00:00
Speaker 1
Think about it this way. If AI like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude recommends your competitors but not you, it just means that you’re invisible to buyers in 2026 and beyond. So if you’re typing in the best skincare products for mom, or the best vegan bar soap, or the best food or the wine or accessories or pet products, or the best author or coach or consultant in your industry and your name doesn’t come up, the question isn’t is my marketing working? The question is how do I get AI to recommend me? That is a real flex now as we know it because 800 million users of ChatGPT are able to type and trust me, their AI for all of the answers without even going to Google anymore. It’s the old rules of SEO as we know it are dying out.

00:36
Speaker 1
And so that’s why this episode is so important. If you want to become the known expert or the best brand or just get in front of more customers to make more sales in this AI era, the question how does AI even pull its information from that is a question we should be asking, not how I can be found. So a lot of people ask me, is it your blog? Is it your Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest? What about Reddit or Quora threads? What about your reviews? What about, what about your blog? Or what about my favorite thing which is PR editorials and press releases? So today I’m going to break down all of these channels in a matrix and rank them from highest to lowest scoring in terms of AI visibility so that you can get found in this era of AI shop.

01:12
Speaker 1
So let’s start with the reality check, which is what most founders don’t really want to realize or don’t really want to recognize, which is AI tools don’t treat all of these platforms equally. And just because you’re spending hours more than other people posting or sharing or creating blogs, it doesn’t mean that you are going to get found more because you put in more work. So this is all about working strategically working smarter and not harder. Now, a major analysis by Muckrack, a platform for PR, looked at more than 1 million links cited by AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini to analyze where they actually get their answers to come from or how do they pick what answers to surface. That’s what this is important. And here’s what they found. 94% Of AI citations are coming from non paid sources.

01:53
Speaker 1
So it means that your ads don’t really play a role here. They also found that 82% are coming from earned media like editorials. What I teach PR backlinks, getting featured in gift guide and a podcast, right? That means credible press coverage. And that’s exactly what AI is overwhelmingly pulling from. Journalism alone makes up for 20 to 30% of citations across all AI models. So in other words, AI trusts third party validation and other people talking about you and citing about you instead of you pushing the narrative about how great you are. I always say that marketing is you talking about you, but pr which is way more powerful. And what AI likes is other people talking about you. So if you think about your Instagram posts or your marketing copy, those are self published claims, your blogs self published claims.

02:34
Speaker 1
But when a journalist, a writer, a blogger, an editor or podcast host, if they’re posting about your brand, that is independent credibility. And that is a new rule of AI search and how you can get found. So let’s talk about the first bucket, which is the first channel editorial media, which is my favorite right? These are earned PR features where you’re not paying to play, you’re not paying for those. Scammy. Let me get you featured in a random 40 under 40. No, you are getting featured in the media gaining site, cited as an expert, you’re being quoted or your product is in a gift guide or a product roundup or a best of list. That’s what I’m talking about.

03:05
Speaker 1
So we’re talking about magazines like Forbes, Vogue, editorials, gift Guides, Bri Claire, Buzzfeed, Refinery 29, New York Times, Business Insider, those places where there’s journalists and writers picking who to interview and what products to pitch. Those matter so much. And the reason why they matter so much is because the AI systems rely heavily on journalistic sources when generating answers, which I already talked about in the beginning. So if your product appears in a best of list or if you’re being cited on something as a credible authority, your name will appear in way higher chances as high credibility evidence, which is what the AI pulls from. So that’s why when you ask ChatGPT something like best productivity apps or best coach for parenting or best software or best book for whatever, you’ll often see citations from places like Forbes, Wirecutter, Reuters and major news outlets.

03:52
Speaker 1
Right? Editorial media scores extremely high in terms of AI visibility because it has the highest AI citation potential. So I give it a 10 out of 10 here. The authority index also is 10 out of 10, which means that 10 being the highest, you get the best authority and you get the best potential for AI citations because you don’t control it. The editors are the ones deciding what to write, what to say. And obviously I’m a PR coach helping you get decided. But this is kind of the highest bar and that’s why it leads to the best outcomes for AI visibility for you getting featured for long form SEO for sustainable visibility, even after you sleep. And that’s what we teach here in the get featured accelerator.

