News and Insights
What Happens at the Intersection of Earned Media and AI Visibility and Why it Should Matter to Your Health Brand
October 23, 2025
- Recognize AI as a new media vehicle and focus your earned media strategy on securing placements in high domain authority outlets as organic, non-paid media account for over 95% of AI citations.
- Craft key client messages like an “SEO wizard” to ensure the context, recency, and expert quotes within your earned media coverage are highly useful, extractable and accurate for LLMs to cite.
- It’s critical to balance your pitch strategy to not only secure placements in high-domain outlets but also consider trade or niche outlets where the client’s target audiences of professionals consume their news.
AI is changing the way we work, as well as the way we meet client expectations and provide deliverables. Many clients in the health sector are starting to wonder: When a consumer is searching for solutions with ChatGPT, how do we ensure that our company appears prominently in search results? We know that large language models (LLMs) used in AI pull from a vast number of information sources (more on that below) to generate their answers, so is there a way to “pitch” the LLMs?
The short answer is “yes,” but the road to get there is unique and new. Rather than seeing the LLMs as media outlets to be approached using tried and true earned media relations strategies, we should view them as an entirely new vehicle. Our media targets should now include paid, earned, social, owned and AI.
To be clear, we are not addressing the challenges inherent in the use of AI to generate content or create prompts: that’s an issue deserving of a separate discussion. We are focusing on how to generate outputs. Considering AI as a new and distinct media stream requires a brand new conversation with health-sector clients and provides an opportunity to think collaboratively with them. Who among their audiences are using LLMs for answers? How quickly is that percentage growing? What paths are they taking to get there? The answers to these questions define the intersection of AI and our earned media outputs.
How do we pitch our clients to the LLMs? Via earned media.
When answering user queries, AI curates all available information, placing overwhelmingly higher value on earned media. This clearly indicates that earned placements in high domain authority outlets are the critical key to influencing LLMs. For a story aimed at consumers of therapeutics or health care services, you may spend more time pitching consumer outlets that rank high on domain authority with key messages (think like an SEO wizard) that would lend themselves nicely to informing ChatGPT, Claude and the like. In a sense, we want to seed the ground that AI covers with stories that contain key information about
After securing quality earned media coverage, how do you ensure that AI works for you? You may be thinking that AI can be fed in a way that is not dissimilar to how you might share that Prevention article across your company’s social platforms to amplify its messages and increase its reach.
However, it does not always follow that if you get coverage in a high domain authority outlet that it will immediately get picked up by an LLM. First, all of the LLMs pull from different sources and cite differently. What will help your earned piece break through with AI is not only the quality of the source article, but also the way in which your client is written about. The context of their inclusion in the article is important. Are their executives quoted as experts? Do third-party KOLs mention them or their products? Does the article have recency? These elements and more are factored into the strategy of reaching LLMs.
We are not advising that you only pitch consumer media with your news right now. Not every story will be right for every high authority domain outlet. Make sure you’re doing quality research into the topics and trends that are relevant and add value to the reporters you’re pitching. Also think about where your audiences are consuming their news. For our health clients, many of their stakeholders are seeking information from trade outlets, which tend to have a lower domain authority. A strategy for reaching those professional audiences through AI, and the messages you employ, will appear different.
So what is AI reading? More on earned media as a source
Earned media is critical in our new AI environment because the technology prioritizes and cites organic, unpaid content, such as news articles and expert commentary, as a primary source in its outputs.
According to new “What Is AI Reading” research from Muck Rack:
- 95% of AI citations come from non-paid media
- 89% come from earned media and 27% come from journalistic content
- 49% of citations for recent queries originate from journalistic content
This research underscores that a strong earned media strategy that encourages authoritative placements and delivers accurate AI content is now a major determinant of success. Therefore, it’s important to prioritize influential high-authority outlets from the onset, high-domain outlets that will not simply build positive awareness among target audiences, but which will also inform LLMs from a variety of AI platforms
Even with the vast potential of AI in supporting public relations, it will never replace the critical human-factor that only seasoned media relations professionals can put into play with reporters. Media professionals are able to make full use of their emotional intelligence and creativity, build authenticity into their storytelling, and through their judgment and experience are more capable of pinpointing a reporter’s “sweet spot” in encouraging them to write a story. When it comes to pitching, AI-produced correspondence is often easily spotted and just as often deleted, while a personalized document builds trust and mutual respect from the onset. Our humanity provides the foundation for relationships that result in the earned-media placements on which AI thrives.
When it comes to developing the right strategy for reaching and leveraging AI, some clients are early adopters while others are just beginning to consider the implications of working to reach LLMs. And, while the current state of AI marketing still has largely theoretical aspects to it, it’s important to start now in considering AI’s and LLM’s potential uses and future developments. Understanding just how AI is being used by a client’s prospective customers gives us the basis for building winning strategies that lead to the best possible results.
POSTED BY: Laura O’Neill, , Glenn Silver
