Mirza Germovic, SVP of AI Solutions & Advisory at Edelman and Whitney Hart, Chief Strategy Officer, Avenue Z explained why and how certain media sources are more likely to appear in AI search results during the PRNEWS Pro workshop "Artificial Intelligence for PR."
Whitney Hart gives three actionable takeaways for anyone trying to gain visibility via Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Open AI and other AI search platforms.
Watch the segment here, or watch the full session, "AI’s Influence on SEO - What PR Teams Should Know," by following the link.
Full transcript:
[WHITNEY HART] So to dive into the media side more carefully, since that's what we're here to talk about today, news and media sources. ChatGPT is most commonly linking to the nine media sources linked on the right. And this is according to similar web from a March, 2025 study.
So we see that top news and media sites like Reuters, New York Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, are all benefiting from traffic being driven to their sites as a result of their large language model answers that they're delivering to individuals.
And as Mirza also alluded to earlier, we are seeing that OpenAI has partnered with all of the different outlets that are listed on the right, everything from the Associated Press back in July of 2023 through the summer of 24 with the FT, the Atlantic, News Corp, Reddit, Time, all the way to February of last month with Guardian Media Group in the UK. So, ChatGPT is looking to understand and can peek behind the paywall of all of these different outlets that are listed here.
So what does that mean for us? Specifically when press releases are published about these partnerships, OpenAI stipulates that they receive access to and current content, including content behind the paywall. And in exchange, ChatGP provides answers, including attribution and links to the full articles for transparency. So we are seeing that reputable media placements are driving results. And increasingly, those results are from those outlets with which OpenAI has crafted a formal partnership.
So I wanted to leave you all today with three actionable takeaways, things that you can do when we leave today that will help you on your path towards those next steps of gaining visibility in large language models. First and foremost, I would recommend to start forging relationships.
Right now we're seeing chat GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Co-pilot leading, but you never know when another deep leak is gonna hop into the headline and that's the new thing we need to throw some attention to.
I would also recommend that you go audit the content on your website. A lot of that content on your website has been created around SEO keywords and it hasn't necessarily been thought through through the lens of PR messaging frameworks. So I'd recommend that you take some time, audit your website content, blog content, things like this, and assess where you think edits need to be made and bring that back to the SEO team, to those relationships that you're forging and see what can be done.
And last but not least, audit coverage. Look at the coverage from the last two years and assess how strategies potentially need to change for your new audience, the AI bot.