Over the past year, we’ve been making a fairly specific claim: earned media is becoming the raw material AI tools use to answer buyer questions.

Our AI Shortlist report focused on the demand side of that shift: 43% of enterprise buyers now start vendor research with AI tools, and 93% use AI to compare vendors before making a decision. What we didn’t have was large-scale evidence of the supply side: what those systems are actually reading when they generate answers.

Muck Rack’s latest What Is AI Reading? report, which analyzed more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, provides that evidence. Eighty-four percent of the links AI cites come from earned media. Paid and advertorial content accounts for just 0.3%.

Journalism Is Doing More of the Work Than Most Companies Realize

Journalism alone accounts for 27% of all AI citations, a figure Muck Rack says has remained in the 20% to 30% range across all versions of the study. That consistency suggests independent reporting is a structural input into how AI assembles answers.

This helps explain a finding from the AI Shortlist that surprised many of the teams we spoke with: Buyers trust AI summaries of vendor strengths and weaknesses more than vendor websites. When those summaries are built largely on independent reporting and third-party coverage, buyers are placing trust in the same signals they've relied on for years, just delivered through a new interface.

Recency Matters on Both Sides

In our research, 92% of buyers said coverage from the past 90 days plays a role in their purchasing decisions. Muck Rack's analysis shows how that plays out in practice: more than half of journalism citations come from the previous 12 months, with citation volume peaking shortly after publication and declining steadily.

We see this regularly with clients. Companies that maintain a steady drumbeat of announcements remain visible in AI-generated answers. When that cadence stops, the visibility fades faster than most teams expect.

The signal behaves a lot like search visibility did a decade ago. It needs to be refreshed.

The Pattern Looks Different in Hardtech and Cybersecurity

Industrial and manufacturing queries have the lowest rate of journalism citations of any sector and the highest rate of corporate blog citations. AI is already leaning heavily on company-authored content in these categories.

That might sound like good news. In practice, it creates an opening. In markets where vendor content dominates, independent coverage becomes more differentiating, not less.

We see a similar dynamic in cybersecurity and enterprise technology, where trade publications play an outsized role. The outlets most frequently cited in technology queries aren't general-interest news organizations, but specialized publications focused on specific buyer audiences. The right trade placement can carry significant weight in how a company is described during early-stage research.

Different AI Tools Read Different Corners of the Internet

ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini each rely on distinct sets of domains and rarely overlap, even among their most frequently cited journalism outlets. Our research shows ChatGPT and Gemini are each used by 66% of B2B buyers. Optimizing for one platform's citation preferences covers, at best, half the audience.

Breadth of coverage across outlets, formats, and publication tiers appears to be the most reliable way to show up consistently.

Closing the Loop

Our research showed that buyers have moved their research process over to AI tools. Muck Rack's analysis shows what those systems rely on when buyers ask questions. Earned media is the connective tissue.

For B2B technology companies, sustained communication is less about short-term visibility and more about long-term discoverability, ensuring the information environment that shapes vendor research actually includes you.

Download The AI Shortlist: The New Rules of B2B Buying for the full findings on how AI is reshaping the buyer journey. And if you want to understand how your company appears in AI-driven research, reach out to Treble.