Time pitches GEO insights into a new brand offering

Time’s GEO product differs in that it focuses on brand sentiment. Time is analyzing how AI search engines talk about a brand, pinpointing the potential mismatch between what a brand wants those AI summaries to say about it, and then selling Time-branded content to those brands to improve their messaging.

“We’re starting to look at that — the difference between what a brand’s advertising is trying to convey to the market about that brand, and the delta between what the AI answer platforms [say],” Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer, said onstage last week at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado.

Time is using tools from companies like TollBit and ScalePost to track how the publisher is showing up in AI search and the topics and articles being cited and referenced — and where they’re pulling information. While it’s still a “black box” and difficult to understand how answers are generated in these spaces, Howard believes Time has enough insights to sell this new product to brands, he said. 

Time is working with Mobian to analyze a brand’s ads to pinpoint what a brand is saying about itself, including tone and sentiment, according to Howard. Then it cross-references that to what is being said about a brand across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, generating up to 100 different prompts and seeing how many different sources and URLs are cited in the answers by each platform. Then, Time scores how closely those answers match the brand’s own positioning.

“We’re showing [brands] this analysis, and we’re saying, ‘We can help you because of the domain authority of Time.’ We show up on average, 30, 40, 50 million AI citations a month,” Howard said.

Mobian analyzed 750 brands and found that 17 percent of citations in AI search were either misaligned with the brand’s positioning or factually inaccurate, according to Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of Mobian.  

“The topics that are highlighted by AI are also not necessarily things that the brand wants to highlight,” Goodhart said. He gave the example of a prompt in ChatGPT asking about a pharmaceutical company’s allergy medication, and ChatGPT pulling from an article about the FDA considering placing a warning on COVID-19 vaccines. “This is sort of like a brand safety [and] suitability application to AI, in a sense,” he said.

Time then creates text and video-branded content to address those gaps to shape a brand’s narrative in AI search. The content is published on Time’s platform, as well as on other channels like YouTube, and the publisher tracks how often the branded content shows up in AI answers.

Part of the strategy, Howard said, is that AI systems often pull from more obscure YouTube videos or websites.

“We did an analysis for a very large automotive company, and we actually showed them that there were more of these long-tail, under-1,000-subscriber YouTubers influencing their answers than their website and the content that they were publishing on their own website,” Howard said. “We’re now in a pretty active daily back and forth where they’re just trying to really understand all this data that we prepared.”

Howard said he’s spoken to several CMOs about the product, some of whom are actively working to improve their AI visibility — while others are unaware of their brand sentiment within AI summaries. He sees this as an education opportunity as well, and a way to spark conversations between Time’s sales teams and prospective clients, Howard said.

Howard declined to share how much Time is charging brands for its GEO service. “There’s no silver bullet. If there was, I would be charging millions of dollars,” said Howard.

He said the product would fall under the same pricing packages of standard branded content, either as a complement to existing brand deals or as a separate product down the line — but with the potential for longer-term deals.

“A lot of branded content is done in a one-off. This is intended to be a little bit more strategic, to follow a longer-term strategy of consecutive releases, and whether we tackle one specific topic or identify multiple areas of having that delta — being able to follow that through over the course of a longer period. So it’s intended to shift from that one-off to a more ongoing relationship,” Howard said.

Goodhart noted that it was unclear if AI systems were weighing branded content differently from pure editorial content, but having a brand associated with a “credible, trusted source” ultimately mattered in AI visibility, he said.

“Phase two of this whole thing is, is it working? Is it changing how AI perceives the brand as a result of these efforts? And I think it’s way too early to know. Also, the AI systems are all very rapidly changing, so we’ll see over time,” Goodhart said.