Hi! I’m Julia. I help organizations in cybersecurity, fraud prevention, financial crime, AI, and other regulated industries translate complex topics into communications that employees, customers, executives, and journalists can understand. Enjoy my latest analysis below.

Somewhere right now, someone is asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity whether a company is trustworthy. Maybe it’s a customer deciding whether to hand over a credit card number. Maybe it’s someone who just got a suspicious email claiming to be from that company, trying to figure out if it’s real. Maybe it’s someone who saw your ad and are trying to decide if your service is worth buying. The AI tool answers with confidence. Nobody at that company reviewed what it said, approved it, or even knows the question was asked.

That’s not a hypothetical. It’s the current state of most brands, according to Muck Rack’s newly released State of PR 2026 report, which surveyed 1,115 PR professionals between May and June of this year.

Who owns the story AI is telling about your brand?

GEO is emerging, but ownership is still unclear.

Nearly three quarters of PR professionals, 73%, say Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is at least somewhat important to their strategy. GEO is the practice of optimizing your content so AI LLM models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.) can easily find, understand, pull, and accurately cite information about a company when they generate answers.

Here’s the part that should broadly concern anyone in marketing or cybersecurity, fraud prevention, or trust and safety specifically: 29% of those same PR professionals say no one at their organization owns GEO. Not a low priority. Not someone’s part-time job. Nobody. That’s a gap that leaves a brand without user feedback and can tarnish the brand’s reputation if they don’t respond to a comment quick enough.

For most industries, that gap means a missed opportunity, a company’s SEO wins may not always translate into AI visibility. In May 2026, Google announced that it is generative AI in search mode through AI Mode and AI Overviews will prioritize users connecting directly with authentic voices of sources and creators and exploring useful information across the web. This may create an effect of de-prioritizing brand blogs and whitepapers by themselves, unless these channels are cited by creators and other authentic voices across the web.

For companies whose entire value proposition rests on being trustworthy, the same gap means something closer to a liability. If nobody is watching what AI tools say about your company, nobody is watching for the moment a scam starts impersonating your brand, a false claim about a breach starts circulating, or a customer asks an AI tool “is this a scam” and gets an answer built from whatever happened to be indexed that week.

It gets worse before it gets better. Among PR professionals who are paying attention to GEO, 39% say they aren’t currently measuring it in any way. So even where there’s informal ownership, there’s often no visibility into whether the AI-generated narrative is accurate, outdated, or actively harmful.

Social media strategies follow the leaders, not the buyers

LinkedIn continues to lead PR’s social strategy:

60% of PR pros say LinkedIn is the most valuable social platform for their work, with a 18% lead on Instagram.

X (formerly Twitter) is 7%

Meanwhile, Facebook is 5%. Reddit is only 2%. YouTube is only 2%.

When referencing Generative Engine Optimization: A Practical Guide by data-driven content marketing company SEMRUSH, it’s clear to see how User-Generated Content (UGC) on Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube could be potential missed opportunities.

UGC platforms appear to influence generative engine visibility. Platforms that allow user-generated content (UGC)—Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, etc.—appear to have high exposure in generative engines. So brand presence on these platforms could be important.

PR’s social strategies tend to follow the leaders, not the buyers.

Traditional correction channels aren’t keeping up

The instinct might be to fall back on earned media. If an AI tool is telling the wrong story, send a press release to a journalist to ask them to tell the right one, and let that ripple outward. But the same report shows that path is getting harder, not easier. Seventy-one percent of PR professionals cite low response rates from journalists as their top challenge in securing coverage this year, while 61% point to smaller or shrinking media lists in relevant beats. Only 2% say earned media hasn’t become more difficult to land. Something’s not adding up.

The channel that used to correct the record, actual reporting from actual journalists, is responding less than it used to. The newer channel, AI-generated answers, often has no one running it at all. How do you get the truth in front of the people who need it, right when they need it most?

It’s not always in a press release, or a generic AI summary. Adding structure to how your information is cited and referenced can put your story in front, the way you intended it, when someone asks an AI about your brand.

This is the gap I try to close

I started Library of Cons because I kept noticing digital trust issues from the other side. I’m a communications writer covering scams, fraud, and cybersecurity with a background in investment banking and product technology. I regularly hear from people trying to figure out if something is legitimate, and I see how challenging it is to find trustworthy information, especially in a time when we’re expected to make decisions by the notion that all the information of the world can be available to us by putting another token into an LLM.

What I do differently is reporting, not spin. I research specific scams and fraud patterns, I create market structure analysis templates to ask the LLMs about your brand, I work directly with nonprofit organizations and think tanks, and I write from a community organizing and employee engagement background. What I uncover is to understand how companies actually talk about risk, not just how they’d like to be perceived. That’s the kind of feedback that can become a powerful signal in shapping your brand for the road ahead. It builds the kind of trust from someone actually checking.

Owning your trust narrative means paying attention to where your buyers actually go to check you out, not just the platforms that are easiest to monitor. If that’s of interest, subscribe to Library of Cons, and reach out directly. I’m a PR pro who won’t leave you on read.