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The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson
The PR Breakdown reveals the moves behind the mess. Crisis communication expert Molly McPherson dissects the viral scandals, celebrity meltdowns, and corporate disasters dominating headlines to show you the strategic mistakes and desperate moves that destroy reputations - so you never make them yourself.
The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson
PR in the Age of GEO: How to Make Sure AI Gets Your Story Right
You saw “GEO” in the title and almost tuned out, didn’t you? Hold that thought. If you work in communications, PR, media, or journalism, this episode might just change how you think about your job.
GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, is not another passing buzzword. It is the next major shift in how information is found, shared, and trusted. It shapes how AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini decide which stories and brands get surfaced.
In this episode, Muck Rack’s CEO and Co-Founder, Greg Gallant, joins me to explain how GEO is reshaping public relations. He walks through how Muck Rack evolved from the early social media boom to the frontlines of AI-driven communications. We dig into how data and generative tools can help communicators strengthen media relationships, measure real impact, and stay relevant in an industry that is changing fast.
We talk about:
- How PR missed the SEO wave and what GEO means for catching up
- Why journalists and AI platforms are now gatekeepers of reputation
- What Muck Rack’s new Generative Pulse feature reveals about how AI “reads” the news
If you work in PR, communications, or reputation management, this is not a someday conversation. It is happening right now.
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I know you saw GEO in the title, and you thought, oh, boring. But before you switch off this episode, I promise you it's not. If you work in communication, public relation, media, journalism, GEO or generative engine optimization, there's other words for it out there right now, but I'm going with GEO. It's the next big shift in how information gets found, how it gets shared, how it gets in the hands of journalists, how story ideas get with journalists. And if you work in public relations, if you need to put your information out there or if you're fighting misinformation, GEO is the next area of focus for you. When you understand why it matters in your job, how it protects your brand, but also makes your job easier. If you want to be the superstar in your office on your team when it comes to PR and GEO, I want you to listen to this episode. Today I'm speaking with Greg Gallant. He is the CEO and co-founder of MuckRack. You'll hear his story how MuckRack got started, but also how Greg is using GEO technology, data-driven technology to make that relationship with the press and PR people that much better. So if you work in PR, comms, reputation, this isn't a someday conversation. This is a conversation for right now. Take a listen. Welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to talk to you about all things muckrack. Welcome.
SPEAKER_00:Great. Thanks so much for having me on, Molly.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so the last time I saw you was back in March, I believe, in Austin at South By. I was lucky enough, fortunate enough to be invited by you and the team at MuckRack to speak on a panel. We talked about crisis response. And that's my wheelhouse, but your wheelhouse, Greg, is all about technology and public relations and communication. So for those who may not know MuckRack, can you describe the problem that the platform helps communicators and PR folks?
SPEAKER_00:Sure thing. So MuckRack, it's a corporate comms platform used by in-house corporate comm teams at anyone from Fortune 500 companies to startups and PR agencies. And it solves several problems. One is knowing who's the right journalist or podcaster or influencer to pitch on a new story idea, trying to know whenever you're mentioning the news on the web, on TV, in print, even. And finally to measure the impact of all this PR and to know, like, hey, we got thousands of articles this year. What does it all mean? How are we stacking off to our competitors? And now, even how is it influencing AI?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, now, of course, I've been a partner with MuckRack for some time now, for most of the year, and I've really enjoyed using it, not only in the crisis response element, but also exploring it for how people can use it proactively. But I know that you've watched PR evolve from media list to real-time analytics. So, what do you think has changed the most in public relations communication outreach when it comes to your platform with MuckRack?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'd say there were two big tidal waves that we've rode. When we started, it was right as social media was getting going. That's actually part of what inspired the whole idea for MuckRack back when we launched it in 2009. And back then, it was like there were like a couple thousand publications, and we were all about, okay, you know what all the publications are. And where our magic was we'd find the right person at that publication to pitch. And then what's changed now is that there's so many more publications, largely due to social media and the effect of the internet. So now there's we have hundreds of thousands of publications, podcasts, blogs to find. And a lot of times it might be hey, the perfect place to be interviewed is a publication you've never heard of before. So that's title wave number one and then title wave number two that we're evolving with and seeing ahead of now is AI. And it's just been fascinating to watch those two big tidal waves affect the media and PR industry.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so here we are in 2025, all about AI, but bring us back to 2009. What made you want to bring this platform to the public?
