Want AI visibility? Pursue earned media, confirms Muck Rack study
Key takeaways:
- Muck Rack examined 1 million AI citations and found almost one-quarter were links to news organizations’ content.
- Therefore, pursuing earned media—the traditional workhorse of PR—is solidly supportive of attaining AI visibility.
- Recency, outlet authority and niche strategies also matter.
A basic irony about generative AI is that what appears novel is actually derivative. My personal view is that’s a problem in some areas—art, for example.
But in other areas, “derivative” is exactly what you want. When using AI tools to search the internet, you want quality information from quality sources. You want answers derived from material you deem trustworthy.
In our PR work, we help investment organizations be recognized in the media in ways their audiences perceive as more credible than advertising, marketing messages or sponsored content. Credibility is, in part, derived from context. There’s that word again.
It turns out that when AI models search the internet, they often include content from news-related organizations within their answers. It would be a surprise if they didn’t, because the AI models are attempting to generate answers of a nature people want … and we know that people in their own explorations see more credibility in earned media contexts than in many others.
Muck Rack’s study on what gets cited
Muck Rack recently issued a study that looks at the earned media/AI search dynamic. In promoting a new service, Muck Rack conducted an experiment focused on the question “What is AI reading?”
Muck Rack entered a half-million prompts about diverse subject matter and reviewed 1 million citations from the responses to those prompts, using Chat GPT (‘4o’ and ‘4o-mini’), Gemini (‘flash’ and ‘pro’) and Claude (‘sonnet’ and ‘haiku’).
Analysis of citations returned showed that:
- Almost all are to non-paid content.
- More than one-quarter are to what Muck Rack called “journalistic content.” This was the second-largest category after corporate blogs and content. The other categories were:
- Owned media
- Press release
- Academic/research
- Government/NGO
- Paid/advertorial
- Social/user-generated content
- Aggregators/encyclopedic
Relevance for PR efforts
From a PR perspective, what Muck Rack calls “journalistic content” is precisely the opportunity set for earned media. Therefore, there is no conflict—from an effort or budgetary perspective—in pursuing earned media vs. pursuing AI search visibility.
High-quality corporate content—that is, owned media—and non-paid “journalistic content”—that is, earned media—are precisely where we’d expect effort to pay dividends without taking AI into account. And the Muck Rack study, together with accumulating practical experience, shows that it’s also precisely where the work matters for AI-search visibility, too.
Important side note: In defining terms, Muck Rack treats the universe of online mentions differently than we do at Lowe Group. The study, for example, places corporate blog content in the “earned media” category rather than “owned.” (For more, see The updated PESO model and the PR/marketing conversations it can help drive.) The comments above are consistent with how we use the terms.
Here are three more key points for PR professionals:
- Recency matters. Muck Rack found that when queries specifically ask for recent information, the percentage of journalism-related citations increases to nearly half.
- Outlet authority matters. Well-known news organizations were generally more visible.
- Niche strategies for earned media make sense. Muck Rack found that industry-specific inquiries tended to result in more industry-specific citations. In the Finance/Insurance industry specifically, journalism content is cited even more than in other industries (37% versus 28% overall)). See the top industry sources per AI system in the graphic above from the study.
Let us know if we can help you improve your earned media results—knowing that these also bring benefits in AI search visibility.
Subscribe.
Receive the latest news and insights from Lowe Group.