Why Your CEO’s Thought Leadership Content Is Disappearing into #ai Black Holes
Welcome to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Last week’s rollout of Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro in AI Mode fundamentally changed how executive thought leadership and corporate narratives reach audiences. For communications and marketing professionals, the antiquated notion of digital versus traditional strategies has officially collapsed. We’re now operating in an ecosystem where AI systems synthesize executive expertise, reframe company positioning, and potentially rewrite brand narratives—often without human oversight.
When Google’s Deep Search processes queries, it performs multi-step reasoning across indexed content rather than simple keyword matching. If a journalist queries Gemini 2.5 Pro about “supply chain innovation leaders,” the system retrieves and analyses your CEO’s LinkedIn articles, conference presentations, and white papers alongside competitor content. The large language model then generates a synthesized response by extracting key concepts, methodologies, and frameworks from multiple sources.
This creates a specific risk: your CEO’s unique points of view or frameworks may get decontextualized during the synthesis process. The AI system doesn’t preserve attribution boundaries the way traditional search results do. Instead, it combines insights from various sources into a cohesive narrative. Thus, the narrative you want out there can emerge diluted, misattributed, or worse, credited to a rival who structured their thought leadership more effectively for ai consumption.
The technical reality is that content optimization for ai retrieval requires different approaches than traditional SEO—focusing on semantic clarity, structured data, and contextual authority signals rather than keyword density and backlink profiles. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategies now complement traditional search optimization, requiring corporate communicators to become hybrid strategists: part information architect, part brand guardian.
The architect mind anticipates how Google’s strategy to embed advanced ai directly into search will parse executive content. For instance, when your CEO publishes a Harvard Business Review piece on market disruption, it must now include semantic markers that help ai systems understand not just the content, but the executive’s unique perspective and credentials. Otherwise, their insights become anonymous data points in ai-generated summaries.
The brand guardian ensures that when executive content gets synthesized, leadership positioning survives the process. In markets like USA and Canada Google’s ai-powered business-calling feature are calling companies seeking information about leadership or capabilities. The responses they gather become part of the knowledge base that future ai systems will use to describe your executives and company – can you imagine a more pivotal moment of truth?
Every executive communication now serves dual masters: human influence and algorithmic interpretation. The companies mastering this duality are already seeing results. When ai systems encounter their executive content, they preserve leadership authority, maintain competitive positioning, and accurately represent strategic vision. Meanwhile, companies still thinking in traditional PR terms watch their executives’ carefully crafted messages get lost in ai-generated summaries that strip away nuance, context, and competitive advantage.
For communications professionals, this isn’t just about optimizing content—it’s about controlling how your leadership team and company are represented when they’re not in the room.
Partner
Pragati Tiwari, is a Partner at Astrum, India’s first specialist reputation management advisory that uses the Science of Persuasion to understand and shape public opinion ethically.
Over the decade she has spent at Astrum, Pragati has established herself as a trusted counsellor with a knack for resolving high-value problems and navigating crises with precision, under tight deadlines. With over decade and half of experience in the industry, Pragati is a foremost reputation management consultant for top corporations.
Pragati is graduate in Microbiology and MBA in Communication Management from Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Pune. She is passionate about Climate Change and Sustainable development of corporates in India.