SPEAKER_00:So I got into this whole world early on because right when I graduated college, I started a podcast. Where'd you go to college? Emory, down in Atlanta.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, and coming out of Emory, you wanted to start a podcast.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's right. I had this idea for podcasts. It wasn't even called podcasting back then. It was just called RSS Speeds with Enclosure. But I was lucky enough I got a job working part-time at CNN.com when I was at Emory and I was commuting to CNN's headquarters down in downtown Atlanta. And I kept getting stuck in traffic and I didn't like Atlanta radio. So I was pitching CNN. I'm like, hey, why don't we just take these newscasts that we have and just make them audio and let people download them onto their iPod? That the name Podcast came from iPod. That was the idea that you I did not know that.
SPEAKER_01:Now, oh my gosh, your origin story is a fascinating one. It it somewhat resembles mine, is when you discovered a problem. Because when I was at FEMA, we had a massive reputation problem. And I thought, well, how can we change this? And this is when social media was starting. So right around the same time. So that's fascinating. So you were at CNN, and you're the one guy who found a way to bring the news to people that wasn't necessarily over the airwaves.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that was the problem, though. I could never convince them to do podcasting. I tried, but I was obsessed with this idea. So when I graduated college, I decided, okay, let me just try starting a podcast and seeing what happens. And I had this idea to interview founders on how they got started on a podcast, which today is a super common format. There's probably a thousand podcasts like that. But in 2005, no one had ever done a podcast like that before. So I started this one and I'd interviewed Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, back when LinkedIn had under 50 employees. I went to their office, set up my mics, and interviewed Reed, the founder of Yelp. I got John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Fund, an inventor of the index fund. Just some amazing guests. One of the people on the podcast was this guy, Ev Williams, who is also doing a podcasting company called Odeo. Odeo never worked. So I watched him pivot to a little side project idea called Twitter. And then of course Twitter took off and Ev did very well. That inspired me to sign up for Twitter really early. So I'm just at Gregory on Twitter and now also Instagram, just because I was the first one to sign up. I didn't even ask for a favor. No one had registered.
SPEAKER_01:Is that true? You're at Gregory on Twitter now, X and Instagram.
SPEAKER_00:That's right.
SPEAKER_01:That's incredible.
SPEAKER_00:So very much an early adopter. So I was watching that whole early social media world, as are you. And the first idea was actually I realized there's no way to know who's doing a good job on social media by topic. So had this idea that we could crowdsource who's best by topic by letting people vote with a tweet or a social share. We called it, we figured how do we get people to want to vote? We'll call it an award. And tweets are short, so we call it the Shorty Awards. Launched that in 08, and that was the very first award show for best of social media. That's still going strong. But when we launched it, it was like we built the site in two weeks. Within 24 hours, it was a top-trending term on Twitter because no one ever built like a viral system on social media before. So that really propelled it. And then what finally brings it back to Muckraq is that I'd launched other business ideas too. I always try, and with the podcasting, I was always trying to get press for them. I knew how hard it is when you come with something brand new. It's really hard to get the press to care about it. Whereas with the Shorty Awards, within those 24 hours of launching it, we had the New York Times, BBC, the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch all reach out to us and end up covering it. It was the first event the Wall Street Journal ever live tweeted. Our office was in Brooklyn at the time. And that was before Brooklyn was cool. And the Wall Street Journal writer was like, Oh, I want to come to Brooklyn to meet you for lunch. I'm like, I'll come to Manhattan, are you sure? Oh no, I'll come to Brooklyn. I'm like, can't believe the Wall Street Journal is coming to Brooklyn for this. So I realized like journalists are using social to figure out what to write about. So we launched Muckrack in 09, really at first for journalists. We didn't have any part of it for PR people. It was the first site we could see all the journalists who were on social media and that let journalists set up their own portfolios. We had over 10,000 journalists request to get on the site. And then I kept bumping into PR people being in New York, and they were all like, oh, you do muck rack. I'm using it to figure out who to pitch. So that's where we're like, oh, we could probably build a business out of this. And that's what we did.
