Four takeaways about AI’s rapidly changing impact on financial PR
Key Takeaways:
- AI answers are increasingly citing news releases and journalistic outlets, making consistent, high-quality earned media and press releases more valuable than ever for financial firms.
- The outlets most cited by AI often differ from those PR teams traditionally pitch, so media lists should broaden beyond top-tier business press to include a wider mix of news, niche, and nontraditional sites.
- Because AI engines favor fresh citations, staying in the news regularly instead of relying on one-off coverage is critical to maintaining visibility in AI-generated responses.
We’ve written as recently as July about the changing landscape for PR given the emergence of AI search engines. Muck Rack, a platform PR firms like the Lowe Group use to track media, has produced excellent research on this subject and once again updated their study, What AI Reads, in December, with important implications for our financial services clients.
In our last blog, we concluded that earned media attention is increasingly important for all organizations including our asset and wealth management clients. That hasn’t changed.
But as Muck Rack continues to document how the AI landscape evolves, we want to offer a few more conclusions. Here are four big takeaways:
THE NEWS RELEASE IS NOT DEAD.
We’ve always believed news releases matter, but Muck Rack found that AI engines are increasingly citing news releases in their answers. This is a complete 180 for those who have long predicted the death of the press release.
Remember a few years back when Google changed their algorithm because so many firms were stuffing news releases with back links to their websites? For a while, press releases links could actually work against you. Many firms stopped using links in news releases, and many stopped creating news releases altogether.
We never stopped encouraging our clients to create and post news releases about legitimate news to provide meaningful information to media and to shape their stories. In our experience, a release can be a door opener with a reporter for a discussion. Plus, news releases on websites get found by reporters and others doing due diligence on your firm.
But Muck Rack’s December study elevates the news release as a source that AI engines are increasingly relying upon for their answers. One percent of all AI citations now come from news releases, up from just .2% in July. This is a five-fold increase.
The research is worth a read as Muck Rack takes a look at what types of news releases AI engines are more likely to cite such as those that include two or more statistics among other factors.
JOURNALISTIC SOURCES REGULARLY ACCOUNT FOR 20-30% OF CITATIONS.
This has held steady across Muck Rack’s research. In the most recent report, Journalistic sources represented 25% of citations, more even than owned media sources like corporate websites.
NEWS ORGANIZATIONS CITED BY AI ENGINES ARE DIFFERENT FROM THE ONES PITCHED BY PR
Muck Rack found that the overlap in the media PR pros commonly pitch and the sites most likely to be mentioned by AI engines is only 2%. The lesson is that media outreach pros should expand their targets to a broader group of news organizations.
Interestingly, AI engines don’t even agree on the most authoritative media sites. Muck Rack lists below the news organizations with the most frequent citations by AI engines, and there is little overlap across engines except for CNBC and Bankrate. Following are the top media cited by each AI engine:
Looking more closely at the financial industry, Muck Rack’s research identified the media most cited in the finance and insurance industry with youtube.com and nerdwallet.com include on the lists. We aren’t sure why metinvestholding.com, a mining company website, and consumerfinance.gov are on the list. While also not a news site, the Muck Rack study included Wikipedia.com and other aggregators among these sources.
Each AI engine has a different idea of which media are authoritative and surprisingly, mainstream media like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times do not top the lists. Part of this may be because these leading news organizations have fought hard to bar search engines from training on their data. As AI engines pursue licensing arrangements with these news organizations, we expect this to change.
Another reason to expand the media you pitch is the fact that each of the AI engines is regularly updating their models to rely on some sources more and deprioritize other sources. Reddit seems to be a common site, but Muck Rack noted that most answers that generate a Reddit response also include a journalistic source as well.
IMPORTANCE OF STAYING IN THE NEWS
Just because you were cited last month doesn’t mean AI engines with continue to cite your firm. Though more than half of citations occurred in the last year, Muck Rack found that the most common time frame (4% of citations) was under a week old. That rises to 5% in the last 2 weeks and 8% in the last month.
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