04:26
Speaker 1
That’s what I built my entire career on, is helping small businesses, unknown founders, Etsy store owners, solo entrepreneurs, busy moms get featured in the media so that they can reach this 10 out of 10 Best of the Best AI Potential, Visibility Potential and SEO potential. Right? So editorial coverage is the most powerful thing out of all of these things. More than Reddit, more than your social media, more than your blogs, more than anything. And so that’s why it is the number one thing that I think you should work on in this day and age if you do want to get featured because you can’t pay for it. That’s the first thing. Right? This is, this is what I’m known for. But let’s talk about the other channels. Second one, which is also in PR is press release. So what is a press release?

05:02
Speaker 1
Press release is a structured announcement that you announce, for example a launch announcement or that you’ve raised money or you’re launching a new product or you have a new beauty line. So anything that’s a company announcement that’s distributed through a newswire service that gets posted maybe hundreds of times across platforms, it is own content, meaning that you are publishing it, but you’re publishing it through a newswire source. So then it gets featured on the news tab of Google. Now press releases used to be treated as like boring company announcement. Maybe a Fortune 500 company like Coca Cola or Nike would just periodically do this for their any kind of update they have to alert their investors. But now small businesses can leverage this because it’s a source of structured data for AI to pull from. And AI models love structured data.

05:39
Speaker 1
Now, the same Muckrack research report that I told earlier, they also found that citations of Press releases in AI answered increased 5 fold in just few months. Which means that AI models are more increasingly looking for citations from press releases and editorials. And the reason why is because press releases are often written in the format that AI models love. There’s a headline, there’s a sub headline. It’s got all the things that makes it structured and easy for AI to scan and quickly grasp you and then recommend you. And when you release a press release through a newswire. So that way when I Google it’s in the news tab. It can appear again on hundreds of different trusted websites and get reposted. Things like Yahoo Finance, Local Industry News, Benzinga, Morningstar, Industry Publications.

06:20
Speaker 1
And this is what I’ve helped so many founders do around the time when they have announcement, usually it’s around a product launch or that to even announce that they’ve existed. It’s a great way to protect your IP in the court of law. If someone is infringing on your copyright, you can say, well, I actually published this press release and I’m the first to do something. So that is why it scores extremely high in terms of AI visibility. And I would say I would give it a 9 out of 10 for AI citation potential. And the only reason why it’s not 10 out of 10 is because it’s own media so anyone can publish it. So it’s not a 10 out of 10, but it’s still pretty good. It’s still the second highest, right?

06:50
Speaker 1
And the biggest advantage here is that you get to control the message and you get to announce in a very powerful way and beautifully the way that you want exactly what it is. I worked with a seven figure electric flosser brand. I’ve written three to four press releases for them and it’s been amazing to see them grow. Every time they have a new iteration of the product, every time they have a new product launch or they have anything exciting to announce, for example, they just launched a partnership with Target, all of their products are found in Target.

07:14
Speaker 1
We issue a press release and that just gives them a tremendous amount of SEO that then feeds into the AI citations so that anytime anyone types in to ChatGPT, perplexity, Claude or Gemini, you know what is the best electro flosser brand or I’m looking for a dental care something, they show up. They absolutely show up. So yes, press releases are a 9 out of 10 for me. It’s the second most scalable AI visibility strategy. I would love to combine that with editorial. I do that with so many startups and brands on my VIP day. What we do is we write a full press release because this is what I’m well versed at. And then we also create a plan for us to write a pitch that editorial, editors, journalists, bloggers will say yes to.

07:48
Speaker 1
So you can get two for one, you get a press release that’s then like I said, distributed through newswires hundreds of times. But then you also have a powerful cold pitch that then gets the editor and the magazines to say yes to your product. So this is a double whammy for me. There’s no more powerful combination than pitching and then also doing a press release. The third channel that people ask a lot more and more is Reddit. There’s a lot of people saying, well, Reddit is now what the AI algorithms that the AI LLMs are calling. So we need to go on Reddit and just post as many times as we can about ourselves on Reddit. Well, yes and no, because here’s the thing.

