If someone asks you, “What’s your AI score?” you’d probably look at them funny, assume they want to sell you some kind of AI gadget or service, and move on.
For journalists, though, the term is taking on a more specific meaning. Now that AI services are essentially the new Google, AI answers are becoming the new battleground for who is considered authoritative on any particular topic. If your name or your outlet comes up again and again in queries about your beat, that means your AI mojo is high, and the world of public relations has begun quantifying it.
Back in March Muck Rack introduced its AI Visibility Badges, which sort journalists and outlets into tiers based on how often AI cites them, and Cision followed suit in July with a dashboard that shows which journalists turn up in AI answers. As PR firms look to safeguard their clients’ reputations, they’re increasingly paying attention to the narratives in AI answers. And journalists play an outsize role in shaping those narratives; studies have consistently shown that AI search engines prefer earned media to anything a brand pays for or publishes itself, and journalism alone accounts for 20–30% of the links they cite.
Public relations professionals have always paid close attention to influential journalists, of course, but the addition of AI into the mix has done two things: It’s allowed PR pros to attach numbers to the work they do, which has pushed them into a more strategic role at the companies they work for. And it’s changed the definition of what an influential journalist is. For those journalists and the outlets they work for, this presents new opportunities.
PR finally has a scoreboard
In some ways, the rise of AI has been the best thing that ever happened to public relations. Soon after AI answer engines came into being, a cottage industry emerged to address the demand for how to optimize content so it shows up in AI answers. (That industry is ready to drop the “cottage” now that valuations have passed $1 billion and exits are in the hundreds of millions.) Separate but related is what’s actually said in those answers—the reputational component, which is the foundational need of PR.
The point is both can now be measured, giving PR teams a clear way to demonstrate the impact of their work. If your efforts turn into a published article, and that article ends up cited in AI answers, that’s as clear a line from cause to effect as you can get in the world of influence. When Walmart announced its CEO’s retirement, for instance, its comms team tracked “not just immediate coverage, but what was happening across AI and the LLMs.” And the more influential the journalist, the greater the impact.
But what counts as influential is changing, too. It’s no secret the PR industry has been obsessed with “Tier 1” media—big national or global brands like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—for decades. But AI answers favor topical authority above general authority, meaning the engine will often cite the work of a lesser-known journalist on a niche beat at a trade publication before someone less immersed in the topic, even if they work for a prestigious outlet. It’s revealing that, when Muck Rack compared the journalists PR teams pitch most with the ones AI cites most for a given brand, the overlap was just 2%.
From a math perspective, it’s easy to see why AI prefers experts who go deep: Understanding all the nuances about a topic, and writing about those nuances in detail, gives the AI more to work with for a wider set of queries.
On average, people type longer queries into AI—Google says searches in its AI Mode run two to three times as long as traditional ones, and one study found ChatGPT prompts average 23 words—and with that level of detail, AI can point directly to who has written about the topic, skipping the traditional top-down list of search results that tends to surface the same sites over and over. And since AI favors recent content: citation rates are highest in an article’s first seven days, so continuous coverage of a niche also works in your favor.
This isn’t just a theory. 5W, a PR firm that tracks which trade publications AI cites, found that “specialist trade publications outperform general news on LLM citations within their vertical.” Its advice to PR teams: “Reweight the media list.” The past couple of years are replete with examples: In the debate over chip export controls, SemiAnalysis, a deep-in-the-weeds research firm, became a go-to source for outlets like Foreign Policy. STAT, Endpoints News and Fierce Biotech are the health trade outlets AI leans on most, according to 5W, and Skift dominates in travel. Clearly, going nerdy wins.
Your beat is your leverage
None of this is to say that journalists should see themselves as a tool of the public relations industry. Obviously they shouldn’t—in fact, their influence and credibility largely depend on them not doing that. But PR is nonetheless an important if not necessary component of the information ecosystem, and as AI spreads, PR professionals will increasingly create ranking systems like 5W’s Trade Press AI Index. It doesn’t even matter if your coverage is glowing or brutal. Anyone managing a brand’s reputation has to account for your work either way, even if you never answer a single one of their emails. It’s your score that matters.
