In this episode, we interviewed Becca Williams - Founder and CEO of Antidote Communications, the performance-driven PR agency that combines predictive data, narrative craft and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) for high-growth B2B brands
Becca has spent over two decades helping high-growth tech brands and enterprise leaders turn communications into a measurable lever for commercial growth. She advises growth-stage founders, keynotes on modern media strategy and search intelligence, and built her foundation in Economics and Business
Her core argument: AI search now decides who gets seen, and LLMs reward the brands that tell one consistent story, so PR's job is to build that consensus for both the models and the journalists
Key takeaways:
GEO is where visibility is won now - Becca puts AI search ahead of SEO and AEO, and sees startups as having an early edge over legacy brands weighed down by conflicting press releases and outdated bios
AI is a challenger, not a shortcut - everyone at Antidote works LLM free for their first three months in a role, whatever their level, and nothing leaves the building without a human eye
Launchpad is a PR executive in a box - the beta tool codifies the agency's strategic knowledge, scans for breaking news opportunities and pairs a subscription with senior comms professionals in the loop
Consistency is the new credibility - LLMs act as consistency detectors, so founders and C-level leaders need one narrative across every touchpoint, or the model defaults to a competitor
🔗 Connect with Becca
Who are you and what do you do?
I am the Founder and CEO of Antidote Communications, a business that is pioneering a CommsTech approach to transform PR and comms into a measurable lever for commercial growth.
I am passionate about combining data-driven precision, AI search intelligence, and the philosophy of Kaizen, to empower high-growth technology leaders to navigate modern media landscapes and build lasting trust.
PR has always been the hardest thing for a startup or scale-up to get right. What is the thing that actually moves the needle in 2026, and what were founders doing five years ago that no longer works?
GEO or AI Search - how visible you are in the eyes of GPT, Claude or other LLMs. Right now, startups and scale-ups have a massive, overlooked advantage. Legacy brands carry digital baggage: years of conflicting press releases, outdated bios, and trash data scattered across the web which then bring trust and logic penalties. To an LLM, these discrepancies trigger trust and logic penalties and it starts to lose confidence in the information they are linked to and even increasing the propensity to recommend a competitor. Start ups and scale ups are less likely to have this issue so there’s a real opportunity here to get out of the doors early and build trusted relationships with the LLMs… but don’t forget journalists too. Building trusted relationships with them will bring dividends in how visible you and your business is online.
And what doesn’t work? I would argue the press release in terms of a generic distribution spray-and-pray type model. When we look at it through the lens of GEO, it is a needed entity for LLMs, but only when it's written correctly using structured, fact-dense data releases.
Every person at Antidote has to work LLM free for their first three months in a role, no matter what level.
Let's talk about Antidote itself. Walk us through where AI sits in your team's week - the dos and the don'ts you've actually written down, not the ones on the website
We embrace AI. It’s a buddy for each of the team. A buddy that acts as challenger, the (sometimes!) annoying questionmaster that picks apart ideas or strategies but makes us see things we might otherwise miss. But we do have checks and balances. Every person at Antidote has to work LLM free for their first three months in a role, no matter what level. We also ensure that nothing leaves the building without a human eye first. AI at Antidote is about foundations and not outcomes.
We are also embracing the agentification of PR as a service and developing agents not only to support different business functions but to deliver some of our services.
You built Launchpad - take us through it, what it is, how clients use it and what’s the value to them?
Launchpad is still in its beta phase but it’s a great example of how we are agentifying our industry. Essentially we codified our agency's entire strategic knowledge base into an AI engine that continuously scans for breaking news opportunities and advises early-stage startups on positioning, PR strategies and opportunities. Think of it as a PR executive in a box that works directly for you.
It was born from a place where we had lots of inbound requests to work with us but the start ups didn’t have the budget for a full service agency. Launchpad offers a solution to this problem by giving founders and start ups tier-one strategic insight at a fraction of a full retainer cost via a subscription model. We pair this with a "human-in-the-loop" model, where senior comms professionals can step in to manage media relationships and strategic execution.
Even with the agentic age, AI handles data and speed, but it’s essential to have that human layer to still have to evaluate nuanced social context, ethical implications, and tone during a sensitive market event.
If PR doesn't manage the digital consensus, the model will either invent its own version of your brand or default to a competitor.
SEO, AEO, GEO - three acronyms doing a lot of work right now. Which of these is real, which is repackaging, and what should a comms team actually change right now?
We need a re-brand - who is doing its PR?! There’s a real lack of clarity right now.
My take is to focus on GEO. This is about optimising your brand so that generative AI systems (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Claude) pull your narrative, citations, and data into their synthesised responses. SEO is seeing an evolution. Technical SEO builds the structural web pipes for businesses for the age of AI search; but GEO builds the narrative logic that LLMs synthesise.
If we think about SEO as a way to optimise a digital footprint so blue links rank on Google and Bing? Hmm, with search engine traffic dropping significantly this year and set to even more next, it’s a consideration but it’s not where I would put my poker chips. AEO was developed for voice search, featured snippets, or zero-click boxes. I see it as a bridge between the two so good to consider holistically but again, not a future focused play. GEO is the place to be.
Juniors are the roles AI is meant to replace first. What are you training yours to do instead, specifically?
We are building a team of Communications Technologists - people who can understand narrative and news as much as data and insights. We believe that curiosity can outmatch any machine, so when it comes to junior team members we are not only developing their CommsTech skills, they are strategist-executors from day one. We are investing time to enable them to understand how to prompt, audit, and direct LLMs as much as I used to build relationships with journalists when I was a junior. However, I do fundamentally believe the value in PR moving forward is through relationships; yes, with LLMs but still very much centred on actual humans: journalists, newsletters or community editors. It’s about understanding them, what they need and translating that into a message to our clients in terms of what they can provide. That’s where juniors become irreplaceable.
Hot take time. Who wins the PR game over the next few years, and who is quietly losing it already? What should people stop leaning on, and what should they double down on instead?
Definitely doubling down on narrative craft - specifically founder and C-level digital identity creation.
Why? AI search and LLMs act as consistency detectors. You may rank high for standard keywords today, but if your messaging is fragmented across external touchpoints, for example, outdated press releases, mismatched social profiles or conflicting biogs, the AI assigns a trust and logic penalty. This can drive it to seeking out competitors with clearer, more unified digital footprints.
Those that are set to win are those that establish a consensus across the entire digital ecosystem. This sounds big and expensive but it’s something that PR and comms can deliver effectively by creating a strong position or narrative as a founder or brand. If PR doesn't manage the digital consensus, the model will either invent its own version of your brand or default to a competitor.
Where should readers find you, and what's the first thing they should join or read?
Misinformation and trust musings on my LinkedIn!
AI Central Voices is where the AI Central team sits down with the founders, executives, and builders shaping AI - going behind the scenes of how they operate, what they're betting on, and where the industry goes next.
Want to be featured, or have an event you'd like us to cover? Reach out at [email protected]
