Member Mondays is an initiative designed to foster direct engagement and provide valuable information sharing within the PR community. Member Mondays take place on the fourth Monday of each month from 1–1:45 p.m. ET. All programs are free for PRSA members. Sign up for future sessions here.
“We’re all shifting to using AI answer-engines for information,” Natan Edelsburg said. And this is true “whether you use Google and it provides a summary, or now you’re asking all your questions to Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini.”
Edelsburg, chief partnerships officer at PR software company Muck Rack, said that when it comes to getting brand messages cited by AI chatbots, “Owned media is nowhere near as important as earned.”
In a September Muck Rack study, 99% of all web links cited by AI chatbots were from non-paid media.
“This is a huge testament to how important our industry is,” and “a renaissance moment for public relations and communications,” Edelsburg said during the Sept. 28 episode of Member Monday, PRSA’s livestream for members and non-members alike held the last Monday of every month.
According to Muck Rack’s research, 84% of AI citations come from earned media, “which is specifically what PR and communications professionals do,” Edelsburg told Heide Harrell, M.A., APR, PRSA’s 2026 chair and host of Member Mondays.
Earned media includes journalism, academic research, government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, encyclopedia sites, social media platforms and third-party corporate content — the latter referring to instances in which one company writes about another, possibly because of a partnership between the two organizations.
In the study, 27% of all AI citations are drawn from journalism, versus 13.7% from owned media such as company websites and social-media channels.
A user’s question also helps determine the sources an AI chatbot will cite. Questions about industry trends, for example, bring up journalism citations more than twice as often as how-to queries.
Some news organizations, even the largest ones, aren’t cited in AI responses as often as others, the research found. Perhaps because it presents news in easily digestible, bite-sized nuggets, Axios is among the three most-cited news domains on ChatGPT across 13 of the 17 industries in the study.
However, “That doesn’t mean that Axios is going to show up for every single prompt,” Edelsburg said.
The Associated Press appears among the top three for one industry, while The New York Times and the Reuters news service do not appear among the three most-cited sources for any industry.
Pitching up the wrong tree?
The journalists that AI relies on are not the ones that PR pros tend to pitch, Edelsburg said — a major issue when you’re trying to land press coverage for clients.
“On average, only 2% of the journalists we’re traditionally pitching are being cited by AI,” he said. One of the main reasons is that AI tools are looking for websites and news sources they can easily crawl and read, he said.
“A lot of the most popular publications out there, like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and any major outlet with a paywall, are often not going to be accessible to these [AI] tools,” he said.
Edelsburg recommended that communications professionals “treat AI as your biggest media outlet.” More specifically, “you need to treat each AI model as its own media outlet, and understand which journalists are being cited.”
ChatGPT “is obsessed with Google Maps,” he said. “When you ask things like, ‘What’s the best city to visit?’ it defaults to Google Maps. A strategy might be to make sure that the reviews on your Google page are really good, and to work with your team on that.”
Claude, on the other hand, “never cites YouTube at all,” he said. Similarly, “Wikipedia matters more for ChatGPT than it does for Claude.”
Studying these trends helps communicators focus their earned-media strategies, he said.
An audience member asked about sending AI-generated media pitches. When AI story pitches appear in reporters’ inboxes, “it’s very obvious,” Harrell said. “I promise you, journalists are hitting delete.”
Illustration credit: kiattisak
