March 24, 2026
In 2026, is it fair to say brands now have two audiences? People… and machines?
With people moving away from traditional search engines in favour of AI-powered answers (37% now start their searches with AI instead of Google)*, AI search isn’t just a new channel, it’s a new behaviour.
AI-generated responses are also integrated directly into search platforms like Google, meaning discovery is no longer just about ranking links, but about being selected and summarised by machines.
As AI becomes the gateway to information, it builds answers by pulling from multiple sources across media channels, communities and culture - determining what’s credible and which brands get surfaced.
This means brands and agencies now need to plan not just for people, but for machines too - building comms plans to earn brand presence in the very environments AI tools gather from.
Side note - it’s important to note that when we talk about ‘earned’, we’re not just talking about traditional PR.
Brands can earn attention anywhere - and those signals collectively shape how they are understood and discovered by both people and AI.
For the past two decades, traditional search has shaped how brands competed for attention. Keyword optimisation in blogs, SEO investment and paid placements all laddering into the fight for the first-page ranking because visibility lived there and died on the second-page.
I remember receiving one brief from a client that just wanted us to generate backlinks for their website to help improve their SEO. They didn't care about the reach, the brand mentions, the image inclusion or if their c-suite was profiled - all they wanted was that all important link.
When discovery moves from clicking blue links to expecting direct answers, the strategy changes. Visibility isn’t about who ranks first on Google anymore - it’s about whose information is considered credible enough to be included in an LLM’s response.
Right now, brands can’t pay their way into AI-generated answers the same way they optimised their SEO rankings - ads in AI tools will inevitably come (and have already been piloted in the US), but right now in Australia, LLM features are driven by credibility rather than media budgets.
And when we look at it through that lens, earned starts to feel less like a supporting tactic and more like the foundation cornerstone.
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If AI engines are mining the internet for credible sources to feed their responses, brand narratives that exist on trusted digital environments matter more than ever.
AI doesn’t just read a brand’s website - it interprets how a brand shows up across the broader media ecosystem whether that’s social posts, consumer trend analysis or thought leadership, and often weighs those pieces more heavily than anything a brand could say about itself.
This doesn’t mean abandoning PR fundamentals, it means creating content that people and machines can understand and reference.
Beyond press releases, brands need a steady stream of credible, citable content - from expert commentary and data-led stories to partnerships, community conversations and culturally relevant moments that earn coverage.
In a world where discovery increasingly happens through answers rather than search rankings, AI visibility depends on whether a brand has contributed meaningful insight, shown up consistently and been referenced often enough to be considered credible source material.
Which is why earned media, when executed as a sustained strategy, becomes the infrastructure that shapes how both people and AI understand and discover.
A recent study by Promptwatch Data makes for interesting reading.
According to their data, LinkedIn is the 3rd-most-cited domain globally from ChatGPT searches over the past 3 months - only beaten by Reddit, a powerful source for brands and Wikipedia, and followed by some of the biggest news sites in the world, Forbes and Reuters.
That’s not all - the world authority on AI, Gartner, has predicted that by next year, mass adoption of public LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will drive a 2x increase in PR and earned media budgets.
It’s clear that AI visibility isn’t driven by a single channel, but by how a brand shows up across an entire network of credible sources.
Creativity and standout work still massively matter, but those spotlight moments need to be supported by a fundamental layer of brand presence. That means showing up in credible spaces with content that adds value, builds authority and can be referenced beyond a single moment.
If you’re not part of the trusted source material, you’re not part of the answer.
As AI-driven discovery increasingly favours trusted sources, the brands prioritising credibility, consistency and culture will be the ones surfaced and referenced by AI engines.
Earned media has always played a critical role in a brand’s communications strategy, but in an AI-shaped landscape, its value has only intensified.
The difference now though, is expectation. Brands can’t just rely on creating one-off moments, they need to build a narrative that shows up consistently, adds value and can be referenced.
Because the brands that win won’t just be the most visible in the moment. They’ll be the most understood over time.