SPEAKER_01:Wow, you were riding the wave right at the right time. Now, of course, I'm listening to your story, and I also was an early adopter to Twitter, but I was not quite the visionary as you. Why I wasn't at Molly, I wasn't even thinking that. I was incredibly early on it. But I wasn't you know, it's it's funny.
SPEAKER_00:A lot of the earliest people, they wanted to get their AOL screen name on Twitter, and they could have had their first name, but they were just like, Oh, I gotta be consistent with my AOL.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my god, that is so funny. But you were a visionary also because you understood the idea of virality that things could go viral. And I remember using Twitter back in 2007, around that time, and that was not in the vernacular. People weren't really talking about viral. So you were viral before it was even a known entity, which I think is incredible. And that's where these great ideas come from.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, to me, what was so exciting about those early days of Twitter is like prior to Twitter, it's so easy to forget now about every social platform, it's only about connecting with your friends. Facebook, right? I was on really early, but back then it was like you had to have your college email address and it could only be with your friends. And then there was the MySpace and Friends there before that. Right. And Twitter, they actually kind of started that way. The original vision was like, oh, let's eat what you had for lunch, and that really was it. But it was open and then it evolved over those first couple years where people realized, like, hey, this is a media that I can write on here and anyone could see it. And back then it was still new. That first year we had the Shorty Awards, like it was newsworthy whenever a celebrity got on social. And I remember we had MC Hammer there the first year, like Shaquille and Neil came by video. And just the fact that these people who'd had real fame would bother with social media was considered extraordinary. Whereas now it seems so quaint because you can't imagine a famous person not being on social media, and it's the social media stars are bigger than the traditional celebrities.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, absolutely. And celebrities still struggle with it, too, in my opinion. Now, as someone who uses MuckRack, I've been a partner with Muckrak now throughout the year, and I've really enjoyed it. And I almost find there are just many different options for people to use it. And in so many different parts of comms are in there. You could be a PR person, you could be a journalist, you could be someone like me who's looking more for the issues. What I love the most is looking at the sentiment. That's something that I'm always uh looking for. What do you find? I could tell you're a trend guy, you're a research guy, you're an analytic guy. How are people using a platform like yours now? What are they seeking most?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I think in addition to what they've always used it for, seeking the right journalists, the contact, and podcasters, seeking the right coverage, making sense of what's in their industry. To me, the new thing that we're really focused on and that has me excited is this whole idea of generative engine optimization, GEO. Where there's all other acronyms for it, and everyone's fighting. It could be AIO, AEO. What are you settling on, Greg?
SPEAKER_01:What are you settling on?
SPEAKER_00:I thought we'd won the battle with GEO. I I like that one. I think it sounds good, but then there are a lot of people still pushing the others. So this will be the big campaign that we need to do.
SPEAKER_01:Put a little PR behind it. Yeah, I'm a GEO person. I'm all in on GEO, and it's so much easier to, and it ties in nicely with SEO. Give me your thoughts on the difference now. Here we are, like late 2025. Where is GEO compared to SEO? Search engine optimization.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there's two things I'd say. One is it's much more powerful than SEO because I think we all use AI, and I think we're all finding now we're asking AI things that we would never have bothered to Google for. Just the other day, I had my alarm in my home started chirping because the backup battery ran out of power. And I took a photo of it and uploaded it to AI and it pointed out, like, hey, that's a zinc battery. It's not going to last as long as if you buy an alkaline or lithium battery, without me even asking it. And I'm like, I never even knew these types of batteries were a thing. So it's affecting us a lot more. But the big thing I'd say, especially if you're listeners in the PR and comms world here, is I think PR missed the boat on SEO. Because the PR profession has a huge impact on SEO, because SEO was always about backlinks. If you have people linking to you from credible websites, that's what drove SEO, at least for the first like 10 or 15 years of SEO. And that's how Google would always decide what to put high up in search results.
