What is earned media?

By the Variask team · Updated

Definition

Earned media is coverage of your brand that you did not pay for or publish yourself, such as press articles, reviews, forum discussions, lists and social posts. AI assistants lean heavily on it when they recommend brands.

Also called Third party coverage, PR

With Variask: Variask shows the sites cited when competitors win, and finds community threads where you can join with reply drafts.

Why earned media drives AI recommendations

When AI engines answer which product is best, they look for independent signals. Reviews, comparison articles, community threads and news coverage carry more weight than your own claims. Studies of AI citations consistently show a large share coming from third party sites rather than brand websites.

What it means for brands

  • Your own site states the facts; earned media makes AI believe them.
  • One mention on a source AI cites often beats ten on sites it ignores.

Questions

Earned media:
common questions

PR is one way to earn it. Reviews, community discussions, creator content and partner mentions count too.

Related terms

Keep exploring

Measurement

Unlinked brand mentions

Unlinked brand mentions are places on the web where your brand is named without a link to your website. AI models learn about brands from these mentions, so they count even without a link.

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Measurement

AI citations

AI citations are the links an AI assistant shows next to its answer to point to the pages it used, such as the numbered sources in Perplexity or the source links in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews.

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Measurement

AI brand sentiment

AI brand sentiment is the tone in which AI assistants describe your brand: positive, neutral or negative, and the reasons they give.

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Measurement

Sources vs citations

Sources are all the pages an AI engine read or retrieved while writing an answer. Citations are the subset it shows to the user as links. A page can shape an answer without being cited.

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Full glossary