• by Lindsey Groepper , Yesterday

Marketers are running around like their hair is on fire, trying to crack the code on AI visibility. But too many are unknowingly handcuffing their PR teams and wondering why the LLM mentions aren’t popping off. Like most things in PR, it’s just not that simple.

These leaders have all seen the Muck Rack report stat asserting that earned media drives 84% of LLM citations. Cue the frantic spending on PR. That’s a good impulse, but they’re missing the big picture. To many C-suites, earned media means traditional, unpaid press coverage from reporters, contributors, and analysts -- period.

LLMs don’t follow that definition. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are crawling the entire internet for information, categorizing earned media to include unconventional channels like community forums, review sites, newsletters and podcasts.

This media mix makes some brand leaders bristle. They want their PR teams only chasing legacy hits because it feels really good to forward a Wall Street Journal link to the board, and they also want it to help reach their AI visibility goals.

If leaders want to show up in AI answers, they have to move on from “the way things have always been done.”

Why isn’t traditional media enough to increase visibility?

Let’s talk numbers. The 84% headline is eye-catching, but marketers should know there’s always more to the story.

Dig deeper, and you’ll see traditional journalism only makes up 27% of cited sources, and almost half of that coverage is older than 12 months. So established media outlets and new coverage are important, but not the whole story.

Where do the bots get the rest of the information considered “earned”? From nontraditional channels like Reddit, LinkedIn newsletters, Substack, G2 and even Wikipedia.

Our teams have run AI visibility audits, laying out these diverse domains to clients or prospects. We’ve often been met with extreme resistance.

I understand the hesitancy. These channels are a major deviation from what we’ve always viewed as earned coverage. But LLMs don’t care about our feelings.

An inclusion in a highly regarded LinkedIn newsletter or a localized industry forum may have a much larger impact on LLM training data than a conventional interview that bots may not index for months. Of course, a Wall Street Journal hit is still great, even if it doesn’t index in LLMs.

Traditional media isn’t dead

I’m not telling you to kick legacy media to the curb. Showing up in new and old channels covers all the bases.

A solid placement in a trusted outlet still does heavy lifting by driving human traffic, reaching actual decision-makers and giving the sales team something shiny to fuel their outreach.

The foundation of AI visibility comes down to consistent messaging across all channels. Whether it’s owned, old-school or new media, PR, marketing, sales and customer teams must all work together to feed bots the right information.

Bottom line: earned media has a whole new meaning. Issuing an executive mandate for sky-high AI visibility, but insisting on only traditional press, sets everyone up to fail. Executives, present your goal, then give your PR partners the reins to steer the strategy so they can put you everywhere the bots -- and buyers -- are looking.