For decades, discovery has dictated how brands meet audiences. From the Yellow Pages to Google, each era rewrote the rules of visibility. The Hoffman Agency has lived through every stage of this shift — often as one of the first to the game. Over the past decade, our point of view has been consistent: SEO and earned media are inseparable, with organic search best understood as earned search. Now, we’re entering the next chapter: discovery through generative AI engines.
Headlines claiming that “SEO is dead” oversimplify what’s really happening. Search isn’t disappearing, it’s transforming. In the Google era, discovery hinged on short, blunt keywords: “best rugged laptop”, “IT vendors Singapore”, “PR agency London”. The task for brands was straightforward: make sure your site was optimized, ranked, and listed on page one. Visibility was transactional; show up in the index and you had a shot at the click.
Generative AI changes that equation. Instead of keyword stubs, people now ask fuller, context-rich questions:
- “Which rugged laptop holds up best for field engineers working in oil and gas?”
- “Who are the top cybersecurity vendors trusted by mid-market banks in Asia?”
- “What’s the most effective way to measure brand visibility in AI-driven discovery?”
These aren’t abstract examples. They’re exactly the type of prompts people are putting put to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity. Already, 58% of consumers now use AI for product or service recommendations, including evaluating vendors — twice as many as in 2023. Analysts forecast that by 2026, one in four searches will flow through AI chatbots.
That’s why traffic from large language models is typically higher value. The questions are richer. The context is deeper. And the intent is clearer. Someone typing “best laptop” into Google might be browsing. Someone asking, “Which brand of drones is most trusted by oilfield engineers?” is probably much closer to deciding.
That’s also where PR comes in. These richer queries lean heavily on trusted, third-party sources like press coverage, analyst reports, expert commentary and industry reviews. In other words, the very currency of PR. As the playing field shifts, the levers we’ve always pulled to build credibility are becoming even more critical in shaping what AI engines surface. This isn’t just a channel shift. It’s a new playing field tailor-made for PR to play a bigger role.
Rethinking visibility in the AI era
For PR, credibility has always been the game. What has changed now is how these signals get used. The influence of earned mentions and trusted third-party validation is no longer limited to people; they also feed the algorithms. The signals that sway journalists and decision-makers are now the raw material training generative engines. In other words, the same building blocks of reputation now double as inputs that teach AI what to surface and trust.
At Hoffman, this realization hit close to home. Measuring visibility has always been our business, first through media monitoring, then social listening, then SEO audits. Each step reflected the way audiences were discovering brands and each time, we built new methods to help clients understand where they stood and how to strengthen their presence.
It made us ask a simple but urgent question: if people are now discovering brands through AI-generated answers, how do we measure and improve that visibility? That led us to build a new capability designed to give brands a clearer view of how they’re represented inside large language models and what’s shaping those answers.
Meet GEDI: Generative Engine Discovery Insights
When we started exploring this space we didn’t want to chase AI for AI’s sake. The industry is already flooded with shiny demos (some of them more smoke than substance) solving problems that aren’t exactly tied to the most urgent business challenges clients face. Our goal was to create something practical that extends the visibility frameworks we’ve always relied on and delivers insight clients can actually use. That’s how our AI visibility radar Generative Engine Discovery Insights (GEDI) was born, built 100% in-house, from the codebase to the interface, to show how brands are represented inside large language models and what’s shaping those answers.
Here’s what it does:
- Discovery Workshop – Expands prompts into the real-world, conversational questions people are most likely to ask.
- Query Engines – Runs those questions simultaneously across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
- Source Analysis – Reveals which domains the engines trust and cite most frequently.
- Overlap Analysis – Compares answers across engines to expose bias, blind spots, or inconsistencies.
The outcome is a clear, data-backed picture of a brand’s visibility in AI powered discovery; with insights we can turn directly into stronger PR, content, and marketing strategies. And this isn’t vaporware. We built GEDI with no reliance on external platforms, giving us full control over how it works and how it evolves. What started as a proof of concept is already functional enough to generate reports and insights, and we’ve begun testing it with clients. It’s a working capability, built to solve real problems in a rapidly changing landscape.
From rankings to references
Traditional SEO was about climbing higher on Google’s results page. Generative AI doesn’t replace that, but it changes the rules: citations now sit alongside rankings as critical signals. Being mentioned is nice, but being cited is what counts. It’s the signal that AI engines trust you or, just as critically, trust sources aligned with you. That trust is what ultimately shapes the answers your customers, partners, or stakeholders see.
GEDI helps clients understand exactly how they show up in those moments of choice. A B2B tech firm, for instance, can see whether its products are cited in head-to-head comparisons and which sources are driving those mentions. A semiconductor company can audit how its employer brand appears in talent-related prompts like “best companies to work for in chip design” and identify where competitors are filling the gaps.
This kind of insight gives us the foundation to shape stronger communications strategies that align with how AI is already presenting brands to audiences. In short, if your competitor is the one shaping the material that AI engines trust, they’re effectively writing the script of discovery. GEDI makes sure our clients have a say in that story.
GEDI isn’t the end of the journey; it’s the beginning of a new way to understand visibility. For us it extends a tradition of measuring influence, from media monitoring to social listening to SEO and now into the era of generative AI.
Our belief is simple: brands can’t control the AI black box, but they can influence the inputs that engines rely on. With GEDI, we’re giving our clients the clarity to see those patterns and the confidence to act on them. As discovery continues to evolve, so will we, building capabilities that help clients not only keep pace, but stay ahead.