Smart journalists who are newly relevant in the age of AI will acknowledge this reality, that AI influence is a new way to measure professional capital, and work to both cultivate and leverage it. What it means for them:
- Access: High-profile politicians and CEOs almost always reserve interviews for the most prestigious publications. That may begin to change as more PR teams recognize the power specialist publications have to frame the narrative in AI.
- Social presence matters more than ever: Just like us, AI tends to go to social networks and big content platforms both for information and to confirm the credibility of claims. LinkedIn is one of the most-cited sources in AI answers, and more than half of those citations go to members with fewer than 10,000 followers. A well-maintained, fresh social presence is a credibility signal that AI cares about, and it costs almost nothing.
- Going deep is less of a liability: Every beat journalist has to balance how deep they go vs. how wide an audience they want to target. AI, however, goes as deep as the query needs, so even ultra-specific topics will eventually reach the right people. The gravity of AI now tilts toward the weeds.
Let your reporters cook
Publications—especially more general ones—also have a new set of rules for this world. For starters, blocking AI services will cost you in a world where authority is currency. That may still be an acceptable tradeoff for many, but at the very least a compromise position where AI engines can still cite the content without training on it (by blocking the crawlers that gather training data while allowing the ones that power AI search, for instance) gets you in the game.
Broadly, publications should let their reporters cook: encouraging them to explore their beats thoroughly and go deep whenever possible. Certainly, there are more audience considerations than just how a story or in-house expert appears in AI, but often that’s more of a consideration of style than substance: Stop and explain things for casual readers, but don’t hold back on the rich detail. The catch is that authority attached to a byline can walk out the door with it.
As some reporters see their credibility in AI rise, some AI-minded publications might consider a reward system. It bears treading carefully here—traffic-based reward systems like the Gawker-era leaderboards ended up incentivizing thin content around topics with the widest audience. And the way AI treats press releases shows the system is susceptible to gaming: the ones that get cited contain twice as many statistics and two and a half times as many bullet points as the ones that don’t. Still, simply noting AI presence within any regular review of KPIs can go a long way.
The rewards aren’t just bragging rights. As the PR side of this gets more influential, so does the spending potential of their clients. Certainly, the church-state separation between editorial and commercial must remain sacrosanct, but existing business models are there to leverage AI credibility: newsletter and event sponsorships, advertorial and branded content, and even the nascent economy of advertising directly to bots. High credibility has always cultivated commercial interest, but it previously required scale. Now publications (or even sections) with smaller audiences but the ability to break through in certain AI narratives can theoretically compete.
And a publication that’s built its credibility through deep reporting on niche topics has exactly the formula for a high-end “pro” product that commands a premium price. The incentives of AI—and a PR industry with a larger strategic footprint—mean the demand for more Politico Pro-type products will likely go up. After all, the comms teams tracking your reporters are exactly the kind of professionals who pay for that depth, and Politico Pro reportedly brings in more than $125 million a year. For any media business, however, such a big shift in strategy obviously shouldn’t be done lightly, and the closure of Axios’ Pro Policy in 2025 shows there’s no guarantee even if you have all the ingredients.
Fad or foundation
To those who have covered the media for a while, a lot of this probably sounds familiar. In the 2010s, Klout was a service that tried to attach a score to someone’s social media influence, which briefly had currency in PR circles. As social’s interest in news would wax and wane over the years, Klout faded away, shutting down in 2018—a cautionary tale for anyone trying to quantify something that continually evolves and whose relevance changes with the lens.
Will AI scores be similarly faddish? It’s possible, but AI’s potential to change the way we consume information seems greater by an order of magnitude. If we all end up asking our Muses or Dots to bring us the stories we want, they’re going to cast their searchlights across the internet. The smart reporters and publications will be the ones who built something that reflects back exactly what they want to see: deep expertise, right where the beam lands.
