As AI rewrites the rules of search, consistent brand meaning and credible proof points make earned media a genuine performance channel for marketers, says Jessica Allison, formerly of Thinkerbell Aotearoa.
Earned media has long been treated as the awareness layer of marketing. For years, its primary purpose has been to get attention: landing headlines, sparking conversations, putting a brand into the cultural conversation. Useful for visibility, but harder to connect to commercial outcomes like consideration or choice.
Yet, earned has never just been about attention. Its real strength has come from trust – coverage in reputable outlets carries weight precisely because it isn’t paid for. In the past, that trust was mostly used to spark awareness, to make a brand credible enough to be noticed. Today, those same signals are what both people and machines rely on to make choices.
AI: curiosity to commerce
Consumers are rapidly shifting their behaviour and using AI to guide purchasing decisions. Accenture’s 2025 study found that 72% of people now frequently use generative AI, with half of those active users making purchases based on its recommendations.
In other words, AI has moved beyond being something people experiment with – out of curiosity – to become a tool that influences what they actually buy. And because AI builds its answers from external sources, the credibility of earned media is directly shaping how people choose.
Why earned matters more than ever
AI isn’t inventing answers, it’s sourcing them. And the sources it privileges are the same ones humans instinctively lean on – articles, reviews, expert voices and independent data.
Behavioural science explains why: when we’re uncertain, we copy what others endorse (social proof), defer to recognised experts (authority bias) and prefer what feels familiar (mental availability). AI systems mirror those same instincts, which is why they cite what they consider authoritative.
And the data backs this up. According to Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse 2025 report, 89% of the links cited by AI come from earned media, not advertising.
This means the stories, reviews and data seeded through earned are no longer just awareness drivers. They’ve become the evidence that determines which brands make it into the answer set.
Start with your brand meaning
So, what should brands do? If earned is to work as a performance channel, the starting point is brand meaning. What a brand stands for – and how it behaves – has to run consistently through everything it communicates. Earned is no exception.
For example: if a brand wants to be recognised as the most innovative tech player in its category, its earned efforts need to consistently reinforce that meaning: leaning into stories that highlight progress, expert perspectives that signal leadership and coverage that keeps the brand part of the wider innovation conversation.
This isn’t just discipline; it’s also how you get surfaced. Generative AI tools don’t just look for authority, they weight recency, often favouring content published in the past 30 days. That makes an always-on approach to PR essential. By continuously seeding stories that align with your meaning, you’re not only building long-term equity, you’re also improving the odds that your brand shows up whenever someone asks a question of the category.
Proof points are the currency of trust
But consistency alone isn’t enough. Showing up often won’t get you shortlisted if what you show up with lacks credibility. What makes earned perform is evidence. Independent testing, credible reviews, expert commentary and data-led insights are the kinds of proof that elevate a brand from being noticed to being trusted. They’re the reason journalists cite you, reviewers include you and AI systems surface your brand when generating answers.
When those proof points are tied back to brand meaning, they work twice as hard. They reinforce positioning in the long term, while simultaneously supplying the justification people and machines look for in the short term. It’s the combination of consistent presence and credible proof that ensures a brand isn’t just visible, but actively chosen.
The new performance role of earned
If earned once lived primarily at the top of the funnel, today it runs through the very heart of it. In an era when algorithms and audiences are both filtering for credibility, the signals that matter most are the ones that can be independently verified and align with what a brand truly stands for.
This makes earned one of the defining levers of modern marketing. It builds equity over time, while simultaneously shaping the answer sets that drive immediate choice. The task for marketers is not to treat earned as noise or a ‘nice to have’, but to understand it as a channel of consequence, an engine of meaning and trust.
This story comes from NZ Marketing magazine issue 85, Dec 2025-Feb 2026. Why not subscribe? Get four issues a year for just $50 (including delivery) if you autorenew.
Essential marketing intelligence. Don’t miss it.
