Eleven’s Christian Rigg on The GEO Show: 3 Tips for Better Content & AI Search Visibility

What makes your content worth citing and your brand worth recommending in AI search?

Christian Rigg, Eleven Content’s Director of Strategy and Operations, recently joined Paris Childress, founder of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge, on The GEO Show to discuss how LLMs find original content, the role of human writers, how much to publish, and where SEO and GEO overlap.

Here are three top takeaways from their conversation to sharpen your content strategy and strengthen your brand’s AI search presence.

1. Pair credible expertise with something new to say

Google has long used Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) to guide its assessment of content quality. This framework also helps brands understand what makes content helpful and credible to readers.

LLMs offer less guidance on source selection. Published recommendations often focus on technical access. Still, research supports Childress’s assertion that LLMs function much like “truffle hunters,” seeking distinctive information to enrich their answers.

“If we could look beyond the curtains of OpenAI and Claude, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the system messages that accompany all the messages we send, they send instructions to their LLMs to find interesting, unique, original content and to surface that over the more mundane or banal,” Rigg said.

In other words, if you want your brand to appear in AI citations, you need to give an LLM something worth citing—namely, credible expertise paired with useful information that goes beyond existing coverage.

Putting this insight into practice: Assign content to writers with relevant subject-matter expertise, then supplement their analysis with direct quotes from other specialists. Ask contributors to explain exceptions, challenge familiar advice, or offer a different perspective.

For example, a writer specialising in payroll could explain common overtime mistakes in hospitality, with an employment attorney clarifying legal exceptions and a restaurant operator describing how those issues arise in practice.

2. The most original insights are inside your company

Specialist writers and outside experts can strengthen your content, but your most engaging information likely exists inside your business. Proprietary data from customer surveys, product usage, or documented tests can reveal findings competitors can’t uncover through web research.

Rigg and Childress also discussed an often-overlooked source of originality: Your team’s opinions and perspectives.

“Thought leadership can be expert commentary; it can also be opinions, op-eds; it can also be your take on things,” Rigg said. “Very often that’s what individuals want from a company.”

The challenge is curating that knowledge. To streamline the work, Eleven built an AI workflow that identifies recurring themes and potential content angles, with each insight linked to its source. Writers can then draw on that material without repeatedly asking busy colleagues for a block of time.

Putting this insight into practice: You can start small before building a workflow. Choose one approved source of internal conversations and collect useful questions, observations, and source links in a shared document. Look for recurring themes that could inform your next article.

For example, a payroll software company could review customer onboarding calls approved for content research. If customers regularly struggle with duplicate employee profiles or inconsistent pay codes, interview the onboarding lead and turn their advice into a free downloadable migration checklist for your website or customer relationship management (CRM) efforts.

3. Shape what AI says about your brand through earned coverage

Traditional search largely lets buyers choose their path; users scan top-ranking results, open trusted sources, form an opinion, and pick a product or service. LLMs draw on multiple sources to compare companies and recommend options, presenting your brand (potentially) alongside strengths or caveats that can shape a buyer’s perception.

That makes digital reputation management and PR—long beneficial to SEO—mission-critical to AI search strategies.

“LLMs permit themselves to have an opinion,” Rigg said. “Digital PR influences that [opinion]; it influences directly how an LLM talks about you, so it’s not just a technique for improving rank or how often you appear. It’s a tactic for shaping a narrative when you appear.”

Putting this insight into practice: Test brand and comparison questions across several AI platforms, record recurring claims, and trace them back to their sources.

For example, if an AI answer incorrectly says your software lacks an integration and cites an outdated page on your website, correct that page. Then pitch a customer story to a relevant trade publication showing how the integration solves a common problem. Monitor whether the LLM descriptions change over time.

Build Your Brand’s Visibility in AI Search

Watch the full conversation on The GEO Show to learn more about original content, digital PR, and how AI tools form an opinion of your brand.

Ready to put these ideas to work? Eleven’s Expertise, Everywhere approach turns your knowledge into distinctive resources and earns coverage across the channels buyers and AI tools read.

Contact Eleven today to build a content and digital PR strategy that helps buyers discover, trust, and choose your brand.