SPEAKER_01:How did PR miss it though? Why do you think they missed it?
SPEAKER_00:So I think PR missed it because they were doing the best SEO of anyone. Because you get a credible website like a news outlet to link to you while they cover you. You're adding all this value to SEO. But I think PR people, they didn't take the credit. So I think all the PR people or most of the PR people out there, they were doing the SEO work or a lot of the SEO work and getting these links to the coverage they got, but they'd never go to their boss if they were in-house or to their client and say, hey, guess what? I did all this SEO. And because they didn't take credit for it and add it to their measurement and their metrics, this whole other industry, the SEO industry developed, got to ride that wave. And it because that most PR departments, PR agencies didn't get a slice of the SEO budget.
SPEAKER_01:That's interesting. The budget.
SPEAKER_00:So it's so it's like you're basically out. I think PR, they were doing a bunch of unpaid work. They were doing the SEO work and not getting paid for it.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Okay. So the GEO, it sounds like you're saying it's a great way to catch up for the industry where they can start getting credit.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. It's like a way to catch up with GEO. PR is even more impactful for GEO than with SEO, because all these AI platforms, OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, et cetera, they're training on news content. And you can read the training on it and they're citing it. If you just read the headlines, OpenAI did a$200 million deal with News Corp. to get their content with Axios, it's billions of dollars are being spent because that's how important it is to AI to have this news content. And so what we saw in our what is AI reading study is that a third of the content cited by AI are what would be considered traditional journalistic news outlets, and then roughly another third are blogs and other kind of third-party content that is what people are saying about you. So if I go on AI and I say, hey, what's the best battery to buy? This is what I was doing last weekend. Should I get the Amazon basics for the Energizer? And it was like, no, also consider Duracell, but don't buy Amazon basics by Duracell or Energizer.
SPEAKER_01:I'd say ask AI.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, exactly. And you take any product category, right? I'm going to Dubai in a couple of weeks. What hotel should I stay at? It's going to spit out five hotels. And so if you're any kind of business person, a comps person, but even if you're a CEO or a CMO, the obvious question is how do I get AI to mention my company? And how do I get it to recommend my company and say good things about me? So that's, I think, going to be the biggest challenge of any business in how they think about communicating, marketing, generally going to market. And PR is the answer because what's written about you in the news on the web is going to determine what AI recommends. So I think it gives PR this whole new calling and whole new relevance. And the connections were obvious than with SEO, because with SEO, to understand page rank and the linking thing is a little academic, whereas here is very visceral because you're asking AI something and you're seeing, oh, it's citing the New York Times, it's citing Wall Street Journals, citing Axios, it's citing our blog, and you can like see that connection very clearly.
SPEAKER_01:So now, because I'm in a lane of very reactive PR, I'm always looking at a metric of reputation. That's the scale that I'm working with. But for a lot of people in proactive PR, working in corporate PR, working for other brands or companies, even small business, politics, whatever it is, their job is to get pressed and proactive and get it anywhere. So for following your map, if a PR person has a general understanding of SEO and you're just trying to land somewhere online, you will be a part of that scrape that will be in the AI search. And then your information is going to come up. So from a day-to-day perspective, what is a PR person doing now that's different than five years ago?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I think one of the big differences is like with SEO, it was very static, but you maybe change positions in Google every month if that. So once you're up there, you're good and it takes a while to change it. With GEO, it's indexing on very recent news. It could be indexing on an article that came out five minutes ago. So I think it's even relevant for corporate comms because your client might say, if I'm going into a meeting, someone's gonna ask ChatGPT, who the hell is Greg Gallant? And I hopefully it'll say good things about me. Luckily, I haven't done a big scandal, at least not yet. But if I did, I'd be like, I want to make sure that it's not defining me by the scandal. What source is it gonna use for me? And that's where you have to now like reverse engineer it. So for example, I could say, okay, let's get this statement out to the New York Times and set the record straight that way. But guess what? Like the New York Times is suing Open AI. So ChatGPT can't index on New York Times stories. So we can get the best placement in the world in the New York Times, and it won't matter for Open AI. So then we might have to say, okay, let's go for a publication that we would normally think is less important than the New York Times, but will actually influence AI. And then vice versa, maybe we do still want to be in the New York Times because they did a deal with Amazon, and soon enough it's gonna influence Amazon's AI.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. I think you and I would agree that it's still a little messy because there are media outlets out there who participate in AI. And then we have lawsuits that are happening all the time where the media outlets are suing because they don't want all their information on there. And then there's also people and their books and their content being so we're still in a messy time, but in that mess, there still is an opportunity right now that if you are quoted somewhere, if you're inserted, if you can get into that story, you're going to get into the AI platforms and into the hands of someone looking for new batteries.
