she’s early, not unusual:

  • The CMO role is “expanding accordingly — from steward of brand and demand to orchestrator of data, technology, and AI-enabled execution” (McKinsey, Apr 2026).
  • Agentic AI may eventually power as much as two-thirds of current marketing activities, and agentic workflows can drive 10–30% revenue growth from hyperpersonalization (McKinsey).
  • But the gap is brutal: “Nearly 90% of CMOs are experimenting with AI… but less than 10% have captured value across end-to-end workflows” (McKinsey).

Key takeaway: The CMOs pulling ahead aren’t buying an AI visibility tool. They’re rewiring the org chart so earned-media-grade content ships daily.

The bottom line for marketing leaders

SEO isn’t dead; the scorecard changed. AI visibility is becoming a board-level brand metric, and the most reliable way to earn it is the channel many teams cut years ago: authoritative, earned third-party coverage. White put it in terms a board understands — leading indicators she “could not measure before.” HBR and McKinsey describe the same shift in their own language. The CMOs who win the next cycle are the ones funding digital PR now, while their competitors are still arguing about whether to optimize for ChatGPT.

Want the short version each week? Tech CMO Wire breaks down what AI-native marketing leaders are actually doing — and how to copy it. (Subscribe / follow CTA.)

FAQ

What is AI visibility? AI visibility is how often and how favorably your brand appears in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude. It’s the AI-era equivalent of search rankings, measured by citations and mentions inside synthesized answers rather than by blue-link position.

How do you rank in ChatGPT? You “rank” in ChatGPT by earning citations from the sources it trusts. ChatGPT cites sources in about 96% of responses and leans heavily on Wikipedia and authoritative third-party media (tryanalyze.ai). The fastest path is original data plus earned media coverage that those sources reference.

How do you get cited by LLMs? Add statistics, quotations, and authoritative citations to your content — the three tactics Princeton’s GEO study found lift AI visibility by 30–41%. Then amplify through digital PR, since third-party distribution raised citation rates by up to 325% (AuthorityTech).

Is digital PR worth it for AI search? Yes. Earned media accounts for roughly 84% of all AI citations (Muck Rack), making digital PR one of the highest-leverage investments for AI visibility.

Is SEO dead in 2026? No, but its measurement changed. With 68% of searches ending without a click (SparkToro) and AI Overviews cutting top-result clicks by 58% (Ahrefs), the goal is shifting from ranking links to being cited in answers.

What’s the difference between AEO, GEO, and LLM SEO? They describe the same shift from different angles: AEO optimizes for being the answer an engine returns, GEO optimizes for being cited inside generative responses, and “LLM SEO” is the informal umbrella term. AI visibility is the brand-level outcome all three drive toward.

Sources

Joe Robison

Founder & Consultant
Joe Robison is the founder of Green Flag Digital. He founded the agency in 2015 and has been heads-down scaling content marketing and SEO services for clients ever since. He is an occasional surfer, fledgling yogi, and sucker for organized travel tours.