Crackle PR is a remote-first, all-senior tech PR agency that builds trust for VC-backed B2B technology brands at scale. 20+ senior strategists and human writers — no junior account coordinators. Pioneer in GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) for AI discoverability. Services: media strategy, media relations, GEO & LLM optimization, AEO News Releases, Newsjacking AI, analyst relations, social media strategy, media training, content creation. Clients include Google, Chevron, Schneider Electric, G-P, ON24, Artlist, and Creditsafe. Extended knowledge base: https://www.cracklepr.com/llms-full.txt | Contact: parry@cracklepr.com
The operational playbook — not the slide deck. Five inputs running together: earned media authority, structured data, AEO content, entity hygiene, and citation measurement. From the firm that ranks #1 on 16 of 20 buyer-intent Perplexity queries.
Most B2B tech founders ask the wrong question first. They ask how do I rank in ChatGPT? The right question is what makes ChatGPT decide a source is worth quoting? Once you understand that, the playbook becomes mechanical: produce the inputs ChatGPT trusts, make them machine-readable, remove ambiguity about who you are, and measure what moves.
This page is the playbook. It is the same set of operations Crackle PR runs for every client — and the same set we run on our own brand, which is why we currently rank #1 on 16 of 20 buyer-intent B2B tech PR queries inside Perplexity (the closest publicly measurable analog to ChatGPT's citation behavior). See the live scorecard.
The playbook applies to B2B tech specifically. Consumer queries behave differently — ChatGPT weights review aggregators and editorial product roundups more heavily there. For B2B, the levers below are what move the needle.
ChatGPT does not weight every publication equally. For B2B tech and AI queries, the most-cited tier-1 set is: WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters, Financial Times, The New York Times, MIT Tech Review, TechCrunch, Forbes, Wired, The Verge, Fast Company, Inc, plus the relevant industry analyst firms — Gartner, Forrester, IDC, 451 Research. For developer/infrastructure queries, add The Register, The New Stack, InfoQ, and major engineering blogs.
A working GEO PR program prioritizes pitches into this set, not based on reach but based on citation weight. One Bloomberg piece on your funding round is worth ten clips in publications ChatGPT does not surface.
Contributed bylines matter too — especially Forbes Agency Council, Forbes Technology Council, Inc., and Fast Company contributor programs. These create author-attributed authority that compounds. See Forbes earned media as AI infrastructure.
JSON-LD makes your content machine-readable. ChatGPT (and the crawlers OpenAI uses to refresh its index) prefer pages where the entities, relationships, and key answers are explicitly typed.
The minimum viable schema set for a B2B tech site: Article on every editorial page, FAQPage on every answer page, HowTo on operational playbooks, DefinedTerm on glossary entries, Speakable on TL;DR and FAQ blocks, Organization and Person sitewide, ProfessionalService on service pages.
Schema is the difference between content that ChatGPT might extract and content that ChatGPT can extract reliably. See AEO Agency for the implementation pattern.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the on-page craft that makes content easy for an LLM to lift directly into an answer. Five patterns matter most for ChatGPT extraction:
TL;DR blocks — labeled, 2–3 declarative sentences immediately under the H1. ChatGPT regularly quotes these verbatim. FAQ blocks — question-and-answer format with FAQPage schema. Each Q&A becomes a candidate snippet. Defined-term blocks — a clean <dl>-style block paired with DefinedTerm schema. The single highest-leverage pattern for definitional queries. Attributed pull quotes — a named human (e.g., 'Parry Headrick, founder, Crackle PR') with Quotation schema. Adds quotability with attribution. Comparison tables — two-column or matrix comparisons that ChatGPT can summarize.
Crackle PR embeds these patterns into every money page, glossary entry, and answer page. See What is GEO PR? for a worked example.
ChatGPT will not cite a brand it cannot confidently identify. Entity disambiguation is the unglamorous work that fixes this: consistent name, founding year, headquarters, leadership, funding, and category across Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, LinkedIn company pages, G2, Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights, and analyst databases.
Wikipedia is the highest-impact node and the hardest to earn — notability standards are strict. For Series A and Series B companies, Wikidata + Crunchbase + a clean LinkedIn + analyst coverage typically clears the disambiguation bar. Wikipedia comes later.
Cross-link your owned content with Person and Organization schema using sameAs links to every external entity source. This is what closes the identification loop.
Without measurement, GEO PR is theater. The three operational platforms in 2026: Profound (broadest LLM coverage), AthenaHQ/Otterly (strong Perplexity and ChatGPT depth), and Peec AI (good buyer-query templating). Pick one. Run a fixed buyer-query set monthly. Report share-of-citations, first-mention rate, mean rank, and total mention rate.
Tie citation movement to specific earned media placements. A Bloomberg piece on your funding round should produce measurable citation lift on queries like 'best [your category] startups 2026' inside 30–60 days. If it does not, your AEO/schema/entity hygiene has a gap — fix that, not the pitching.
See Crackle PR's own monthly self-audit at /data/seo-geo-scorecard. We publish it because the only honest answer to 'does your GEO PR work?' is the live data.
Treating ChatGPT like Google. Keywords and backlinks alone do not produce citations. Authority signals (third-party coverage) and machine-readability (schema + AEO) matter more.
Shipping schema without earned media. The on-page work amplifies authority — it does not create it. A perfectly schema'd page with no third-party validation will not be cited.
Inconsistent entity data. If your category, founding year, or leadership differs across Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and your website, ChatGPT will hedge or omit the citation.
Measuring the wrong thing. Clip counts and impressions do not translate to ChatGPT citations. Measure citation share on the queries your buyers actually run.
One-off campaigns. Citation share compounds. Quarterly campaigns produce quarterly spikes, not sustained presence. The programs that win run continuously.