The most trusted voice in your business isn't your business
Why would you want to be a recruitment thought leader?
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Your next client didn't scroll through the first page of Google to find you. They asked ChatGPT, Copilot or Perplexity which recruitment agency they should be talking to, and the AI gave them an answer. Several names came up. You’re lucky if one was yours.
That was the starting point for our recent webinar on how recruitment brands can get cited in AI generated answers, also known as, how the robots decide who to recommend, hosted by Vickie Collinge, Associate Director at BlueSky PR, and Jennifer Wright, Marketing Director (aka me).
The short answer
Recruitment brands get cited in AI answers by being talked about credibly, consistently and recently across sources the models trust. That means earned media coverage, named experts and original data. Citations have replaced backlinks as the currency of visibility, which makes PR the most direct route into the answer.
AEO and GEO, briefly
There are a lot of acronyms attached to this, and they all look more complicated than they are. Traditional SEO is the work you've been doing to get your pages ranking in traditional search engines. AEO, or answer engine optimisation, is optimising to be picked as the direct answer: featured snippets, voice results, AI overviews, the kind of result that doesn't usually get a click. GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is optimising to be cited as a source inside the generated answer in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI mode.
But don't get too hung up on the labels. Google still calls all of it SEO, and it boils down to two things: being genuinely useful, and being cited.
Key takeaways
- 69% of Google searches now end without a single click (SimilarWeb, 2025). In Google's AI mode that rises to nearly 93% (Semrush, 2025).
- Branded mentions are now a more accurate prediction of AI visibility than backlinks (Ahrefs).
- 84% of AI citations come from earned sources (Muck Rack), not a brand's own website.
- AI doesn't quote AI. Generated content won't get you cited, and journalists will spot it.
- Only 14% of marketers are tracking their AI search properly (Omnibound; Search Engine Land, 2026), so measuring it now puts you ahead of almost everybody.
The answer has become the destination
For years, prospects searched for something like "the best tech recruitment agency", scrolled the top three or four links, clicked through to your blog or your website, and eventually reached out once they'd built their own picture of the business.
In AI mode, that journey looks completely different. As Vickie put it: "The AI gives the answer for your audience. It tells them in one place everything they should know about the best recruitment agencies, what people are saying about them and why they are deemed to be the best. It's essentially the AI generated summary that makes the decision for your target audience as to whether or not you are relevant for them."
The numbers behind that shift are hard to ignore. 69% of Google searches now end without a single click (SimilarWeb, 2025). In Google's AI mode that rises to nearly 93% (Semrush, 2025). When Google’s AI overview appears, only 1% of people click a link inside it (Pew Research, 2025).
If you find that unsettling, it should be. It’s a big change. But it's the new normal, and the reason is simple: the answer, rather than your website, has become the destination. If your whole marketing, content and communications strategy rests on people clicking through to your site, it's time to update it.
“A recruitment agency can be described in an AI answer without ever being named in it.” – Vickie Collinge, BlueSky PR
What the engines actually reward
Breaking down the four signals that decide who gets cited…
- Frequency is how often you're mentioned across the web, and as we noted above, branded mentions now predict AI visibility more accurately than backlinks do.
- Quality of source means earned, third-party coverage: trade press, national titles, industry bodies. Muck Rack found that 84% of AI citations come from earned sources rather than a brand's own website.
- Consistency means the same facts and bios about you and your team wherever they appear. As I explained: "Whenever your story doesn't line up, the model can't confirm these details and then it doesn't want to include you in the answer, because what it's looking for is for that answer to be completely accurate."
- Recency is about mentions that keep coming, because lots of coverage in one year and nothing after that gives the model no confirmation that the information is current, and this is a long-term commitment.
"What all these four have in common, is that they're exactly what's always built a reputation, which is being talked about by credible people consistently and recently." - Jennifer Wright, BlueSky PR
AI won't get you cited by AI
One myth is worth killing off. You can't use AI to run your PR campaign, and you shouldn't try.
The content AI models surface is usually original thought leadership from the original source. Generated copy also damages your reputation with the journalists you need. Their inboxes were already filled with hundreds of press releases by 9am every day before AI came along. Now they're drowning in AI slop, they can spot it from a mile away, and some are blocking entire businesses over it.
