The goalposts aren't moving. (It just feels like it.)

Trust your instincts. Learn the tools.

Open your inbox and everyone is telling you something different. Search is dead. SEO is dead. You need AEO. No wait, GEO. Here's a dashboard. Here's an audit. Here's a new acronym and a monthly fee to go with it.

I get why people are chasing. Something big is happening to how buyers find information. And no one – or everyone – seems to have the answer.

But after spending time with the latest research on what AI tools actually read and cite, I've realized, the goalposts haven't moved.

Remember that scene in Hoosiers, where Coach Dale measures everything in the bigger gym, just to show his players that the dimensions are the same? That’s where we are now. And yes, I did just mix sports in trying to make this point.

(Ok, let’s stick to one sport. I’ll choose football, since we’re in the thick of that season.)

The conditions have changed.

The goalposts can stay put. But sometimes the conditions change how you play the game. (Because sometimes you only attempt three passes in biblical rain.)

So, let's be honest about what has changed:

Fewer people are clicking. Publishers – wait, you know what? Let’s define publishers as it pertains to this. For the purpose of this blog, publishers=media.

Ok, back to it. Publishers surveyed by the Reuters Institute expect their search traffic to fall by more than 40% over the next three years. Google organic traffic to more than 2,500 news sites was already down a third globally between November 2024 and November 2025. Ipsos estimates about half of online searches now involve an AI-generated answer. Bottom line: people don’t need to click as much because AI is giving them the info direct.

The AI search engines don't agree with each other. Muck Rack analyzed more than 40 million AI responses across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Only 212 domains showed up across all four. And before you ask ‘can’t we just hit those 212?’…well, no. Not really. Because…well, here – take a look at the top 5:

• Forbes.com 

• Linkedin.com

• Energy.gov

• EPA.gov

• FDA.gov

I’m willing to bet those top 5 aren’t always (ever?) your top 5. Bottom line: Each engine reads its own slice of the internet. So yes, your targets still matter.

They don't agree with themselves, either. Here’s where things get interesting. This is why you’re getting so much data…and why you’re trying to read and digest it all.

Between April and September, ChatGPT's share of citations from government and nonprofit sources jumped from 10% to 35%. In return…Reuters, the Financial Times, AP and Axios each dropped to near zero in ChatGPT's answers for a stretch this year.

The result: Ask the same question twice on the same day and the sources overlap anywhere from 41% to 94%, depending on the tool.

Bottom line: Don’t build your strategy around how one engine behaves this month to the next. Not yet anyway. We don’t have enough data to show us that the field is set.

No one is moving the goalposts.

Although they might if back-up college kickers keep hitting 60-yarders.

Let’s look at what doesn’t change, regardless of the conditions.

AI trusts what other people say about you. About 99% of the links AI tools cite come from non-paid sources. Paid or advertorial content combined account for roughly 1%. The overwhelming majority of citations come from third party sources. Bottom line: Thought leadership is still a key part of your content mix.

Editorial still beats pay-to-play. Muck Rack looked at how ChatGPT cites Forbes. In almost every type of question, Forbes editorial content outperformed its paid Councils content. This isn’t to disparage the Councils content. However, it is to say… Bottom line: AI puts significant value in earned content.

Smaller outlets punch above their weight. Claude, Gemini and Perplexity tend to cite news outlets with fewer than 1 million monthly visitors. Claude in particular leans on trade and regional publications. That focused industry outlet with a modest circulation may be showing up in more AI answers than you'd guess. Bottom line: Targeting trade, specialty and in-market/regional outlets isn’t new. Thank goodness because they still score high in credibility, even when it’s the machines doing the searching.

Communicators are noticing. In this year's Ipsos Reputation Council interviews, one senior comms leader put it plainly: "People sort of declared the death of the press release. Well, guess what? That's really important now... Earned media is actually sexy again. Local media is sexy again."

Ipsos goes further, describing GEO as "reputation management for a machine-mediated information environment." Bottom line: Don’t get distracted by the GEO part of that last sentence. It’s the reputation management – the core function of a PR-driven content strategy – that matters.

Your game plan for the content mix

So, let’s review: goalposts? Not moving. Conditions? Wear layers. Bring a jacket. Pack snacks.

As the ones responsible for content strategy, we need to plan for everything. So how do we do that? Without having to carry around a Denny’s style playbook?

“Make earned media your quarterback.” Everything else in the mix works off it. Coverage, expert commentary and bylines in credible outlets are the most durable assets you have. They get cited across engines, and they keep getting cited long after the story runs. A placement used to be worth its readership. Now it's also a source a machine may reference every time someone asks about your category.

Go deep! (In your trade and regional outlets.) If a client asks, "Can we get into the Wall Street Journal?", you now have a better answer. For most B2B companies, a steady presence in the four or five publications their buyers read will do more for AI visibility than one big national hit. And spread it out. No single outlet reaches every engine.

Have a game plan. Muck Rack found the type of question decides what gets cited:

Start with the questions. What are your buyers asking? Then decide which ones you answer on your site and which ones need a credible third party to answer for you.

Defense is still the best offense. Protect this house!!! Yep, owned media still matters, especially product and service pages, (58% of owned-media citations) and how-to guides (24%). Clear specs, real use cases and honest how-to content give AI something useful to pull when the question is about you.

Earned coverage provides the outside validation. Owned content provides the details. Yep, you need both.

Get your stars the damn ball. The Reuters Institute found that 76% of publishers plan to get their journalists to act more like creators, because audiences trust people more than institutions. The same applies to your clients. An engineer or a plant manager who comments on industry trends is the kind of expert analysis AI looks for, and the kind of voice reporters want to quote.

Check the film. Muck Rack found that most major publishers blocking Claude's search crawler got almost no Claude citations, and Gemini showed a similar pattern. It's worth knowing whether your priority outlets, and your own site, allow the AI tools your buyers use.

Every day is a two-minute drill. So just calm down.

Ipsos calls this moment the "Judgement Economy." When content is cheap and answers are machine-generated, the scarce thing is knowing what to trust, which signals matter and when to act. Their advice to comms leaders: invest in judgment, not just content production.

In other words, we need to be sharper than ever when it comes to the fundamentals and how we’ve built our core content strategy. Some of that is trusting ourselves to tune out the noise and using our judgement to buy-in to what matters…versus what matters right now.

People telling you the goalposts moved want you to keep throwing out your game plan. If you ever had one to begin with. When in fact, the data says the opposite. AI is doing what your buyers have always done. It looks for credible sources, trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself, and rewards useful answers to real questions.

Our playbook may be changing. But our goal(posts) shouldn’t.

Turn pain into gain -- in other words, let's talk about your goals. 

Sources

• Muck Rack, What Is AI Reading? (October 2026)
• Ipsos, Reputation Council Report 2026
• Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026