08:19
Speaker 1
AI is smart and it knows that if you’re just creating tons of Reddit profiles to create tons of comments, they’re going to know that it’s spam. So there’s an AI vulnerability there that it knows that when someone is doing it in a spammy way and you actually get downgraded. And so there’s all sorts of things that, for example, they check for how long that Reddit user has had a profile. So it doesn’t work if you just enlist an army of people and you just start like posting nonstop. AI is going to flag that. So yes, Reddit has become incredibly popular and influential in AI search and AI citation platforms found that Reddit is also one of the most frequently cited sources by large language models. But there’s also a drawback, which is the AI vulnerability.

08:57
Speaker 1
The thing about Reddit, the good thing is that it’s real conversations by real sources. So if you can comment on a subreddit like home goods or products or you know, whatever thread that you own, whether it’s law, health care, for me, it’s small business pr, right? There’s tons of founders in these Reddit group chats, kind of threads asking like, what is the best PR strategy for small business? Has anyone gotten into gift guys? How do you do that? If I were to enlist a bunch of my loyal fans and students to go and comment and flood it’s not going to boost it all that much because AI is going to know that the users, they haven’t had long history on Reddit. And then also it’s kind of a lot of comments in a short amount of time.

09:32
Speaker 1
It works best for community validation, it works best for discovery and traffic. But it’s not necessarily the most top quality, high quality driver of AI citations because again, people can spam it, people can game the system. I would say that Reddit as an AI visibility score, I would probably rank the channel like a 7 out of 10, right? A 7 out of 10. So it’s still pretty good. Now the fourth channel for AI visibility is blogs. And a lot of people are like, well, I’m still going to stay true to blogging. It’s been an SEO foundation. So look, blogs are still valid. But here’s the thing. Your website and your blog, that’s stuff that you put out. The rules have changed. This is not the 2000s where anyone can blog and just take up all the SEO.

10:11
Speaker 1
It’s become so saturated that blogs are, yes, they’re good for SEO, but they’re more for education, they’re more for deeper frameworks, case studies, you know, nurturing your audience to show that you’re an expert. But AI models tend to discount brand owned content. So if you own that content, you have control and you can say whatever you want to promote yourself. It doesn’t rank as highly as editorials and Reddit and press releases. So they still matter, but they just play a different role now because everyone can write blogs with AI and then keyword stuff. And of course the AI is smart enough to know that. So I would say that the AI citation potential for blogs have really decreased over the years. Probably a 5 or a 6 out of 10 max.

10:47
Speaker 1
So think of your blog as still a home base where all your channels can point back to. What I love to do for blogs is say, hey, today I’ve been featured on this podcast and then when I put the link, it creates a web of citation across the Internet, which is what people want for SEO, right? You want to have a lot of different links pointing to each other and your homepage can serve as a great hub. I always recommend you create a press page on your website. So for me, I’ve been on over a hundred something podcasts, so my press page will have all of the links pointing to those podcasts and then that tells you the ecosphere, right, whatever the algorithm, the Internet, that there is a map of all the places that I’ve been featured and vice versa.

11:20
Speaker 1
So that’s what it’s good for, a hub for internal linking and external linking. Let’s talk about the last channel, which is probably what most people are doing, which is social media, right? So that’s Your Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, all of these things. These platforms are absolutely amazing, right? They’re amazing for connection and engaging, but they’re really not great anymore for discovery, for AI, because they’re just not cited by AI systems. They’re not what AI and large language models are pulling from. And the reason why is because they don’t give that Structure like rich content that a press release can, with a headline and a subheading, or the way that an editorial does. Because social media is really fast. It’s fast moving, it’s quick, it’s algorithm driven. Every platform is very different.

12:01
Speaker 1
And a real might get, I don’t know, 20,000 views and disappear in 48 hours, as you know, right? And social media in that sense, it scores very low. It’s great for humans, but it’s not great for search and discoverability. I have a lot of people increasingly telling me it’s so hard to get seen now on any platforms because it’s so saturated. And the platforms they want you to pay to boost their content so you’re no longer playing your own game, you’re playing someone else’s game. And you’re at the whims of what that algorithm God of the week or whoever tech billionaire decides whether or not your stuff gets seen or not seen. And so because of that, the AI citations don’t have a reliable metric to be able to pull from. Again, the data is not structured.

