Rachel Colson

BREAKING: @muckrack analyzed the citations for a MILLION realistic user prompts into LLMs and if you’re a PR pro, you NEED to know the results and implications: BACKGROUND: Per @PatrickCoffee's WSJ article from yesterday, although only around 5.6% of U.S. [desktop] search traffic went to LLMs last month, that’s more than QUADRUPLE what it was in Jan 2024. And this trend will only accelerate. BACK TO MUCK RACK’S FINDINGS: • 37% of results cited content NOT owned by the company/product in the search • 27% cited news sites/journalistic publications • 2% cited social media/marketing content and only 1% citing press releases And get this: A key difference between AI-generated search results and traditional SEO is that paid marketing and sponsored links rarely populate (per @emayhawk reporting at @axios) Let me repeat that: AI is completely ignoring all that sponsored content masquerading as real journalism. WHAT THIS MEANS: Brands have spent the last decade buying their way into "earned-looking" content. Native advertising. Sponsored posts. Advertorials pretending to be editorial. And then AI came along and said: "Yeah, we're not citing any of that." Meanwhile, outlets that have never “sold out their editorial souls” such as Reuters, AP., FT, etc., are the ones AI trusts. One more wild stat, per the report: 96% of what AI cites falls squarely in PR territory. Not marketing. Not advertising. PR. THE NEW REALITY: The brands winning in AI search will be the ones who earn their citations through genuine third-party validation… NOT those who buy them through increasingly “sophisticated” paid placements. We're not just seeing a new type of SEO; we're seeing the revenge of EARNED PR and REAL journalism. And if you ask me, it's about damn time.