Your competitor just got featured in AI overviews (AIO), and it wasn’t just because of their SEO budget. Yes, SEO matters, but a big part of the reason their content was chosen over yours is that the AI saw signals of trust across all their channels. Their Instagram posts, TikTok reviews and LinkedIn updates made them look more credible than a website standing on its own.
For years, SEO and social media have lived by different rules and thrived in their separate lanes. Why wouldn’t they? Google rewarded technical excellence and content depth, while social platforms celebrated creativity and authentic engagement. The rules were clear, and the metrics for success were different. But with the introduction of Generative Search Optimisation (GSO) — AKA SEO in the AI era — the rules are changing.
And you need to keep up.
Wait, what’s GSO?
GSO is about tailoring your content so AI-powered search engines know it’s reliable and worth recommending. AI models now use real-time social signals to surface trusted, relevant recommendations, whether it’s a viral post, a customer tag or a well-placed hashtag.
Traditional SEO mainly looks at your website itself and off-page signals like backlinks, mentions and citations. AI goes a step further — it pulls together signals from across the web — reviews, forums, LinkedIn content, even TikTok or Instagram — to determine truth and authority. It’s looking for holistic brand signals that span your entire digital ecosystem, including, and sometimes especially, your social media presence.
This creates what I call the ‘authority loop’ — a powerful symbiotic relationship where social media becomes an essential fuel for GSO success.
What is holistic brand authority and why does it matter for GSO?
Holistic brand authority is the combined strength of your website, social profiles, brand mentions, reviews and the reputation of key personnel. It’s the consensus that your brand is a credible leader in its niche. AI models prioritise widely cited and trusted content, favouring brands with strong EEAT signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness).
What AI looks for when evaluating authority has evolved significantly. Research has shown that traditional ranking signals seldom correlate to AI citation frequency, with 95% of AI citation behaviour unable to be explained by traffic metrics and 97.2% unable to be explained by backlink profiles. Instead, AI systems evaluate the totality of your brand’s digital footprint to assess credibility and relevance.
How organic social feeds the GSO engine
So how do you boost your authority in the eyes of generative engines? Social is one of the most effective levers. It supports GSO in four critical ways: validating your expertise, aligning your brand presence, shaping trust and sentiment and driving backlinks and mentions.
Proof of EEAT
Social media platforms are real-time validation of your expertise and trustworthiness. When AI systems look at your brand, they look at what you say about yourself AND what others say about you. Social media gives you this third-party validation through shares, comments, mentions and user-generated content. A brand that is always publishing valuable content, engages meaningfully with its audience and receives positive social signals demonstrates the kind of authority that AI systems prioritise.
Consistent brand messaging
GSO focuses on helping AI models find, understand and prioritise your content by establishing clear connections between your brand and its expertise. Consistent branding across social platforms, up-to-date profiles, regular content publication and clear backlinks to your website help large language models connect the dots and recognise your brand as a significant, reliable entity in your industry.
When your LinkedIn articles link to your blog posts, your X threads reference your research and your Instagram content showcases your products in action, you create a web of interconnected signals that AI loves to pick up on.
Trust and positive sentiment
2025 might well be the year that social media truly replaces search engines as our go-to choice for discovering new information. People are turning to social media as a second search engine to get real human opinions on products and services. Your organic social content directly influences this narrative.
When someone gets an AI-generated answer about your industry, they’re likely to cross-reference that information on social platforms. If your brand consistently appears in these secondary searches with valuable, authentic content, you reinforce the AI’s initial recommendation and build trust with potential customers.
Backlinks and mentions
Organic social is a prime distribution channel for your thought leadership content. If you post a blog or research report to your socials, it’s significantly more likely to be discovered by journalists, industry analysts and other content creators. These discoveries lead to the high-quality backlinks and citations that contribute to overall authority signals.
Digital PR helps secure high-authority backlinks and trusted media mentions that improve search rankings and increase the likelihood of being featured in AI-generated results, as LLMs are trained on well-cited, newsworthy sources.
How GSO also helps feed success back into social
The relationship between GSO and social media isn’t one-way. When your brand earns visibility in AI-generated answers, that exposure doesn’t just boost search authority — it spills over into your social channels. Here’s how you’re rewarded on social when you focus on GSO.
AI mentions to social discovery
When your brand appears in AI-generated responses, curious users might look for more information by visiting your social profiles. This direct pathway from AI citations to social discovery can significantly boost your follower growth, particularly among highly qualified prospects who are already interested in your expertise.
Data-driven social strategy
The insights you get from your GSO performance can inform your social media content strategy. By understanding which topics and angles result in AI citations, you can create social content that addresses the same themes, positioning your brand as the go-to authority on subjects where AI already recognises your expertise.
On-platform visibility
Just like GSO, social media platforms like it when you send strong authority signals. As your brand is repeatedly surfaced in AI results, social platforms begin associating your profiles with those same topics. That makes it easier for users to find you when searching within LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and beyond.
GSO and social work better together
Not to state the obvious, but there’s a new set of rules that come with getting noticed in search. Brands that want to do well in this evolving landscape will embrace the authority loop that is GSO and social media. They’ll use social media to show their expertise and build community, and let GSO success feed back into wider social reach. The secret weapon isn’t social media alone, or GSO alone – it’s the strategic integration of both, creating a unified brand presence that AI systems can easily recognise, understand and recommend to users seeking expertise in your domain.
Don’t get stuck hoping AI will magically mention your brand or your socials will gain a million followers overnight. Get ahead of the curve by using your secret weapon: a smart, social-powered GSO strategy.
Teaser: The search revolution within social
Though I focused mainly on organic social and GSO in this article, it’s worth acknowledging a parallel revolution happening within social platforms themselves. TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and even X have evolved into sophisticated search engines in their own right, with users increasingly bypassing traditional search engines to discover information, products and services directly within these platforms.
This shift represents another layer of the authority loop we’ve discussed. Your social content isn’t just feeding external AI systems — it’s also competing for visibility within the native search algorithms of each social platform. Understanding how to optimise for social search, leverage platform-specific discovery features and create content that performs well in both social feeds and social search results is becoming equally critical for brand visibility.
But that’s a topic rich enough for its own deep dive — one we’ll explore another day.