Some brands are suddenly far more visible in AI-generated answers because the media outlets that cover them have signed licensing and distribution deals with major AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Meta; and those deals now shape which sources LLMs see, trust and surface first. The same media group can hold different deals with different AI providers, so some of your earned coverage becomes highly visible in AI answers while other coverage is almost invisible; a new layer of algorithmic gatekeeping that PR teams can no longer ignore. On that basis, Wiztrust provides a concrete action plan to prioritize AI‑friendly media outlets, optimise PR content for AI search, and systematically close visibility gaps so brands do not disappear from AI‑driven discovery as usage grows.
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How are AI–media deals changing media coverage and public relations?
Brand visibility in AI-generated answers is increasingly shaped by a number of commercial agreements between AI platforms and publishers. These deals determine whose archives are ingested, which outlets are prioritized in retrieval, and therefore which brands and leaders are most likely to be cited when an assistant synthesizes an answer. For PR and communications teams, these agreements are effectively the new gatekeeping layer, deciding which outlets, and therefore which brands, AI treats as primary sources.
Three main agreement structures dominate:
Licensing agreements that grant legal access to archives and live feeds
Content sharing partnerships that optimise structured feeds, attribution and interface presence
Revenue sharing models that reward publishers when their content performs inside AI answers
To understand why certain brands surface more often in AI answers, it helps to look at which news and media groups sit inside each platform’s preferred partner set, as shown in the table below.
Table: Major AI platforms and their priority media partners
| AI platform | Media and publisher partners |
|---|---|
| OpenAI | Disney, Condé Nast, Time, The Atlantic, Vox Media, World Association of News Publishers (WAN‑IFRA), News Corp, Reddit, Dotdash Meredith, Stack Overflow, Financial Times, Hearst, BuzzFeed, PRISA Media, Le Monde, Axel Springer, American Journalism Project, Associated Press, Shutterstock |
| Perplexity | Gannett (USA TODAY Network), Maddyness, Le Monde, Adweek, PRISA Media, Gear Patrol, Lee Enterprises, The Independent, Blavity, Fortune, Time, Der Spiegel, The Texas Tribune, Entrepreneur |
| Copilot (Microsoft) | Reuters, Hearst, USA TODAY Network, Financial Times, Informa, Axel Springer |
| Google (Gemini) | News Corp, Reddit, Associated Press |
| Meta | USA TODAY, CNN, Fox News, Fox Sports, Le Monde Group, The Daily Caller, Reuters, BuzzFeed, Shutterstock |
For AI companies such as Open AI, Perplexity, Copilot, Google, and Meta, publisher agreements secure a steady stream of high-quality, rights-cleared content to train models and to keep answers fresh and credible in fast-moving news and specialist domains. They also reduce litigation risk by turning unlicensed scraping into paid, contractual access, which is increasingly important as more publishers challenge unauthorized use of their archives.
For publishers, these deals trade data for distribution and cash. Some agreements bundle training access with real-time content feeds and prominent placement in AI answer modules, effectively turning LLMs into a new audience and revenue channel. Financially, the first wave is big: one analysis estimates AI companies are paying an average of about 24 million dollars per publisher, with total content-licensing commitments approaching 2.92 billion dollars; News Corp’s reported OpenAI deal alone is valued at over 250 million dollars, roughly 2.5 times its net income over the previous five years.
The bulk of early agreements cluster around large, premium, often English-language news brands and data-rich platforms such as News Corp, Axel Springer, Reddit and Shutterstock, alongside dozens of individual titles already listed across OpenAI, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Google and Meta partnerships. Smaller and non-English-language outlets are only just beginning to enter the conversation, which means their content and the brands they feature still appears less often in AI outputs.
