Before you optimise for AI, answer this: Why should it choose you?
The IAB is right that every discipline has a role. However, capability without a defined script simply encourages best-guess execution, writes Paul Evans.
James Chandler’s recent piece was great. In a market where every go-to-market discipline is attempting to claim GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) as its own, the IAB UK’s chief strategy officer argues that the fight for ownership itself is the problem. PR, SEO, content, advertising: each has a role; none owns the territory alone.
He is 100% right. I found the piece more useful than most of what is being written about AI discovery and visibility right now, precisely because it resists the turf war. But it stops one layer short of the answer. In fact, it skipped the most fundamental step entirely.
Chandler maps out what each discipline does. PR generates the citations that AI models trust. Advertising builds the awareness that causes people to ask about you. Creative work earns coverage. Consistency ensures AI can connect the dots across your touchpoints. All correct. All execution.
What none of it answers is: execution of what?
Every discipline in that list needs to know the same things before it can do its job properly. What problem does this business solve? What value does it create that competitors do not? For which customer? In which category? Framed against which alternatives?
These are positioning questions.
Until a business has answered them coherently, it is asking PR to generate unfocused coverage, advertising to build awareness for something undifferentiated, and content teams to be consistent about nothing in particular.
The article’s own evidence makes this case, almost inadvertently. Kantar’s “share of model” data shows Emirates matching British Airways in AI mentions, despite being roughly a third of BA’s brand size among UK consumers.
But Emirates does not appear as often as it does in AI answers because it issued more press releases. It appears because AI chat interfaces can identify what Emirates is, what it offers, and why it belongs in a recommendation – and they do so more effectively than BA. Emirates’ positioning is ultimately clear enough for a machine to act on.
Clarity is a positioning outcome
The scale of this shift demands attention. Forrester’s 2026 Buyers’ Journey Survey, which surveyed 18,000 global buyers, found that 94% now use AI in their purchasing process. The same will be true of advertisers and media agency planners and buyers in our own industry.
Generative AI has become the single most meaningful information source across every phase of the buying process, ranking ahead of vendor websites, sales teams, and product experts.
Research by Edelman confirms that 90% of the citations driving brand visibility in AI come from earned and owned media rather than paid placements. PR is clearly the primary distribution channel for AI visibility. But PR distributes what positioning defines. Without a resolved positioning, you are distributing noise at scale – not to mention wasted investment.
Chandler closes his article with an observation that is, at its core, a positioning argument dressed in GEO language: “If every touchpoint describes your brand differently, you’re asking AI to connect dots that shouldn’t need connecting.” This is true, but inconsistency across touchpoints is a symptom, not a cause.
Businesses whose website says one thing and sales team pitches something else are in fact suffering from a failure in positioning – and no amount of touchpoint alignment can compensate for that. However, if you fix the strength and clarity of positioning, then consistency will follow.
GEO does not need another owner. It needs a strategic foundation.
The IAB is right that every discipline has a role. However, capability without a defined script simply encourages best-guess execution.
I’m not claiming positioning should own GEO in any way. Positioning is the script every business needs. It defines the problem you solve, the value you create, how you deliver it, the category you operate in, the alternatives you compete against, and the customer you serve.
Get those six strategic positioning dimensions right and every downstream discipline, from PR to content to advertising, knows exactly what to say and why. Get them wrong, or leave them unresolved, and the best GEO execution in the world optimises irrelevance.
The businesses that AI will recommend are not the ones with the largest budgets or the sharpest technical optimisation. They are the ones that have done the harder work – the positioning work – of deciding what they are, for whom, and why it matters, then said it clearly enough that a machine can recommend it without hesitation.
That work comes before everything else. It always has. AI just made the cost of skipping it much more visible.
Paul Evans is the founder and chief positioning engineer at V2RSION