On the second Monday of every month, PRSA offers “AI Pulse,” a briefing hosted by Ray Day, APR, PRSA’s 2026 immediate past chair, that provides timely insights into the latest AI trends, tools, and developments. Learn how to stay ahead of an ever-evolving digital landscape here.
Artificial intelligence “is changing how we create content,” Angela Dwyer, APR, said. “AI search is a huge channel, in terms of influence.”
For PR pros, getting clients mentioned in the news media is no longer the end goal. Today’s PR professionals must craft messages that will also be cited by the AI models many consumers increasingly rely on to answer their questions.
Earned media still matters
According to Muck Rack’s research, AI models tend to favor credible journalism as sources. Some 94% of the sources AI models cite are non-paid content, 84% of which is earned media mentions that PR pros have worked to arrange.
Artificial intelligence favoring earned media is “super exciting for comms professionals today,” said Martin, a longtime PR and media relations pro who serves as managing director of media and influence for Allison Worldwide in New York.
The research findings “validate our business” and create a mandate “to look at how AI is impacted by the work that we do,” he said. AI answer engines often rely on unpaid content as one signal of authority when evaluating the information they serve to users, he said.
Content from YouTube and LinkedIn is also being cited more often by AI models, Martin told Dawn Robintette, APR, Fellow PRSA. Robintette, owner of Tale to Tell Communications in San Antonio, moderated “AI Pulse” for regular host and immediate PRSA past chair Ray Day, who was on vacation.
Executive thought leadership on LinkedIn, as well as content from influencers on LinkedIn and YouTube, can also increase visibility in AI-generated responses, Martin said.
“These are areas that we as comms professionals need to think about when applying strategy,” he said. “Discovery-based communities like Reddit and Quora are becoming another important source of earned visibility.”
Creating content AI will cite
Different AI models rely on different types of sources, the research found. While earned media is the top source for ChatGPT answers (at 35%), it falls to third place on the more scholarly Claude AI, which prefers research papers and government sources.
Earned media also drops to third place for Google’s Gemini AI, which favors content from its own YouTube platform and wider Google ecosystem. Similarly, Microsoft’s Copilot favors the company’s LinkedIn platform and the index of its Bing search engine, pushing earned media to third place.
“Things are changing in the world of earned media,” said Dwyer, vice president of Insights at Fullintel, a media-monitoring and measurement company.
From clicks to citations
Website clicks might be down, “but people are still being influenced by the content,” she said. “They’re just getting it from a different source. They’re going to AI search, or, more old-fashioned, they’re still going to Google, where they type in their search and get an AI overview. You want to be one of the links cited.”
In some industries, for example, health care, owned content such as websites is seen as credible by AI models, she said.
Along with authority and trust, other content characteristics influence what AI will cite, Dwyer said, drawing on her own research.
“The number-one thing is educational content, which goes hand-in-hand with the second one, which is answer articles. Across the board, educational content is getting cited more.”
People don’t like promotional content, she said. “But we do like our questions to get answered.”
The discussion underscored how media relations, thought leadership and educational content remain central to PR strategy — not only for reaching journalists and audiences, but increasingly for influencing the AI systems people use to find information.
Illustration: Blankstock