And when asked whether recruitment firms should just use AI to write more blog content faster, my answer was short:
"AI is not going to quote AI. It's looking for that original data. It's looking for third party credibility. It's looking for real experts." – Jennifer Wright, BlueSky PR
What gets lifted
Compare two blog posts. One has no author, no data, nothing a thousand other sites haven't already published, no content structure, and hasn't been updated in years. No LLM will cite it, and no journalist wants it. The other names a real author you can verify, includes original data with a clear methodology, quotes named experts, and is dated and kept current. Princeton research (ACM SIGKDD conference 2024) suggests adding your own original data can lift AI visibility by up to 41%.
Your spokesperson doesn't have to be your most senior person, and often it's better if they aren't. One individual can't be the expert in everything, so a CEO fronting content across multiple sectors looks odd to journalists, to your audience and to the models. Find the people who are genuine experts in each specific topic or sector.
The same logic applies to where you aim. Everyone wants the Times or the BBC. If you're a specialist recruitment consultancy, trade coverage puts you in front of the right people, and AI citations currently favour those niche titles over national coverage. As Vickie said, that's something the industry has argued for years without ever being able to prove it:
“AI citations currently favour niche trade titles over national coverage, so a specialist recruitment agency gains more from the trade press than from a national byline.” – Vickie Collinge, BlueSky PR
Almost nobody is measuring this
Around half of consumers are already using AI to help make buying decisions. And only 14% are tracking their AI search properly. Plenty of brands are invisible in AI generated responses and have no idea, because nobody's measuring.
“Most recruitment brands that are invisible in AI answers don't know it, because they aren't measuring AI citations at all.” – Jennifer Wright, BlueSky PR
Clicks no longer tell the whole story, so track AI citations, brand search volume, share of voice against competitors, and direct conversions. The traffic that still arrives via AI-powered search has much higher intent. And Adobe's research found it converts 42% better. So focus on your brand visibility.
Start with the free tools. Google Search Console has a generative AI report showing how often your links appear in AI answers and which pages are being used. GA4 catches the AI referral traffic. Manual prompt testing costs nothing: ask the questions your clients would ask, and log what comes back in a spreadsheet.
Five things to do this week
- Audit your top 10 landing pages for AEO formatting: headers as questions, a definitive answer in the first paragraph, FAQ schema underneath. Start with your highest traffic pages. What you’re looking to do here is structure your content so it can be easily lifted.
- Add named author bios to every blog post, linked to the author's LinkedIn profile. Show your content is written by real people.
- Identify your three most quotable consultants and brief them on how you want them involved.
- Pitch one piece of expert comment to a trade title this week.
- And run your brand and those three spokespeople through ChatGPT, Copilot and Google's AI mode by typing in the search queries your target audience are using. Screenshot what comes back. Even if you don't appear, that's worth knowing.
Questions from the webinar
Should we fix SEO first, or invest in PR?
Neither on its own. PR adds to SEO as much as it does to AEO and GEO. Third-party credibility plus a technically sound website is the goal, because you're not just looking for Google to recommend you.
If we gate our best content behind a form, can AI still cite it?
No. If it's a PDF behind a form, AI can't cite it. Make the landing page strong enough on its own by pulling a couple of statistics and quotes out of the report and putting them on the page. You still want the download, so it's about finding the balance.
Can podcasts and video get cited?
Yes, as long as there's a transcript or a strong description. YouTube transcribes automatically and gets cited often. Check the transcript, because automated captions get names and brands wrong, and that inconsistency counts against you.
A competitor is recommended above us. How do we displace them?
Don't retaliate and don't talk them down publicly. Ask the AI why they came up. Which publication cited them? Did they have original data? Then go and out-earn them.
Where to start
If you want to know how AI currently sees your business, we're offering a free AI visibility check: a 30 minute consultation with an audit of your brand and your top competitors, and a walk through what it shows. A third party audit matters here, because if you search for yourself regularly, you'll start appearing more in your own results.
Book your free AI visibility check.
You can watch the full webinar recording here. If you'd rather hand the whole thing over, our AI Positioning Sprint is a fixed-price, three month programme built around earning the coverage that gets you cited. Find out more.
As BlueSky PR’s Marketing Director, with almost 10 years’ prior experience in the recruitment industry, Jennifer writes articles and guest posts to inspire recruitment agencies to build their brands, improve their content, bring in more leads and generally make their lives easier.
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