CS Insights: Is Media Engagement Important? Just ask ChatGPT

Engaging with the media has always boiled down to trust and visibility. Media coverage helps companies (and individuals) establish credibility in front of key audiences – whether that’s investors, policymakers, customers or others – and by engaging with the media, companies can provide context to better shape their own narratives.

Today there’s a new audience in the mix, and media coverage and engagement play an important role in reaching it: Bots. Automated traffic (bots) now make up more than half of internet traffic, and they won’t be terminated anytime soon. In fact, the rise of AI systems and chatbots that access and retrieve information from across the internet presents an opportunity (despite the Governator’s reservations) to engage with the media and provides further support for why doing so can be so beneficial to amplifying a company’s message.

Source Ranking Favors Credible Outlets

When you ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini about a company, the systems don’t pull content at random. They rely on layers of data ranked for reliability and authority similar to Google’s E-E-A-T framework for search results.

While there is no public formula for how these rankings work, and they can vary significantly by prompt, a recent Muck Rack report suggests reputable media outlets and other credible publishers are among the most trusted sources in the information hierarchy. This is true among internet and trade publications as well as tier-1 paywalled outlets, many of which (i.e. The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times) have signed licensing agreements with companies behind LLMs.  

Three example prompts about companies in the news at the time of writing this demonstrate how much ChatGPT relies on journalistic sources to generate its responses. In all three examples, the chatbot cites the company’s own website but supplements and verifies that information with media coverage from a variety of sources.

This isn’t a perfect science and doesn’t mean ChatGPT “trusts” The Wall Street Journal more than a company’s social posts, blog or press release. But since the outlet’s reporting is verifiable, consistently cited, and now licensed for use, it becomes a reliable and accessible source in AI-generated answers.

Recency Still Matters

LLMs typically have knowledge “cutoffs” marking the date on which their training data stops. Anything published after that point isn’t part of the model’s built-in knowledge. To bridge that gap, AI systems retrieve information from web browsers and other external sources to supplement their answers with newer content. In other words, if ChatGPT determines it can’t generate a confident response based on its training alone, it may search the internet in real time much like a person would.  

Because these retrieval systems prioritize both credibility and recency, media coverage from just a few weeks or months ago often appears more prominently than older content. One recent study suggests that AI systems may place even greater emphasis on recency than traditional search engines like Google. That makes fresh media coverage especially valuable, giving AI systems trustworthy material to reference when operating beyond their training data.

Marking Your Territory

For communications and investor relations teams, AI creates a new reason to engage thoughtfully and proactively (and regularly) with the media. When a company’s story, statement or executive quote appears in trusted outlets, it’s cemented as a structured data point that AI is more likely to reference, summarize and resurface in order to answer the 2.5+ billion prompts sent per day. Over the long run, good coverage can meaningfully influence how AI systems represent a company’s leadership, strategy and market positioning.