The Role Earned Media Plays in the New Age of AI Search
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Key Takeaways
Brand visibility now depends on coming up in AI searches.
AI-driven searches look to credible sources to generate their summaries.
To appear in those summaries, you need your own credible earned media to validate the trustworthiness of your brand.
AI has completely changed online search results.
Old way: Type in what you’re looking for — for example, “best places to stay in Lake Tahoe” — and your search engine of choice would produce a long list of blue links you could follow. Good luck growing your business if you didn’t show up on that first page of results.
New way: Type in “where to stay in Tahoe,” and you no longer get a pageful of options; you get a one-paragraph summary that basically answers the question for you, often accompanied by a shortlist containing a few recommended links — all presented in the most confident, informed tone imaginable.
Why go any further when AI has already done all the research for you and reached a definitive conclusion on its own? More and more, people are simply trusting that answer and going with it. As a result, more and more, the question that concerns business owners has shifted from “How do I rank?” to “How do I become part of AI’s summarized answer?”
There are ways to increase your chances of becoming part of the answer, and earned media is one of them.
I realize not everyone works in the field of public relations, as I do, so let’s start at the start. What is “earned media”? It’s any coverage that a brand earns organically rather than pays for. Paid media includes ads and purchased placements in publications; owned media includes exposure you’ve created for yourself (like your website and your social channels); but earned media has attracted attention from outside sources — and, therefore, it carries credibility.
It’s the difference between you saying your widget has revolutionized your industry and a magazine in your field saying your widget is revolutionary. So when we’re talking earned media, we’re talking third-party reviews of your brand, expert commentary on your brand, podcast invitations about your brand, awards your brand wins and all forms of press coverage you didn’t buy — basically, any organic conversations that are happening online about your brand.
Today, you have to be in as many of those conversations as possible for AI to find you on the basis of the public at large deciding you’re worth talking about. And that’s what we’re all after nowadays, isn’t it? Giving AI a reason to pay attention to you. Having enough external endorsements (i.e., earned media) to grab the attention of AI’s spotlight.
The new book on brand visibility
What we’re really zeroing in on, of course, is brand visibility. Showing up in online searches has always equated to brand visibility, and that’s not going to change. What is changing, however, are the tools that cause you to show up.
At last count (counts that increase every single day, all over the world): Google remains the most used search platform with approximately 80% of the market share, but its Gemini AI app has experienced a “staggering” 10,600% increase in usage over the past two years; 37% of consumers are starting their searches with other AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity); and 70% of readers never scroll past the opening section of AI overviews.
With AI search traffic up 527% year over year just from 2024 to 2025 and the “tipping point” of AI searches taking over traditional searches projected to be the year 2028, it’s clear that the brands investing in authority today are the ones that are going to be discoverable tomorrow. And that “authority” is generated by a brand being cited in a cluster of domains that AI results cull from.
To be cited in this new book on brand visibility, you need earned media placements. As many as you can get. So rather than chasing trends to increase your visibility, you’d be wise to direct your marketing resources toward making your name part of the AI-generated answer when potential customers go looking for the “best of” in your category.
How to build lasting brand visibility
Like I said, showing up in online searches will always be the holy grail of establishing a solid brand reputation, and that applies to any kind of search, powered by any kind of tool, conducted by any kind of consumer. So my advice is to concentrate your PR initiatives on building the kind of presence that both people and AI tools recognize and surface.
AI-driven discovery hasn’t changed the power of visibility, it’s just made it more urgent by relying on consolidated, definitive summaries that aren’t necessarily converting to click-throughs right away but are converting to consumer trust (hold that thought for the next section).
To create durable visibility, earned media plays a central role by:
Garnering meaningful coverage and expert positioning in the publications your audience and algorithms already trust
Building a consistent, credible footprint across media, reviews and thought leadership so your brand is clearly associated with what you do best
Connecting earned media to your broader content and reputation strategies so your visibility compounds over time
You’re aiming for credibility here — being considered reputable enough in your market to show up in AI search results — and that’s generated by information about you being corroborated elsewhere (beyond your four walls), positive commentary about you in sources AI itself deems credible and being part of online discussions in which your brand is a topic.
So ask your customers to post recommendations, participate on expert panels at conferences that will be covered by the news, actively encourage your followers’ engagement with your social media content and accept those emailed invitations to be a guest writer in roundups. The great thing about every bit of visibility you generate online? It never goes away. It lasts forever. It will continue fueling AI-powered searches. An ad loses its impact and reach the second it expires.
AI visibility = consumer trust
Your website and your existing SEO still matter, they still remain central parts of effectively conveying your brand’s identity. They’re just not going to get you surfaced in AI searches. To accomplish that, you have to have a reliable footprint beyond your own marketing assets.
When you show up in an AI search, trust in your brand automatically goes up. Referrals from parties people already know has always been the most direct path to company growth, and AI-driven discovery hasn’t replaced that tendency. It has automated it. People want findings they can trust, believe in; and 80% of searchers feel confident that AI results provide unbiased information.
Bottom line: Trust is the entire currency here, both for consumers and for the AI tools serving them. And the systems people rely on to gauge credibility and trust remain the same third-party signals they’ve always valued: independent coverage, consistent mentions, expert recognition and genuine reviews.
Earned media builds all of that at once.
Earned media used to be about reaching the right people through the right outlets. It still is. But today, those same placements are also teaching AI tools who you are and what you’re known for. Each time you earn a piece of media instead of buy it, you’re building credibility with humans and machines simultaneously.
Brands that benefit most from earned media show up steadily in industry-specific outlets, are associated with their area of expertise and have accumulated third-party proof vouching for them, which turns a claim into a credential.
In other words, the qualities that have always defined good earned media are now also the qualities that make a brand citable by AI. You can’t shortcut your way onto the shortlist. You have to earn it. AI systems are essentially doing what people have always done, only faster and at scale: looking for outside validation before forming an opinion.
Key Takeaways
Brand visibility now depends on coming up in AI searches.
AI-driven searches look to credible sources to generate their summaries.
To appear in those summaries, you need your own credible earned media to validate the trustworthiness of your brand.
AI has completely changed online search results.
Old way: Type in what you’re looking for — for example, “best places to stay in Lake Tahoe” — and your search engine of choice would produce a long list of blue links you could follow. Good luck growing your business if you didn’t show up on that first page of results.
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