SPEAKER_00:Well said. I think it's the Wild West in GEO. We don't even know what it's called. But it's the Wild West. But I think that's exciting. And it reminds me of the early social media days, where like in the early days, you you'd really have to convince a company like why they should be on social. And most companies weren't, and most of them were like, hey, aren't we going to get in trouble here? And maybe somebody will flame us or whatever. So it took a while for companies to get on social media. But because of that, people were insurgents were able to get ahead that you saw. A lot of brands were like, they weren't even that important, but they just got on social before other people and they were able to really build up their brand in a much bigger way. And a lot of people even built entire companies around like figuring social out before other people. And I think that opportunity exists now where, hey, if you're already the number one, you should definitely be getting on GEO to protect that position. But if you're number 15, maybe you could become number three because you're gonna figure this out before everybody else does. So I think it's like there's no sure fire playbook, but that's why there's opportunity.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, absolutely. You and I are very similar in terms of the career trajectory or even just our interest, because I'm with you. When it I was a very early adopter to social media, but I was also a very early adopter and also ambassador to telling my clients and in my talks and in my workshops, we want to use social media, but there is always this reluctance because there's a fear. AI is going through the same reputation issue that social media is going through as well in terms of that fear, but there is something to it. There is a lot of misinformation on the AI platforms right now. So I know a lot of people are using Chat GPT perplexity to get the truth. But in your opinion, what are the implications for organizations that aren't thinking about how AI represents their story, good or bad?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think the big implication is people are going to ask AI about you whether you want to like it or not. AI is gonna give an answer whether you like it or not.
SPEAKER_01:Well said.
SPEAKER_00:So there's no opt-out button. You can't go to ChatGPT and be like, actually, just block my whole product category until we figure out our strategy. It's out there telling you what kind of battery to buy and what kind of hotel to stay at. So you're in the game already. And like PR, right? That you could say, hey, look, I don't want the media to cover me. If the media doesn't care, if they think you're newsworthy, they're gonna cover you. And it's kind of the same for AI, where AI is gonna cover you, so you have to have a strategy. But I think with AI, it's more complex because at least with the kind of traditional PR, it's okay, I can see what the New York Times said about me. Maybe I don't like it, maybe it has an error, maybe we debate if we try to get them to issue a correction, but I'm gonna get the newspaper, I cut it out with my scissors, or put look at it on my screen and I know what it says. Hi, every answer is a little bit different. So if I don't start tracking it, like I might ask AI, if I go to ChatGPT right now, I say, tell me about Greg Gall, it knows who I am, so it's gonna be a sycophant and say, Oh, Greg Gallon's great, listen back, because it it has a memory, so it knows everything about, or if I ask about my company, it's like an intern who sucks up. It's gonna try to say the best things about it. Whereas if you did it, Molly, from your account, it might say something totally different because it's just trying to equip you with the most accurate information, or maybe it knows some based on your persona, it's gonna describe us one way, but for someone sitting next to you, they have a different persona, they're in a different part of the industry, and it'll describe us another way. So if you don't start measuring in a broad way, you just have no idea what AI is saying about you. That's a dangerous thing given now, for better or worse, that so many people are relying on these AI answers to make decisions.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And not only, of course, we always can't control how the press covers us or our clients, but we can control our websites. We can control where the outlets that we own, and AI certainly picks that up as well. Now, Mugreq has always been about helping communicators build stronger media relationships. How does that mission evolve into an era, now that we're in the era of algorithm and AI, when it comes to my lane of shaping perception, but also just those proactive stories out there?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think what's really changed is how you go about doing it. So the innovation we first brought to market was that you should think it shouldn't be journals based on what they have written about in the past and search by keyword. And now everyone does that, but in 2000, 2009, like no one had put a system like that out there and it changed the whole world of how it works. Now I think we're in the next version of it where you want to reverse engineer the whole process. So you want to say, hey, for my audience, which news outlets and journalists are gonna be the most influential uh to them and to AI when they ask AI about these topics. And then, based on that, build your media list and say, okay, these are the publications, these are journalists. I'm gonna add them to my media list. And then I'm going to build relationships with these journalists. And now it's also podcasters, substackers. We've added all the whole new media ecosystem. But basically build your list based upon that and then get strategic about okay, do you meet with them, do you pitch them, what ordering combination do you do that all in, which we built all the tooling for. But it's tying that all and then finally connecting that to results with then knowing when you do get the press hit, like being notified, hey, this press hit happened because you pitched them, and now it creates this flywheel of influence with PR and GEO.