12:35
Speaker 1
Your reel doesn’t have a heading, a subheading. It doesn’t have that rich content like an editorial or a press release does. Remember, they want structured, credible content. So I would give social media probably like a 3 or a 4 out of 10, because again, it’s fast, it doesn’t really do much, doesn’t have an SEO or AI citation power. It’s great for nurturing and having conversations in the DMs, but it’s not great for discoverability and it’s not great for the age of AI search anymore. So what is the smartest strategy? We talked about all five of them, right? And it’s not about pr is much better than social media, although it seems like that’s what I’m saying. I’m just saying that as busy founders, how do we work smarter so that we can get more ROI for everyone minute that we spend on marketing?

13:11
Speaker 1
And for me, there’s no higher ROI than pitching, using my methods, using the easy plug and play prompts to be able to get featured. And I’ve talked so much about using free tools like Perplexity to be able to do what a PR agency would charge you five, $10,000 for, because it ideates the angles, it brainstorms, and then it actually writes the pitch for you. So you know exactly what to pitch, what is the angle, how to get into a gift guide, how to get into a podcast. Right? All that’s done for you with Perplexity AI and it’s a free tool. It’s great for information gathering, it’s great for relevant citations, it monitors the media sentiment, what people are wanting, what are the consumer insights, what are editors covering? ChatGPT is not great for that.

13:47
Speaker 1
ChatGPT is not a great recent relevant, real time information gathering resource. It’s more of a kind of an information synthesis. So I always say ChatGPT is great at receiving a bunch of information and then giving you kind of like a pasta maker, the shape of a pasta that you want to come out for the other side. Perplexity goes out and it hunts the information for you. So it’s external, it’s outward, it’s great. So that’s what we want Perplexity for. And obviously on this podcast, I don’t have time to go into all of my methods on how to use that, but we had hundreds of founders get featured using free tools like Perplexity, who have never done pr, who are just solo founders. And you can watch the free masterclass now at Gloria C H o u p r.com masterclass. It’s free.

14:24
Speaker 1
And it absolutely has changed the game for how PR is done for small businesses because no one’s sharing this information, they’re still gatekeeping it. And now with these tools, it’s never been easier to be able to harness the power of a PR agency, but while owning the story. So definitely go watch that. So I guess my closing is that it’s not about one or the other. It’s not like social media or pr. But I will say that unless you have a good infrastructure like pr, editorials, press releases, you just simply don’t have the foundation to be able to be seen. In this era of AI search, you just don’t. Social media disappears. Your blogs are less and less cited because anyone can make a blog.

14:55
Speaker 1
When I’m thinking about the longevity of my business, how do I get found and how do I position myself to be an authority, to be recommended, to be visible, and to be the top pick of where people are going, which is AI. It’s always going to be PR editorial and press releases. So again, blogs are great, social media is great, Reddit’s great, but those are things that you want to stack on top. But if you don’t have that foundation of editorial features, gift guides, PR podcasts, you just simply don’t have anything to build that house on. Right? And this is not coming from me. This is from real citations and real sources of what AI is pulling so what I would do is use, you know, have press releases every quarter.

15:30
Speaker 1
It creates structured information, it gets reposted hundreds of different times, and you can link that back to your website and then also pitch editorials very frequently to build that powerful authority, which is a 10 out of 10 for AI visibility. And then use Reddit communities to showcase real conversations for social proof, and then publish blogs and then stack that with social media so these channels can all work together so that way your brand appears everywhere. But again, the foundation is super important. Right? So if you want to know more about how I can work with startups and independent brands, authors, coaches, products and services, go to gloria chow pierre.com masterclass.

16:02
Speaker 1
You can DM me on Instagram @gloria chow pierre.com I have written dozens and dozens of press releases and every time I do, it’s such a great SEO boost and geo boost and then we pair that with an editorial strategy that allows you to basically do what a PR agency does at 90% less time and 90% less cost. So this is all about making it accessible. I think it’s our time to shine. I think with AI, it presents amazing opportunities for small businesses. If you know the strategy, and here is in what I’m telling you on this podcast is a part of that. So tune in every week for more. If you know of any small businesses who can benefit from this conversation, please share that with them.

16:39
Speaker 1
But again, I just want you to get you super organized and clear in terms of where this is headed so that you can be prepared to be able to put your best foot forward and make decisions out of all the marketing that you’re doing. What is the best channel for you? Thank you so much. And until next time,.