How AI Is Becoming a New Channel for PR

It’s hard to read the news without seeing “AI” in every other headline, often with a focus on the negative, especially in the media industry.

However, the rise of AI presents real opportunity for PR professionals: a new channel for visibility. 

Recently, DLPR SVP Sarah Lazarus and Junior Account Executive Ellie Stevens attended Muck Rack’s “What Is AI Reading?” webinar, which covered how AI models source information and what that means for the future of PR. 

Muck Rack analyzed responses to more than seven million prompts across large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Gemini, to identify patterns in the links and sources most frequently cited in AI-generated answers. 

The results were striking: 94% of content cited by AI is non-paid media, which includes earned media, first- and third-party blogs, and aggregators and encyclopedias. 

To break it down further, 25% of those non-paid sources are journalistic, the most of any category, with social and user-generated content (UGC) accounting for only 4% of citations by comparison. This reflects LLMs’ preference for credible, third-party validation.

Additionally, more than half of AI citations come from the past 11 months, with the strongest spike in the last seven days, reinforcing the value of consistent, timely earned media coverage. 

Authoritative, up-to-date media coverage doesn’t just support brand reputation, it now actively shapes how companies, products and industries appear in AI-driven discovery. 

That visibility matters not only for staying in front of target audiences on a day-to-day basis, but also for influencing how a company is portrayed more broadly when users search actively for it. A strong body of credible coverage gives LLMs trusted context to draw from, helping ensure firms are understood and framed fairly both in everyday searches and during periods of heightened scrutiny.    

Not All Coverage Is Created Equal

Of course, “journalistic sources” is a very broad category, and influence varies widely. Muck Rack found only a 2% overlap between journalists most frequently pitched by brands and those most often cited by AI engines, pointing to a significant opportunity for PR teams to rethink outreach strategies and media lists. 

Roughly 20 outlets account for the majority of AI-cited responses, and they vary by LLM: 

Top Media Outlets Cited 

• Claude: U.S. News and World Report, Nature, Yahoo! Finance, CNBC, NerdWallet, Bankrate 
• ChatGPT: Reuters, The Verge, The Guardian, Financial Times, CNBC, Axios 
• Gemini: Forbes, Investopedia, NerdWallet, CNET, Bankrate, PC Magazine 

While major outlets dominate overall across the board, niche and trade outlets frequently lead for category-specific queries, offering a path to highly targeted visibility among specialized audiences. 

In addition to the optimization of earned media, press releases are now also playing a growing role in AI visibility. Since July, AI citations of press releases have increased five fold, driven by AI’s bias toward fact-based releases as well as improved access to wire services for AI crawlers. 

The most cited releases tended to share common traits, including twice as many statistics, 30% more action verbs, 2.5 times as many bullet points, more mentions of unique companies/products, and a 30% higher rate of objective sentences versus marketing language. 

Putting AI Visibility into Practice

So, how can PR professionals apply these learnings to their day-to-day work? 

A good place to start is by experimenting with your chatbot of choice. Enter prompts that mirror your industry, audience, and common client narratives, and observe. 

Which publications are cited most often? Whose bylines appear most frequently? What topics generate the most comprehensive responses?

Gathering the answers to those questions will help you shape and adapt your media strategy for greater visibility as AI-driven search becomes more prevalent. 

While AI may be reshaping how information is discovered, it is also reinforcing the value of credible storytelling and earned media. At DLPR, we’re excited by what this means for the future of media and PR, and we are looking forward to continuing to grow and adapt along with it.

By: Sarah Lazarus & Ellie Stevens