By Lana Mini, Senior Vice President

It’s easy to get swept up in the excitement around AI—automated insights, instant content, hyper-personalization. But as AI becomes central to how people discover, evaluate, and trust brands, one traditional PR strategy is more relevant than ever: earned media.

Why? Because AI learns from what’s already online—and it learns best from credible, public sources.

That local restaurant review in a digital newspaper? A nonprofit quoted in a trade piece? A startup profile in a business journal? An investigative piece in a digital publication? These aren’t just PR wins—they’re data points. Tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and other large language models (LLMs) use this kind of content to form their understanding of your brand.

No links, no mentions, no visibility in AI-driven experiences.

Earned media provides the digital signals AI needs to recognize your brand as relevant, credible, and established. Without it, even a great company can remain invisible in AI-generated summaries, search answers, or content recommendations. This applies whether you're a restaurant chain, a nonprofit, or a Fortune 500.

What About Social Media?

AI models like ChatGPT don’t train directly on most social media content. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn restrict access to their data, either through privacy rules or technical limitations.

So if your brand exists only on social, AI tools likely can’t “see” it clearly.

However, social can still influence AI in indirect but powerful ways:

• If a social post sparks a conversation that gets picked up by media or blogs, that content can be used in AI training.
• Platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) are more open and may be indexed by search engines or used in AI datasets, especially when news links are posted on those sites.
• AI tools integrated with search engines (like Bing or Google) may consider social engagement signals—but not the post content itself.

Bottom line: AI doesn’t "pull" real-time updates from the web or social unless it’s specifically connected to a live search engine. What it does pull from are the public, indexed sources it was trained on—which include media coverage, blogs, websites, and public forums.

What This Means for PR

 For PR professionals and brand strategists, this is both a challenge and an opportunity.

We’re not just earning coverage for a one-day spike in traffic—we’re building a brand’s digital footprint that AI tools use to decide what (and who) shows up in search, summaries, and recommendations.

That’s why people, for now, still matter in AI. The journalists, editors, and writers producing credible, searchable content are still the gatekeepers of what AI understands—and what it doesn’t.

In the end, earned media isn’t just about today’s headline—it’s about tomorrow’s search result.