The specific URLs, domains, or articles from which the AI extracted and cited information comes from different types of medias. We categorize these into three different types.
- Earned Media (Third-Party Validation)
Earned media refers to content sourced from independent, third-party authoritative outlets, such as professional reviews, publisher domains, and institutional sites. - Brand Media (Owned Content)
Brand media includes sites that are officially owned by the organization and directly provide products or services. - Social Media (User-Generated Content)
Social media encompasses content from community forums, social platforms, and user-generated sources. Platforms classified as Social include community-driven sites like Reddit, Quora, and YouTube.
Marketing impact
The insights about what sources AI choose in your brand's context should guide your content strategy, showing you precisely where to focus your efforts.
What sources does LLM's cite most?
Media types changes depending on the llm, it's training data and access to the internet.
- ChatGPT and Claude: These are noted as being "extremely earned-heavy," strongly privileging third-party validation and minimizing user-generated sources.
- Perplexity: Tend to adopt a more hybrid or balanced strategy, incorporating a greater share of Brand and Social content compared to Claude and ChatGPT, but still prioritizing Earned sources overall.
- Google Search (Traditional): Google maintains a more balanced distribution across Brand, Earned, and Social content, though its overall mix differs based on the specific search intent (informational, consideration, or transactional).
AI search engines today show a consistent and overwhelming bias toward Earned Media as shown in the graph below. 1 Where you can see what types of source media the different AI engines prefer in the two domains consumer electronics and automotive scanning 1,598 unique domains.
