AI Search Citations: How Earned Media Gets Your Brand Found in ChatGPT

Most brands are trying to show up in AI search by optimizing their own website. That is not where AI is looking. According to research across millions of AI citations, 27 percent of what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity pull into their answers comes from journalism and earned media. Owned content, the stuff you control, is a much smaller slice of the pie. Which means the companies winning in AI search are not the ones with the best blogs. They are the ones with the best PR. In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Natan Edelsburg, Chief Partnership Officer at Muck Rack, the communications and PR software platform that analyzed millions of AI citations to understand exactly what these models are reading and recommending. Natan breaks down what the data actually shows about AI search citations, why earned media now sits at the center of GEO and AEO strategy, and what businesses need to do differently as the lines between PR and SEO collapse. They dig into why paid media is barely showing up in AI results right now, how Reddit and forum platforms are getting crawled heavily by frontier models, and why press releases are having a genuine renaissance because longer, more comprehensive releases are being written for bots, not journalists. Natan also shares the "2% overlap problem": only 2 percent of the journalists PR teams are currently pitching are the ones AI is actually citing. That gap is where the opportunity lives. In this episode, we cover: Why AI search citations come overwhelmingly from earned media and third-party journalism, not owned content The 27% journalism stat: what Muck Rack's research on millions of citations actually found Why paid media and traditional backlinks matter less in an AI-first search world The press release renaissance: why longer, comprehensive releases are now written for robots, not reporters How Reddit, forums, and niche Substacks are getting crawled heavily and cited frequently by frontier models The 2% overlap: why the journalists you are pitching today are mostly not the ones AI is citing How to build media lists that include AI visibility as a targeting criterion Why recency matters: most AI citations come from the last 12 months, not your evergreen content library How to use prompt sampling (and tools like Muck Rack's Generative Pulse) to monitor your brand's AI visibility Why the wrong information is showing up about your brand in AI, and what to do about it How PR is finally gaining the direct revenue attribution that has eluded it for decades If you are a CMO, chief communications officer, PR professional, or marketing leader trying to figure out how your brand shows up in AI-generated answers, and why traditional SEO alone is not enough to get you there, this conversation reframes what earned media strategy has to look like now. Because if AI is your biggest new media outlet, the question is not whether you have a press release strategy. It is whether you have one built for the machines that are reading it. ------------------------ RESOURCES Learn more about the work the Muck Rack does at Muckrack.com Get connected to Natan here: www.linkedin.com/in/natanedelsburg Need help finding a marketing agency to scale your business? Check out PerissonNetwork.com