The performance impact is already measurable. Publishers with OpenAI licensing deals see a ChatGPT clickthrough rate almost seven times higher than those without agreements, according to Tollbit’s State of the Bots report. This finding underscores a clear reality: publishers with licensing agreements capture both revenue and traffic from AI platforms, while those without deals benefit from neither. Although AI-driven referrals still trail traditional search by a wide margin, their growth is already significant enough to shape how editors prioritize AI partnerships within their overall revenue strategy
Brands that appear frequently in AI answers tend to be covered by publishers that have formal content deals with AI platforms and maintain rich, searchable archives in business, technology or trade topics. Their articles are easier for models to access, interpret and reuse, so those brands become default reference points in responses. In practice, AI models are learning your story from a narrow slice of media, which means those publishers, not your owned channels, increasingly script the first version of your narrative.
When a publisher limits or blocks AI access, its content is far less likely to be used in training or pulled into real‑time answers, even if its human audience remains highly influential. For B2B PR teams, this fundamentally changes the value of earned media: a single feature on an AI‑friendly title can influence buyers at every stage of their decision journey, not just at initial awareness. Conversely, relying on outlets that restrict AI risks pushing your brand to the margins of AI‑driven discovery, just as more decision‑makers turn to assistants instead of traditional search.
Earned media now needs a clear generative AI lens, built into planning alongside audience fit and editorial relevance. Focusing on AI‑indexed publications and structured, machine‑readable storytelling significantly extends the impact of every placement.
Start by mapping which of your priority outlets have formal relationships with major AI platforms, and make that view a standard input for campaign design, executive visibility and thought‑leadership planning. Then, re‑segment targets by “AI visibility”: prioritize media that combine audience relevance with strong domain authority and AI‑friendly access policies, even if they are niche titles.
Finally, shape earned content so both people and models can use it: clear headlines, sharp executive quotes and simple structures such as FAQs or explainers help AI systems retrieve and correctly interpret your messages. Each piece of coverage becomes both a reputational asset and a training signal that influences how AI tools describe your brand throughout the buying journey.
Wiztrust has partnered with GetMint to give B2B communication teams a sharper view of how generative AI currently talks about their organisations and leaders, and which sources most frequently shape those narratives. Concretely, the joint approach focuses on answering a strategic question: which media and sources are most often cited by AI when it describes your company and executives, and how can your PR actions strengthen that visibility over time?
With that evidence, comms teams can see where mentions are most likely to be ingested, summarized and repeated by LLMs, by mapping the AI influence profile of your earned coverage. This evidence base supports more rigorous media planning: reallocating effort toward titles and formats that are visible to both human audiences and AI systems, and pinpointing gaps where key messages are under‑represented in the content that feeds AI models.
In practice, this approach helps ensure PR investment is aligned with the new information gatekeepers shaping how stakeholders retrieve and validate information. Teams that adapt their earned media strategy with AI in mind are more likely to remain present in AI‑generated answers, while those that do not risk seeing their brands gradually disappear from AI‑mediated conversations, regardless of how strong their traditional media footprint may be.
Q1. Why does earned media matter so much for AI visibility?
Generative AI systems rely heavily on credible third‑party coverage when deciding which brands to surface and cite, and most of those citations come from editorial and other earned sources. This makes authoritative news, trade and analyst coverage a core input into how AI understands and describes your organisation, far beyond what paid or owned channels can achieve on their own.
Q2. How should PR teams adapt their media strategy for AI‑driven search?
PR teams need to factor AI visibility into target lists, prioritizing outlets that both reach key audiences and are widely used or licensed by major AI platforms. That means focusing on high‑authority news and trade titles, structuring stories so they are easy for models to summarize, and treating every placement as both human‑facing content and machine‑scale training data.
Q3. How can comms leaders tell whether their brand is being cited by AI today?
The starting point is to audit how leading AI assistants describe your company, products and executives, and which sources they cite when doing so. From there, teams can benchmark which media environments are most frequently referenced, identify gaps where key narratives are missing, and adjust pitching and content plans accordingly.
Q4. What KPIs should PR teams track in the context of AI and earned media?
Beyond traditional metrics such as reach and share of voice, teams should monitor the volume and quality of AI citations, the diversity of sources quoted, and how often priority messages appear in AI-generated answers. Over time, leading comms functions are also tying AI‑driven visibility to downstream outcomes such as consideration, lead quality and conversion rates, reflecting earned media’s growing influence across the full B2B funnel.