SPEAKER_01:I was using MuckRack when I needed to pitch a client because they were dealing with the reactive issue. So we weren't trying to proactively pitch a product. We were trying to pitch a reputation and how it was good and not bad. And that feature in Muckrack was really helpful, trying to find the right journalist who talked about this issue in the past and it brought it up right away. So I found a way for me to use it as well. Now, tell me then about the GEO feature that you've added into MuckRack.
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So we launched this whole new product within Muckrack called Generative Pulse. And what it does is it lets you set up a bunch of prompts, AI prompts, questions that your customers would likely ask, just to use my my selling example. What's the best battery? What's the best nine? You come with dozens of them, what's the best nine volt battery, what's the longest lasting battery, what's the most reliable battery, et cetera, et cetera. So you queue up all these prompts, and then what it does is it goes out to every AI platform and asks it every day those questions, and then records the answer and records more importantly the citations. So then you can say, hey, if you're an energizer, you want to know I mentioned 60, share kind of share a voice, like I mentioned 60% of the time, Duracell's got 50, so we're ahead, but let's try to get to 70. And also what's the sentiment? Are we getting positive mentions? Are we getting it could be we're getting a negative mention? So it tells you all that. And then even more importantly, it tells you what outlets are being cited for these questions. So it might be is it batteryweekly.com being cited? Is it the battery podcast being cited? Or is it the New York Times and Wall Street Journal? So you can see all the outlets, and then even all the journalists who are writing the stories are getting cited by AI, all within this generative pulse product, which is fully integrated to the rest of the muck rack. So then you can look at that and start to know okay, if I want to impact this, which journals and outlets do I need to connect with?
SPEAKER_01:Certainly, if anyone's listening from the battery industry right now, they're going to be thrilled because now they know exactly what they need to do. So are you hearing anything from PR teams or clients who are already experimenting the generative part of your platform now with MuckRack?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we've been getting a lot of great feedback on it. It's one of our most quickly adopted new features that we've rolled out among our user base. So we're seeing a lot of PR teams that kind of gives them like this whole new relevance and lens to look at their job where they're seeing, like, hey, we're impacting this whole new way. We're seeing, I was just meeting with a PR agency customer of ours who's telling me that the earn media part of her agency has been like getting getting much more busy this year because people have realized there's this new value to earn media. And then it also is given, I think, that they often struggle to talk to the CFO and explain, hey, how does what we do affect the bottom line of this business? But now with these kind of stats, it's so we can explain exactly how we're impacting AI, and everybody knows that AI is the driving force, and everyone's redoing their budgets now, so it really shows the impact.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, absolutely. Do you think there's a big difference between your platform and other media platforms out there, like Meltwater, Susion?
