Katie Earlam

Why Earned Media Matters More Than Ever in the Age of LLMs

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.

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by Katie Earlam