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 reading 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.

Which is where most firms selling AI search have a problem. They came up through SEO and they are retrofitting a technical playbook onto an editorial judgment. We came at it from the other side of the desk. We sat in the chair that decided what got covered and what got spiked, so when we build your earned strategy we are not guessing what a gatekeeper wants. We were the gatekeeper.

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