Showing up in AI answers: what the data says for logistics and supply chain brands

As more people turn to AI systems over a traditional search engine to research suppliers, compare options or understand a sector, being the source an AI model chooses to cite has started to be just as important as ranking well on Google. Soon, it may even be more important.

The practice of trying to influence that outcome has picked up a name – Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO – but the underlying question predates the label: what makes a business visible in an AI-generated answer, and what can a business do about it?

The consistent answer, repeated across most of the industry commentary on this topic over the past 12 months, is that public relations and earned media coverage play an outsized role – considerably more than paid advertising or acompany's own website content.

Muck Rack's Generative Pulse study puts figures to the claim: across more than 25 million citations from the three leading AI models, 84% came from earned media, while paid and advertorial content accounted for just 0.3%.

That number is an average across all 17 sectors the report covers, from media and finance to hospitality and retail. Broken down by industry, however, the picture looks different for supply chain, logistics, transport and industrial manufacturing.

Industrial and manufacturing queries return the lowest journalism citation rate of any sector in the study, at 18.6% – tied with education for last place, and well below the 27% average across all sectors.

Retail, travel and finance queries all return journalism citations above 30%. In the absence of that coverage, AI models fill the gap with company-owned content: 36.6% of citations in the manufacturing sector come from corporate blogs, against a 24% average elsewhere.

Transport performs closer to the norm, at 29.3%, above the study average, with Axios, AP News and specialist aviation titles accounting for most of its journalism citations.

What does this mean for where logistics and supply chain brands should focus?

The data supports two conclusions here.

The first is that earned coverage carries more relative weight in this sector than in almost any other the study measured. Where journalism is scarce, a small number of well-placed pieces have an outsized effect on how AI describes the sector as a whole – considerably more than the same coverage would achieve in a sector where AI already has thousands of articles to draw from. That advantage is unlikely to last. As more industrial and manufacturing brands recognise how AI-generated answers shape perception of their sector, citation rates should be expected to move toward the study average, and the businesses that invested early will have set the terms others are answering to.

The second, also supported by the data: corporate blogs and owned content are already carrying more of the citation load in this sector than anywhere else in the study. That is not evidence that owned content is a substitute forearned coverage – the report's overall findings are clear that paid and owned content combined account for a fraction of total citations. But it does mean that, for as long as journalism coverage of this sector remains thin, what a business publishes on its own site is more likely to be the material AI reaches for. Substantive, well-sourced owned content is doing real work here, even if it is not the strongest long-term lever.

The practical takeaway here is about sequencing, not choosing between earned and owned. Earned coverage – placed with journalists who cover industrial and supply chain subjects in depth, framed as trend and analysis content rather than product news – is the higher-value, more durable investment.

In supply chain, AI tools rely heavily on what companies publish themselves – more so than almost any other industry the report studied. So, it's worth investing properly in your own content too.

If you'd like to talk through what this means for your own PR and content strategy, get in touch: mel@stark-communications.com.

Source: Muck Rack Generative Pulse, "What Is AI Reading? May 2026 Edition" analysing more than 25 million citations across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Full report: generativepulse.ai/report.

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