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Who handles generative engine optimization for you? Not for your company - for you. A brand has an answer to that question: a team, a vendor, a budget line, a dashboard somebody checks on Mondays. A person usually has nobody at all, and the tools that do exist were built to read websites, which turns out to be a thin substitute for a career.
In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with his own business partner, Erin Lanuti, co-founder and CEO of Lilypath and former Chief Innovation Officer at Omnicom Public Relations Group. Erin spent two decades building the measurement and AI search machinery that tells systems how to read brands, and kept running into the same asymmetry: companies have infrastructure to govern how they get interpreted, and individuals have nothing close to it. Authority Intelligence(TM) is the discipline she, Dan, and Todd Grossman built for the second problem.
The conversation moves from measuring earned media without a pixel to why she started digging into generative engine optimization roughly nine months before the industry had a name for it. What follows is Erin's case for why the individual version of that problem needs its own tools, and why the damage stays invisible to the person it's happening to. It ends on the question Erin says she hears from clients more than any other right now, which is whether they need their agency at all.
Listen in and hear about:
- Why GEO tooling built for brands doesn't do the job when the subject is a person rather than a website
- Why an authority built for human audiences doesn't carry over to a machine one, and what has to be rebuilt from scratch
- How Conversation2Commerce and OmniearnedID measured earned media without a pixel, and why impressions survived anyway
- The Tide Pod scenario that turned AI search from a marketing question into a legal and reputational one
- What happens to earned citations when the outlets that produce them keep shutting down
- The value question clients are now asking their agencies out loud
Notable Quotes from Erin
"I keep saying measurement needs an intervention. It does, because we have better tech than we've ever had. And the consumer journey has changed. And we have to ask ourselves why. Why are we measuring that? What's the importance of that metric? Is that still true today?"
"Help me understand how, in a world where advertising budgets are getting cut to these publications and we're losing tons of earned media outlets every day, in this new world of GEO, when earned is more important than ever, if they're all shutting down, how are we going to get those earned citations?"
"As we look at some of the most respected people in the world that we've been doing some analyses on, these people should be perfect in the AI system. And they're far from perfect."
"There are people that have way less authority but know how to game the system. They know that if they assemble a clear picture around a topic, clear, concise, consistent, that their authority in the eyes of a machine can be perceived higher than people who without question have higher status or stature."
Resources and Links
Dan Nestle
- Lilypath | Website
- Inquisitive Communications | Website
- The Trending Communicator | Website
- Communications Trends from Trending Communicators | Dan Nestle's Substack
- Dan Nestle | LinkedIn
Erin Lanuti
- Erin B. Lanuti | LinkedIn
- Lilypath | Website
- Erin Lanuti | Website
Timestamps
[00:00] Introduction and Host Principles
[00:35] Meeting Erin Lanuti - Business Partner Introduction
[06:10] Erin's Career Origin Story - Burson and Colgate
[07:43] Bell South Olympic Sponsorship and Early Success
[08:07] Move to MSL and P&G's New to the World Initiative
[08:50] Pioneering Entertainment Marketing with Jessica Simpson and Swiffer
[11:12] Transition to Agency Leadership and UL (Underwriters Laboratory)
[12:51] Creating Innovative Campaigns - White House Christmas Tree and Muppets
[13:30] Developing Conversation to Commerce Technology
[17:21] The Problem with Traditional PR Metrics (Impressions and AVE)
[19:40] Omni Earned ID - Moving Beyond Vanity Metrics
[23:24] Understanding AI Search and Reputational Risk
[28:40] Erin's Non-Linear Career Path and Early AI Research
[30:04] The Tide Pod Problem - AI Generating Dangerous Information
[33:39] Building Integrated Marketing Solutions for AI Era
[38:34] Citations Over Traditional Top-Tier Outlets
[43:04] Introducing Authority Graph for Personal Authority Management
[49:45] Personal Branding Reset in the AI Era
[54:48] The Threat - Lower-Authority People Gaming the System
[58:21] Individual vs. Brand Reputation Management
[01:03:30] Agency Value Proposition Crisis and Repositioning Opportunity
[01:08:46] Closing Remarks and Where to Find Erin
(Notes co-created by Human Dan, Claude, Fireflies, and Riverside)
About The Trending Communicator
The Trending Communicator is a podcast about the future of communications and marketing, hosted by Dan Nestle. Each episode is a conversation with a communicator, marketer, author, or technologist about how the work is changing and what that means for the people doing it. The show launched in 2020 as The Dan Nestle Show and has published more than 150 episodes.
About the Host
Dan Nestle (Daniel Nestle) is a communications strategist with more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years in Japan. He is co-founder and Chief Product & Intelligence Officer of Lilypath, the company behind the patent-pending Authority Intelligence™ platform, and founder and Chief Curiosity Officer of Inquisitive Communications, a strategic advisory practice. He received the 2022 Arthur W. Page Society Page Up Innovation Award, was named a PRWeek Dashboard 25 AI Pioneer in 2023 and 2024, and was named one of Propel's 100 Most Influential PR Tech Leaders Worldwide in 2025.
Connect with Dan
The Trending Communicator: https://trendingcommunicator.com
Substack: https://trendingcommunicator.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nestle
Lilypath: https://lilypath.com
Inquisitive Communications: https://be-inquisitive.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/trendingcommunicator
Show notes for The Trending Communicator are co-created by Human Dan, Claude, and Fireflies.
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