GEO and AI search consultant · for PR and comms people
No hype, no BS. Just practical, realistic advice.
AI is writing about your brand. Nobody controls what it says. And there's no magic bullet.
But you can influence it. I'm Russ Read-Barrow, a GEO and AI search consultant for PR and comms teams. I'll help you understand how ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI and the rest see your brand, work out what to change and what to leave alone, and decide where to invest for the long term.
Twenty years in international PR, agency-side. No scores, no dashboards.
What PR and comms teams actually need
Three things worth knowing about your brand in AI search.
Share of voice
How often AI talks about you, against the competitors that matter.
Your brand's share of voice in AI answers, across the questions your audiences really ask and the AI tools they use.
The sources
Who AI is quoting when it talks about your market, and why.
The outlets, journalists, sites, reviewers and voices that shape the answers. The ones it trusts, and the ones it ignores.
The content
What kind of content is actually influencing AI.
The types, styles and formats that keep getting cited, from news coverage and expert comment to reviews, comparisons and reference pages.
All of it feeds straight into your content and media relations strategy: who to pitch, what to publish, and where to put your budget.
Talk to me about your brandI've simplified things.
Known & Cited used to sell fixed packages, scores and named reports. I've dropped all of it. Now it's me, working on whatever your brand actually needs. If you find an older post here that talks about the old way, that's why.
Why Known & Cited
To be known, you have to be cited.
When someone asks an AI about your market, it builds the answer from sources. If you're one of them, you've been cited.
Being known by the people you want to reach now depends, in part, on being referenced by AI. I'll help you find out whether you're being cited and, if you're not, how to go about changing that.
The AI links to a page as evidence for its answer. Your site, a news story, a review, a forum thread.
Your brand is named inside an article or page on someone else's site, which the AI reads and repeats. That's where a lot of PR's work already lives.
What the data says
The numbers, and how far to trust them.
AI search is new, and most research on it is young, small or paid for by someone selling something. Here's what I think is solid right now, with the catch for each.
of AI citations come from earned media, across more than 25 million links in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.[1]
How far to trust it: it's a broad definition, taking in journalism, academic, government and encyclopaedia sources. Journalism alone is about a quarter. Paid content is 0.3%. The pattern has held across three editions since July 2025.
chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI give you the same list of brands twice for the same question.[2]
How far to trust it: 12 prompts, nearly 3,000 runs by 600 volunteers, co-authored by a company that sells AI tracking. The useful part: how often a brand appears across many runs was far steadier than where it ranked.
of Google AI Mode citations aren't in the organic top ten for the same search.[3]
How far to trust it: one Google product, nearly 40,000 US and UK queries, February 2026. It tells you good SEO isn't the whole story. It doesn't tell you SEO has stopped mattering.
people use ChatGPT every week.[4]
How far to trust it: OpenAI's own figure, from February 2026. Weekly users aren't the same as people asking about brands like yours, so treat it as a sense of scale.
Most of what AI says about your brand is said by someone else, and it says it a little differently every time. That makes this a PR question as much as a search one.
More in my GEO research library, the plain-English What is GEO? and my map of the UK landscape.
How I help
I start with your problem, not a package.
Every brand is somewhere different. Some teams need the basics explained. Some need a clear set of rules. Some need proper research into their own corner of the market. Most need a mix. I'll suggest what makes sense, and nothing more.
Getting your team up to speed
Awareness and education. Sessions and talks on how AI search works, what it means for reputation and coverage, and where the hype runs ahead of the evidence. Good for teams who keep getting asked about AI and want a straight answer.
Doing the basics properly
Practical guidance on the best practice that makes your brand easier for AI search engines to find, trust and consider. Your own site, your coverage, your spokespeople and the third-party places AI reads. Clear rules you can use without buying a platform. My free GEO guide is a taste.
Finding out who owns your space
Tailored research into the things PR and comms people care about: your brand's share of voice in AI answers, who is being cited instead of you, and why. A clear picture of your corner of the market at a point in time.
Priced per brief. Tell me the problem and I'll tell you what I'd do and what it costs. See my approach in full.
How I think about it
Anyone selling certainty about AI search is guessing.
It's messy. It changes weekly. There are more variables than anyone can count, and a product that promises to fix your AI visibility can be out of date within days of a model update. I won't sell you one.
But messy isn't the same as hopeless. There are still things you can do right, and it's still worth understanding. Get the basics right, keep what's already working, then put your budget where it counts: finding out who owns the space you care about, and why. I'll help you work out the best way to approach it.
I'm also tool-agnostic. I don't sell a platform and I'm not tied to one. I use whichever tools suit the brief, and I tell you which ones and why.
What I won't do
- Give you a score.
- Sell you complicated tracking.
- Measure things for the sake of measuring them.
- Pretend I know what AI will say about you next month.
You get what you need to make a decision. No fluff.
Why me
It's me you're hiring.
Known & Cited is one consultant: me. I spent twenty years agency-side in international PR, so I know the pressure you're under, what a coverage report is for, and how this lands in a client meeting. I came to GEO because it has turned into a reputation question, and reputation is what I know.
You won't be handed to a junior or a dashboard. You talk to me, and I do the work.
Get in touch
Tell me the problem.
A short email is fine: what's going on, what you've been asked, and when you need it. I'll give you an honest answer, including if I'm not the right person.
Sources
- Muck Rack, What Is AI Reading?, May 2026 edition. Announcement
- SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai, AI recommendation consistency study, 2026. Summary in Search Engine Land
- Moz, study of nearly 40,000 Google AI Mode queries, February 2026. Moz
- OpenAI, reported February 2026. TechCrunch