Earned media coverage is fast becoming the main driver behind whether brands get cited and recommended by artificial intelligence tools, as consumers increasingly turn to large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews to find information.
That shift puts public relations professionals in charge of a currency LLMs cannot do without: credible, independently verified coverage.
Supernewsroom.AI founder and Chief Executive Officer Manminder Kaur Dhillon said PR practitioners are now central to how brands are discovered in an AI-driven information landscape.
“LLMs generate responses by drawing from publicly available content, particularly credible news articles and authoritative sources. Earned media is no longer valuable to human audiences alone, it also determines whether a brand appears in responses from tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.
“The value of news coverage for brands is more important now than ever, because that is exactly what AI platforms trust. Simply put, if your brand is covered in the news, you will surface on AI searches.
“PR practitioners already have the tools and relationships to secure that coverage, this is their role to own,” she said at the Supernewsroom.AI Public Relations Bootcamp 2026, held from June 22 to 25 under the theme “AI+PR”, and hosted alongside Intelectasia.
A Gartner report, “Top Predictions to Inform 2026 Comms Strategies,” backs this up. It forecasts that the shift to LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will drive a 2x increase in PR and earned media budgets by 2027, as organisations recognise these functions as central to strong AI search visibility.
Manminder said AI visibility is a new measure of brand presence, with communicators playing a key role in driving it. Trusted journalism, she added, remains one of the strongest signals LLMs use to identify reliable information.
“The more consistently a brand is featured by reputable news organisations, the more likely it is to surface in AI-generated responses. This also opens a monetisation path for publishers.
“As LLMs lean on trusted news content to build their answers, quality journalism becomes a direct input into the AI economy. Publishers investing in original, credible reporting are best placed to benefit, through licensing deals, citation-driven traffic and new partnerships with AI platforms,” she said.
The event concluded successfully, marking its 16th year of empowering PR professionals. The four-day programme drew more than 50 practitioners from the corporate and public sectors.