How Traditional Media Feeds AI Search

View Infographic

Traditional media remains an essential component of getting found online, particularly in AI search. Learn everything you need to know right here:

Rise of AI Search

• 37% of consumers now say they start their searches with AI tools instead of Google.
• 58% of US adults have already used AI-generated summaries and search results.
• Half of people regularly use AI search, risking up to 50% of traditional search traffic.
• 83% of users prefer AI search compared to traditional Googling because they get faster results.
• Weekly AI use for information rose to 24% in 2025, more than doubling from the previous year. 

How AI search works

1. AI search uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to pull content from websites.
2. LLMs collect relevant pages and then use information to synthesise answers, providing specific responses.
3. Citations come from crawled sources, not from pre-trained data.
4. AI search looks for the most relevant and fresh content to reduce hallucinations.
5. AI search constantly crawls new news websites for new information that might be relevant to users.

Traditional media fuels AI search

• AI tools prefer credible media sources over random internet blog sites. 
• Chatbots cite news publications to their audiences to establish more trust.
• AI takes apart journalistic content, parses it, and then repackages it for users with no permission needed. 
• Earned media from journalism shapes narratives about facts that AI presents to users. 
• Without traditional coverage, brands risk being overlooked by AIs responding to users’ searches. 

The numbers for AI Search are in

• 50% of citations in AI search come from content published in the last 12 months.
• 94% of AI citations come from unpaid sources.
• 25% of AI citations are from journalistic sources.
• 82% of citations AI uses for search are in earned media with traditional journalism leading the way.
• Cross-industry tests reveal that AI cites between 69 and 92 percent of earned media, which is overrepresented compared to Google results.

Outlets already trusted by AI

AI trusts: 

• Forbes, Business Insider, and Bloomberg for Business Intelligence.
• BBC, FT, and Reuters for global authority and breaking news stories.
• The Times, The Economist, and Wall Street Journal for in-depth Analysis. 
• Third-party journalism over self-publishing. 
• High domain authority websites over generic blogs and social media content. 

Why PR publications are best for AI-generated search 

• AI prefers to cite earned media coverage and amplify it. 
• AI responds most to trusted outlets that already influence thousands of users. 
• Consistent PRs build authority signals that AI engines trust. 
• PR generates coverage in high circulation publications even before AI decides to report to search results. 
• Traditional media has an inherent credibility that AI can leverage. 

Sources: 

What Is AI Reading? Inside the Hidden Mechanics of Generative Citations – Unite.AI

University of Toronto Study: Earned Media Dominates AI Search

Tow Center’s Latest Report on AI Search Engines | Columbia Journalism School 

Generative AI and news report 2025: How people think about AI’s role in journalism and society | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism