Earned media comes about when others decide on their own to cover a brand: a trade magazine tests a product, an industry portal includes a provider in a comparison, an expert recommends a company in an interview, or customers share their experiences. A business can encourage such coverage but cannot buy it, because editors and authors decide for themselves what gets published. Hence the name: a brand has to earn this attention. Earned media is also called third-party coverage. Earned media is a central part of Off-Page GEO, the work on a brand’s presence beyond its own website.
Paid, owned, and earned media
The distinction comes from marketing, which separates three types of media:
- Paid media: reach that is paid for, such as ads, sponsored posts, or purchased spots in lists.
- Owned media: channels a brand controls itself, such as its website, a blog, a newsletter, or its own social media profiles.
- Earned media: coverage, reviews, and recommendations by others that are neither paid for nor published by the brand itself.
Directory listings that a business creates and maintains itself are therefore not earned media either, while reviews that others leave on such a listing are.
How far the term reaches depends on the source. A 2012 marketing study, for example, distinguishes traditional earned media—coverage in newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio—from social earned media, meaning posts by others in blogs and online communities. A 2025 study of AI answers uses a narrower definition: it counts only independent media, review sites, and comparison sites as earned and treats social networks, forums, and other user-generated content as a separate category. When reading research on earned media, it is worth checking which definition it uses.
Why earned media matters for AI answers
What others write about a brand can become part of a language model’s knowledge through its training data or be retrieved by AI systems for a current answer. A review or comparison can then be cited as a source—an AI citation—or the brand it covers can be named without a source reference, as a mention.
How strongly AI systems draw on independent sources is not settled. Providers do not disclose in detail how they select sources, and the two studies below are preprints, released before peer review was completed:
- In September 2025, researchers at the University of Toronto reported a systematic, strong preference for earned media in the narrower sense. In August 2025, they had mainly asked web-enabled versions of the models behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity for the best products or providers, for example in ten consumer product categories such as smartphones and electric vehicles, and in several languages. Independent media, review sites, and comparison sites were drawn on more often than brand websites and communities. The degree differed by AI system: Perplexity mixed in more brand websites and communities. Brand websites gained weight in purchase-oriented questions; this was analyzed for the models behind ChatGPT and Perplexity. The paper thanks a GEO services provider for its support, and one of the authors advises that company.
- An analysis of almost 150,000 citations in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok between March and May 2026 paints a different picture of source types. Its author co-founded a company that sells software for measuring AI visibility and analyzed that company’s data on 102 brands tracked by its customers, mostly software and fintech brands and Indian brands that sell directly to consumers. Most sources were websites of other companies in the same field, such as competitors; tech and business media and software review sites made up only a small share. Only a very small share of the sources pointed to the website of the brand being studied.
The two studies asked different questions, covered different periods, and classified sources differently, so their results cannot be compared directly. They share one finding: a brand’s own website is often just one source among many for AI systems. Earned media is therefore a sensible complement to the work on a brand’s own website, even though it does not guarantee being named in AI answers.
Digital PR: how earned media comes about
Earned media cannot be ordered, but it can be encouraged. The work behind it is often called digital PR: public relations aimed mainly at online media, trade publications, podcasts, and newsletters. Digital PR is the activity; earned media is the result.
Coverage often starts, for example, when a company’s experts offer commentary on industry topics, when a company publishes its own data or analyses that are new to a readership, when it takes part in independent tests and comparisons, or when it is active in industry associations. Satisfied customers can be asked for a review or to take part in a case study. To keep the facts in all this coverage right, it helps when the paragraph about the company at the end of a press release, known as the boilerplate, states the same facts as the brand’s website (Brand fact consistency). A press clipping list—a running record of all coverage and mentions in other media—makes progress visible.
Paid placements are not earned media
A sponsored trade article (advertorial), a purchased spot in a best-of list, or a paid social media post is paid media, even if it looks like editorial coverage. In Germany, under the Act against Unfair Competition (UWG), failing to disclose the commercial purpose of a post can be unfair unless that purpose is immediately clear from the circumstances (Section 5a(4) UWG). Editorial content that a company pays for to promote sales, without this being clear from the content or its presentation, is always prohibited toward consumers. As a rule, paid placements must therefore be recognizable as advertising, for example through a label such as “Anzeige” or “Werbung” (German for “advertisement” and “advertising”).