“You can’t buy eyeballs in LLMs as you can with pay-per-click (PPC) in search engines. Up to 90% of citations that drive brand visibility in LLMs can come from earned media.”
That is a quote from this report from Edelman, digging into how AI search is upending the game for brands when it comes to visibility.
But behind the quote lies a potent, unavoidable reality that many brands face. Countless brands big and small have all used PPC to guarantee higher placement in search results. So when AI is effectively killing the PPC practice, how are brands left to adapt in a world that doesn’t care about paid placement?
Our last blog established that in order to placate GEO, you have to create content that is enticing, engaging, and most of all — human. When we consider what “human” writing means, it’s all about getting into the heads of your audience. LLMs work conversationally and contextually because they’re engineered to complement how their users think and talk and ask questions.
When people engage with an LLM, they want results that are accurate above all else. But accuracy has little to do with where it pops up in a list of options on a search query.
So if accuracy matters most to users, and LLM is searching through millions of hits to find only the most accurate, then what’s the point of paying for placement? Perhaps, as Edleman pointed out, we should focus on accurate and engaging content via earned media.
Earned media thrives where paid media doesn’t because the rules of the game are different.
In paid media, content is secondary to price. What your content is might be relevant to readers, but at the end of the day, that relevance doesn’t really matter because you’re paying for the content to be front and center, unignorable by the masses.
Meanwhile, earned media has to achieve the same ROI but without the reliance on paying to be front and center. Because of this deficit, the content has to take priority. In order to gain that attention, the content has to do so organically, appealing to audiences with something surprising or relatable or factual or enjoyable.
Consider OpenAI’s own explanation for where ChatGPT sources its information from:
“For publicly available internet content, we use only information that is freely and openly accessible on the internet. We do not intentionally gather data from sources known to be behind paywalls or from the dark web.”
So how do brands adapt to this change? How do they keep themselves at the top of people’s minds in an organic way?
Instead of creating content with the intention of sales conversion, brands should create content with the intention of boosting their credibility and authenticity. Those are two metrics that simply cannot be bought, but are being relied on more and more by AI models and their users.
Brands that can rely on their authenticity and back it up with facts and thought leadership are going to increase their reputation within the ranks of Chat GPT and the like. And when that happens, their likelihood of getting in front of end-users increases, as well.
Of course, creating that credibility and authenticity and thought leadership from scratch can be a huge challenge. Partnerships with businesses like ours — creating new data and turning that data into an engaging piece of news content — helps nurture those things.
Through Talker Research, our dedicated research arm, we help collate the voices of actual human beings and create data that can be relied on as statistically sound. Then we take that data and put it into a narrative that is set out to be engaging, informative, and appealing to semantic-and-context-loving AI models.
By taking the factual elements (data, from say 2,000 Americans or so) and adding context, we end up developing exactly the type of content that publishers and AI models alike look for: credible information from a reliable source that gives readers a new insight into any given topic imaginable.
It’s not only a formula for our success as a business, but it’s also a formula to give your business an edge in a whole new world of AI-powered search.
Want to learn more about how to adapt your content and earned media strategy for the age of AI search? Get in touch with our team. We’d love to talk.
Joe Staples
Editorial Account Director