SPEAKER_00:Of course. We started MuckRack. We're still the new kids on the block, believe it or not. One of the ones you mentioned started is Bacon's book in the 1800s, where they were sending out books to everybody. But I think that the big difference is we built MuckRack from the ground up. We didn't string it together through acquisitions and all that. So, because that's one interview platform, so you can connect when you're pitching the journalist, when you're monitoring, get notified. Hey, you got this article. This article is written, and we can tell you pitch the journalists. So we're, you know, we're automatically telling you that you should take credit for that. To the reportings, you can see the impact of all the pitches that you had, to now generative false reach and see how does that affect AI. It's all one continuous system, so it's all tied together, and you can, in a very user friendly way, go from one part to another and tell that story of how it all connects. And I think for any legacy player where they've had to piece all the parts together, like the data just doesn't speak as well between it all and just can't have that same impact.
SPEAKER_01:For people out there listening, I Of course, have a lot of communicators, PR types, corporate communicators who listen to this podcast. So let's say they're using one of those other platforms, or they haven't even explored using any platform at all. What would you say to a PR person? What is the pitch that you would give them that they need to give to their senior leadership to get on board?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think the pitch now is that the media is totally changed. You have to rethink about how you influence AI, how your customers get AI answers, that getting to the media is super important and that earned media drives AI. So you have to do earned media better than ever. And just like any other part of your business, you need like an integrated uh system of record where you can both get your data, track your outcomes, measure the impact. And that's really what we do at MuckRack. We built the software platform that thousands of PR teams are already relying on to do this. So getting the right tool in place is what will really let your team be much more efficient, be much more impactful, and then be able to measure and show the results.
SPEAKER_01:You know, I see MuckRack, I like how you position it as the scrappy fighting platform that's always really just always evolving into the next thing around the corner, which really matches how you embrace technology, social media, digital media many years ago, a couple decades ago. And that's why I'm excited. Coming up in December next month, there's a generative pulse summit that you're sponsoring in New York City. I'm going to be on a panel about reputation. I'm excited about that. What was the idea behind putting this summit together?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so we saw this whole GEO field is so new. It didn't exist even a year ago, because even though AI's been around now for a couple of years, AI search has only really been around for just a little bit under a year. So it's a whole new field, super impactful. Like I said, we're getting tremendous interest in this generator pulse product, but we see that everyone knows it matters, but a lot of people are still getting up to speed on the 101 of like how does this all work? So we thought, hey, let's actually buck the trend and get people together in person. How old fashioned is that? Uh, to talk about AI and to talk about what's driving AI. So we just thought it'd be super uh impactful to bring all the smartest minds about GEO together in New York City, back where we started, and hash it out and explore this together and give people a chance to meet all the kind of leaders in the field and as we figure this out together.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm excited about the event and I'm excited to attend, but also to hear everything around GEO and what people are talking about and thinking about. So, my final question to you, Greg: what excites you most about the future of PR and communication and technology as it continues to evolve?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, what really excites me is that media and the importance of communication is it's been around time immemoria, right? Where when the printing press was invented, there's always technology and media and PR. They're always having interplay with each other, and and the game is always changing. And it has been ever since newspapers and radio, TV, the internet, social media. And and this is why for me, after even though I started this company where 15 years ago, it still feels like a startup. It's still as fun as ever and exciting as ever because there's always something new. And I think now we're seeing all these changes with AI, with LLMs, with new ways of interacting with AI, that it's only gonna get more interesting. And I think the active media and therefore PR on AI is only gonna become more important because people are really gonna have a flight to quality with AI. You know, they're realizing this sometimes hallucinates there's gonna be a lot of pressure on all these AI companies to become more accurate and have better sources. And as they start moving towards that, due to market pressure to make their and political pressure, but both to make their products better. I think it only makes PR more relevant and only makes it a more exciting time in the industry for our customers and then for us too.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I agree with you. I'm excited. I'm a big early adopter, excited adopter about AI, of course, because I'm in risk management. I'm always looking for the risks as well. But I think it's just a really exciting time to be in the industry, whether you're on the media side as a journal or if you're in PR, corporate comms. And Muckrak, I think is really leading the way in these types of conversations and connections to create those media and PR relationships. So, Greg, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. And I think this is a round the corner type of a conversation. PR and GEO. So thank you.
SPEAKER_00:My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me out, Mally.
SPEAKER_01:All right, I look forward to seeing you in New York City.
SPEAKER_00:See you there.
SPEAKER_01:Alrighty. Bye.
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