If you spend money on PR, there is an awkward possibility worth checking: the coverage you are working hardest to get may not be the coverage that decides whether an AI assistant recommends you.
Muck Rack compared the journalists PR teams pitch most often against the journalists AI engines actually draw on for a given brand. The overlap averaged 2%.
That is not a small inefficiency. It suggests most PR effort is aimed somewhere other than where AI systems are looking — which matters more every year, as more of your customers start their search by asking an assistant rather than typing into Google.
Coverage You Didn’t Pay For Is Doing Almost All the Work
Start with the headline finding, because it is stark.
Muck Rack’s continuing study of what AI systems cite — more than 25 million links across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, covering seventeen industries — found that earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations, while paid and advertorial content accounts for 0.3%. “Earned media” means coverage you did not pay for and cannot control: a journalist’s article, a trade publication’s round-up, an analyst’s assessment. The figure has held between 82% and 89% across three editions of the study since July 2025.
Nought point three per cent for everything you can simply buy.
Academic work points the same way. Researchers at the University of Toronto took 300 consumer-electronics queries and classified where each system’s sources came from. Claude drew 65% of its sources from independent media and review outlets, GPT-4o 57%, Perplexity 50%, Gemini 46% — against Google’s 41%. For the queries that matter commercially — best-of lists, comparisons, “which should I choose” — the AI engines converge on earned sources at between 59% and 86%.
So when someone asks an AI which supplier to use, the answer is assembled largely from what other people have written about you. Not from your website.
Why Editors Count for More Than Your Own Pages
The mechanism is not mysterious. An AI system has no way to verify what you say about yourself. It can check whether anyone else says the same thing.
When a trade publication names you in a piece, the decision to include you was made by someone with no stake in your marketing. That is evidence of a kind your own website cannot produce, however well written it is.
Ahrefs measured this across 75,000 brands, looking at which signals track with a brand’s visibility in Google’s AI Overviews. Mentions of a brand across the web scored 0.664. Backlinks — the currency of search optimisation for two decades — scored 0.218. Ahrefs is careful to say this shows association rather than proven cause, and so are we. But the direction is consistent with everything else here: being talked about tracks visibility more closely than being linked to.
Which Outlets, Not How Much Coverage
This is where that 2% figure becomes useful rather than merely alarming.
It does not mean PR does not work. It means most PR programmes are aimed at publications chosen for reach, prestige or relationships — sensible criteria that happen not to be the ones AI systems respond to.
AI citation is concentrated. In the categories the Toronto researchers examined, the sources AI systems leaned on were overwhelmingly specialist review and comparison publications rather than the national titles a PR brief instinctively reaches for.
Knowing which publications carry weight in your category turns a vague “more coverage” brief into a targeted list. That is a more valuable piece of information than an extra month of outreach.
It Has to Keep Going
Coverage decays.
Muck Rack found half of all AI citations come from articles published within the last eleven months, and about 4% from the previous week alone. The Toronto researchers measured median source ages by engine: Claude 62 days, GPT-4o 80, Perplexity 90, against Google’s 130 — AI engines drawing on material roughly 31–70% newer than Google does.
That does not make older coverage worthless; the remaining half of citations spans roughly three further years, and long-lived reference pages do a lot of quiet work. But a campaign you ran eighteen months ago is not carrying you now. This is a drumbeat, not a launch.
Being Cited Is Not the Same as Being Named
There is a complication worth understanding before you judge whether any of this is working.
A large share of AI citations are what the industry calls “ghost citations” — your page is linked as a source, but your brand name never appears in the answer the customer reads. A study of 3,981 brand appearances across four AI engines found that 74.9% drew a citation but only 38.3% got the brand named in the answer text. In 61.7% of appearances the link was there and the name was not — which is 82% of all the citations earned.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable. Your content can be doing the work of informing the answer while a competitor gets the recommendation.
The fix is partly structural. Coverage you secure should carry your name in the sentence a machine would extract, not buried in surrounding context — which in practice means comparative and evaluative pieces, where naming is intrinsic, rather than purely informational ones.
What This Means for You
If AI assistants are not recommending your business, the most likely fix is not on your website.
Three things follow. First, the question worth asking your PR agency is not “how much coverage did we get?” but “which publications in our category do AI systems actually draw on, and are we in them?” Those are different questions with different answers. Second, budget for continuity rather than campaigns — a steady presence beats an annual spike, because the systems weight recent material heavily. Third, check whether the coverage you already have names you in a way a machine can extract, or merely links to you.
None of this requires a large budget. It requires aiming at the right targets, which is mostly a matter of knowing what they are.
Where you stand can be measured rather than guessed at: whether AI tools name your business when someone asks for what you do, how that compares with your competitors, and what in your existing online reputation is producing that answer.
That is what we do at Entity Confidence.
Leave a Reply