84% of what AI says about your company, you didn't write

For twenty years, my actual job was deciding who to believe.

Every morning there was a stack of pitches. A company would tell me it was the leader in something. That’s not a story — that’s a claim. What turned it into a story was whether I could find someone with no stake in it saying the same thing. Two sources before it airs. That rule is older than I am and it never bent.

Muck Rack pulled 25 million links that ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini cited across 17 industries and sorted them by source. Earned media: about 84%. Journalism alone: 25 to 27%. Paid and advertorial: 0.3%.

Read that again and you’ll recognize it. The model is running my old checklist. It isn’t evaluating your homepage the way a customer would — it’s looking for corroboration. How many independent sources describe this company, and do they describe it the same way? Your site is one voice making a claim about itself. Twelve outlets, three podcasts, a Reddit thread and a G2 review are seventeen voices confirming it. Ahrefs put a number on it: brand mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664, backlinks at 0.218.

So the discipline that wins here isn’t technical. It’s editorial. It’s the work I did for two decades, pointed at a new kind of reader.