Why Earned Media Matters More Than Ever in the Age of LLMs
By Katie Earlam, Director of Creative Strategy, 72Point
There’s been a quiet but seismic shift in how audiences are discovering content and it’s one every comms professional, strategist and marketer needs to understand. With the rapid rollout of Large Language Models (LLMs) in search, the internet is being reorganised around trust.
These new systems are fundamentally changing how information is found and surfaced. And they’re rewriting the rules of brand visibility in the process.
The rise of LLM-powered discovery
In the old search world, if you wanted to be seen, you had to play the SEO game - optimise for keywords, rank high, and win the click. But LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews don’t serve up ten blue links. They generate answers, pulling content from across the web, distilling it, and delivering it in one seamless response.
So what gets referenced? Not the loudest brand. Not necessarily the brand with the most paid placements or the highest ad spend.
It’s the brand that’s trusted. The one cited in news stories, mentioned by credible sources, and surrounded by signals of authority. That’s where earned media suddenly jumps from a comms goal to a central discovery strategy.
Earned media is now training data
At its core, an LLM is only as good as the data it learns from. And some of the most authoritative, high-signal data online comes from journalism. News content is timely, fact-checked, and subject to editorial oversight. That makes it exactly the kind of source LLMs prefer when deciding what to reference.
If your story has run in a national paper, been covered by a regional site with high E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness), or generated links and social engagement - there’s a much greater chance it will appear in an LLM’s response. In effect, it becomes part of the next layer of the internet’s collective knowledge.
We’re entering an era where earned visibility feeds machine visibility.
Implications for brand strategy
This shift has big consequences for how brands show up in the world:
- Authority is no longer optional. To be referenced by LLMs, brands must have signals of legitimacy across trusted third-party sources.
- PR becomes part of the SEO ecosystem. Creative campaigns that generate media coverage now directly contribute to your brand’s discoverability in AI-led search.
- Content needs to be newsworthy, not just optimised. The bar is higher. LLMs are trained to distinguish between genuine stories and branded puff pieces.
- Search becomes storytelling. We’re moving from keyword stuffing to strategic storytelling. What you say and where it’s said now shapes how machines understand and surface your brand.
What we’re doing at 72Point
At 72Point, we’ve always believed in earned content as a force multiplier for brands. But in this new search environment, its value only grows. We’re helping brands not just land media coverage - but create content that’s designed to build trust, engage audiences, and be recognised as credible by both people and platforms.
That means focusing on stories that resonate emotionally, socially and editorially because these are the signals LLMs are learning from.
It also means making strategic distribution decisions: partnering with high-authority news brands, ensuring relevance to real-world conversations, and using our insight tools to identify what’s cutting through in a noisy media landscape.
Final thought
The race isn’t to be everywhere. It’s to be credible in the places that count.
In the LLM era, earned media is no longer just a nice-to-have for awareness - it’s the foundation of being discoverable, trustworthy, and top-of-mind when audiences go looking.
And if we want to show up in tomorrow’s answers, we need to be in today’s headlines.
International Women's Day 2025
This international Women’s Day, we want to tip our caps to the women – no, the icons! – who have inspired and fuelled our lives in PR.
None of us would be here without those that came before. All of our individual experiences, whether through school or Uni or work, make us who we are. And sometimes ‘that one sentence’ that someone said to us, or ‘that one thing’ that they did, can inspire our lives to go completely new directions.
This is female fandom in it's fullest!
FROM SAM BROWN – HEAD OF PR
ICON #1 Lynne Franks
Lynne Franks is often referred to as ‘the one who Ab Fab was written about’, but this does not do justice to the woman, her work and her influence. Franks made fashion PR, and in fact, had a crucial role in making London Fashion Week what it is. She is a consummate networker, an opportunity spotter, a collaborator, a visionary and a maker-of-big-things. In fact, she arguably made PR itself famous. I spent much of my early career thinking ‘I want to be like Lynne Franks’ and now, in my slightly older years, I find myself looking at her continued making-of-things and creating of communities, and I still think ‘I want to be like Lynne Franks’! A true PR icon.
ICON #2 Katharine Hamnett
Curiously, Lynne Franks once worked as a PR assistant for Katharine, and it was Katharine that encouraged Lynne to set up her own firm. But it was one specific incident that puts Katharine Hamnett in this list, and it was THIS moment in the ‘80s. In one photo, she showed how to influence through the power of fashion. I was a tiny wee nipper this happened, and my young brain thought ‘well that’s clever isn’t it’. Clever indeed…. Katharine Hamnett – thank you for showing tiny me that you can make a difference in your own way, and you can step into the corridors of power as an individual and make your voice heard. Thank you for your lifelong passion and commitment to a cause. And thank you – THANK YOU – for creating the iconic slogan t-shirt style that I (for one!) still relish today! I salute you.
FROM VICTORIA O’BRIEN, HEAD OF MARKETING
ICON #3 Ruth Yearley
Ruth Yearley is my dear friend and the woman who first taught me the difference between objective, strategy, and tactics – a lesson that's guided me throughout my career. An insanely astute mind who can spot the 'big idea' in minutes and cut straight to the heart of any campaign, I continue to admire her clarity, creativity, and unwavering generosity in helping others see what really matters.
FROM DANIELLE BAIRD, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR
ICON #4 Jennie Stoddart-Scott
I’ve had the privilege of working with Jennie at two different agencies in my career and have always been in awe of how she operates. One lasting impact she left on me was the importance of transparency with clients. She taught me that if something goes wrong or doesn’t meet expectations, its crucial to own it. By doing so you not only demonstrate integrity but also build trust and respect with your clients in the long run. Jennie has always made time for me and championed my growth and I have huge respect for her dedication and integrity.
