We’ve heard that earned media is on the decline. That building relationships with reporters matters less than ranking at the top of Google.
Brands invested heavily in paid search strategies designed to get the click and win the customer.
AI Overviews, Copilot and Perplexity can now answer a customer’s question before they ever click a link. Someone searching for the “best insurance for small businesses” may get a summary of several brands right on the page. No scrolling through results. No comparing websites. Often, no click at all.
When AI answers a question about your industry, will your brand be part of the answer?
Earned media, the coverage a brand earns rather than pays for, has always helped build credibility. Think news stories, expert quotes, interviews, reviews and other mentions from trusted sources. Now, that coverage may also play an important role in how people discover and understand your brand through AI.
AI doesn’t simply look at which company spent the most on advertising. It pulls from information across the internet, including media coverage, reviews, social conversations, industry articles and other sources.
If your company is consistently associated with the right expertise and messages across those sources, AI has a clearer picture of who you are and what you’re known for.
If that presence is limited or inconsistent, a competitor may become part of the answer instead.
Earned media has always helped build credibility because someone other than your company is telling your story.
Every credible media mention, expert interview or industry article adds to the larger online conversation about your company. As AI pulls from information across the internet to form its answers, that conversation becomes increasingly important.
The opportunity isn’t simply to get more media coverage. It’s to be intentional about the story being built around your company.
How do you want your customers to see you? Are you consistently showing up in the right conversations? Are trusted sources outside your company reinforcing your expertise in those conversations?
Those are increasingly important questions for businesses as AI changes the way customers search and discover brands.
At TCA, we help clients identify the stories and thought leadership they can own, develop clear messaging around them and create opportunities to put that messaging in front of the right audiences. That might mean turning original research into a national media story, positioning an executive as an expert reporters turn to or finding a timely angle that puts a client into a larger industry conversation.
The goal isn’t coverage for the sake of coverage. It’s building a clear and credible presence around the things that matter most to your business.
AI is changing how customers find information, but it hasn’t changed one fundamental part of marketing: people are more likely to trust what others say about your company than what you say about yourself.
The brands that stand out won’t necessarily be the ones spending the most. They’ll be the ones with a clear, consistent story being reinforced in the places their customers trust.
And as AI increasingly influences which brands and experts become part of the answer, earned media isn’t becoming less valuable.
