95 percent of AI citations don't come from your media budget

Johan Wetterqvist, Spotlight Communications (Stokholm, Sweden)

Written by Tommy Perlhamre, Spotlight Digital Performance (Stokholm, Sweden) , and Johan Wetterqvist, Spotlight Communications (Stokholm, Sweden)

The customer's buying journey increasingly starts in an AI model, and there, visibility isn't determined by your ad budget but by your credibility. Despite this, most organizations continue to spend the bulk of their marketing budget on paid reach – while PR and digital marketing each operate in their own silo. The solution isn't to shift money from one to the other, but to make paid, earned and owned visibility connect across the entire chain.

Gartner predicts that PR budgets will double by 2027, driven by the fact that more and more customers are starting their buying journey in an AI model like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity. It's a new first filter. And it operates by entirely different rules.

AI models cite what they consider credible: editorial articles, analyses, expert voices, well-structured owned content. According to Muck Rack's analysis of more than a million AI citations, 95 percent come from earned, organic or owned content.

The problem is the imbalance

It would be easy to conclude that the solution is to move money from digital marketing to PR. But that's not the point. The argument isn't against paid media. It's against budget mixes that treat paid reach as the only thing that counts.

The problem is that most organizations underinvest in what now determines whether they are relevant in the customer's early information gathering. A customer who asks an AI model about alternatives in your category and doesn't find you isn't lost because you spent too little on Google or Meta. They're lost because you lack the credibility that AI actually reflects.

Tommy Perlhamre, Spotlight Digital Performance (Stokholm, Sweden)

Three parts that must work together

Paid media drives demand and converts. Earned visibility builds credibility and authority in the channels AI values. Owned content captures, explains and determines whether you are citable.

None of the parts works optimally without the others. Paid reach without earned credibility creates exposure without trust. Earned visibility without distribution reaches the wrong audience at the wrong time. And strong owned content without external presence remains invisible to the AI models your customers are asking.

In most organizations, PR and digital marketing work in parallel with different goals and different metrics. The old structure of separate channels was never optimal, and in the new AI world it works even worse. Now more than ever, the entire chain needs to hang together – in the buying journey, in the channels and in what AI surfaces. The budget and resources then have to be adjusted accordingly.