Your Communications Strategy Could Be Built on a Myth

Here’s why your communications strategy could be built on a myth.

Vested interests and the herd mentality obscure the reality of modern information environments through status quo bias.

Take the question of how to make sure your content is found and referenced by AI, or ‘being in the minds-eye of the AI’.

There are lots of companies promising they can use data to inform your ‘AEO’ (the new SEO but for the AI age).

I recently saw an influential report from Muck Rack on this topic.Loads of people sharing it, claiming that the fact that 95% of links were from ‘earned media’ shows traditional media is still really important.

But does it?

I looked deeper into the data and found that only 27% of those earned media links were 'journalistic'.

Most were from owned media like corporate blogs, which AI is set to transform into oceans of slop.

An argument for the importance of communications? Yes.

An argument for that op-ed in The Guardian? No.

Another example of why AI could screw our collective epistemic capacity - definitely.

Even within that 27%, a minority of citations were from ‘major media outlets’ and most were from niche media.

All of the major media brands referenced as being ‘most referred’ by AI were only at the top of a tiny subset of the data.

This report categorically DOES NOT reinforce the legacy mindset that engaging traditional mainstream media is an important part of an AI-savvy approach to communication. If anything, it shows that when it comes to AI, editing Wikipedia and writing on Reddit are more important.

This legacy mindset is a problem because other data tells a different story.

Look at Profound's data on what sources go into Google’s AI overviews.

The New York Times? The Financial Times? Highly unlikely.

Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube? A decent chance.

Google reviews? Quite likely.

Social media platforms are some of the most influential sources for Google’s AI overviews. Old school media brands don’t even make the list.

The sources keep changing as the models keep evolving. Less than half of the sources used by Google AI, ChatGPT, and Co-Pilot are the same month-on-month. Not to mention the fact that most AI search is zero-click—so how do you even measure that?

This is a fast-moving, opaque space with little concrete data.

Beware of kneejerk assumptions that happen to align with the interests of those invested in the status quo. Don't let the status quo define your strategy.

Data below from Muck Rack and Profound.