NEW RESEARCH: A team at the University of Toronto ran over a thousand consumer queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google, then classified every single source each engine cited as Brand, Earned, or Social. If you work in PR, marketing, or comms, you need to see these numbers: THE FINDINGS: In U.S. consumer electronics queries, AI search cited earned media 92% of the time. Brand-owned content? Single digits. Social media? Essentially zero. In automotive, it was 82% earned. Again, zero social citations. Compare that to Google's traditional results for the same queries: roughly 39% brand, 15% social, and 45% earned. A balanced mix. But AI search isn't balanced. When someone asks ChatGPT (and others) about your product category, the answer is being built almost entirely from third-party journalism and editorial coverage. AND IT GETS WORSE: Per a recent Ahrefs analysis, Google's own AI Overviews now correlate with a 58% reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages. And Pew Research Center found that users click results only 8% of the time when an AI summary appears, versus 15% without one. Even traditional Google search is starting to behave like AI search. And AI search overwhelmingly trusts earned media. WHAT THIS MEANS: The playbook that dominated the last decade: - SEO-optimized owned content - Sponsored posts - Social media "thought leadership" ...is being structurally devalued by the technology billions of people are adopting right now. Meanwhile, the thing many CMOs have been quietly deprioritizing? Earned media. Real journalist relationships. Genuine third-party validation. That's now the primary currency of AI visibility. And most companies are still pouring budget into the channels AI ignores while cutting spend on the one channel AI actually trusts. If you don't have a real earned media strategy (NOT a content marketing strategy dressed up as PR) you're already falling behind in the most important search shift in a generation.
Thanks for sharing this! I'm curious whether the study examined any quality signals in the earned media citations. For example, are AI engines weighing original reporting differently from syndicated wire content? Because if so, that has real implications for how we think about media strategy. A press release picked up by 50 outlets might look like coverage, but it may not carry the same weight in AI search as one deeply reported feature in a credible publication.
Spot on, Carly. This data confirms that AI isn't just a new search bar; it’s a trust filter. If models cite earned media 92% of the time, the "owned-content-first" era is hitting a wall. I recently ran a trial with Gumshoe AI and the results were eye-opening regarding "Share of LLM." A few takeaways that align with your research: Validation over Volume: AI models often ignore brand whitepapers if a journalist hasn't vetted those claims first. The Citation Trap: Since CTR is plummeting, the sentiment within the earned media matters more than the link. The AI must "ingest" the praise to repeat it. Persona Bias: Different AI personas rely on specific clusters of third-party reporting. If you aren't in those outlets, you effectively don't exist to those buyers. Earned media has become the data layer for AI. If you aren't feeding the models via high-authority journalism, your brand is becoming invisible in the most important search shift of our time.
I've run over 700 internal "attribution source," prompt pulls almost 99% of the time owned media is cited first and at a higher frequency.
First, phenomenal. Second, it's up to PR folks to earn trust. For good and ill, people don't trust us because of the uncertainty factors (and the "I got screwed once by a PR firm" factor).
Will you share the study Carly Martinetti ? That’s pretty incredible
Here's the survey, for those wondering. It's from October: https://www.britopian.com/research/earned-media-dominates-ai-search/
Useless tech for charlatans.
Very interesting indeed. To think that not so long ago, authoritative industry voices declared PR dead!
Preach. Important reinforcement. And proud this emerged from my alma mater, U of T. 🇨🇦
Blackwood King LC•991 followers
1moEarned media, especially on certain channels/platforms/pubs, is critical. As someone who has worn the journalist hat, I'm right there with you on journo relationships. And data like this is valuable......but these studies aren't the whole story. I've seen -- many times -- owned media get cited. Sometimes, even, preferred.I'm finding in GenAI-focused studies, whatever the subject, that they often don't seem to account for how real people use GenAI in real-world use cases.FWIW, I recently wrote a piece on the phemonenon in the medical context here: https://b2bs.substack.com/p/dr-ai-aint-so-bad