Newsrooms are smaller, and inboxes are overflowing. Journalists receive more than 100 pitches a week on average, and most are deleted almost immediately for missing the mark. AI has made pitching faster and easier to scale. PR teams can now generate subject lines, draft outreach and distribute at a pace that wasn’t possible even a few years ago. The result is more emails, more follow-ups and more noise. Journalists have adapted by becoming more selective. They scan subject lines faster, filter aggressively and engage only with pitches that clearly align with what they cover and why it matters now.
Standing out today isn’t about sending more. The key is and has always been sharing something worth covering. While AI has changed how pitches are produced, it hasn’t changed what journalists need to create a story or what stories ultimately get amplified. And increasingly, what gets amplified is what trains the system.
That’s the part most PR teams aren’t accounting for. Earned media isn’t just about reaching target audiences anymore. This is where Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) comes into play: AI systems prioritize authoritative, third-party content when generating responses, making earned media a critical input into how brands are discovered and represented. Large language models are trained on publicly available content, including news coverage, expert commentary and original reporting. The stories journalists choose to publish influence perception in the moment and inform how AI understands industries, companies and trends over time. If your brand isn’t showing up in credible, earned coverage, it’s not just missing visibility. It’s missing inclusion in the datasets that power AI-generated answers.
There’s also a compounding effect. When outreach misses the mark, it reduces the likelihood of future coverage. Fewer earned placements mean fewer signals entering the broader content ecosystem. Over time, that absence adds up. Brands that consistently earn relevant, credible coverage are more likely to show up in searches because of how AI surfaces and summarizes information. Those that don’t become less visible in both human and algorithmic discovery.
The increase in AI-generated outreach has made this baseline harder to hit, not easier. Journalists aren’t just evaluating whether a pitch is well written. They’re deciding whether it’s worth their time at all.
Be Valuable
What journalists value has remained consistent. They are looking for timely stories with clear news value and quickly move past anything that doesn’t align with their beat. Substance and clarity matter. Clear, concise pitches, with new data and access to a credible expert, are more likely to get attention.
Be Intentional
Personalization isn’t adding the reporter’s name to the email. Real personalization requires context. It means referencing a specific article a journalist published recently and clearly connecting your story to that coverage. It might mean recognizing that a reporter focuses on funding rounds within a specific sector, or that they tend to frame stories around market impact rather than product features. That level of specificity signals that the outreach is intentional, not automated.
Be Smart About AI
AI can support the pitching process by surfacing recent coverage and identifying reporter patterns, but it cannot determine whether the connection is actually meaningful. That requires human judgment. The teams seeing better results are using AI to accelerate research and refine their lists, then applying a human lens to ensure the angle truly fits. In many cases, that leads to fewer pitches overall, but stronger alignment and higher response rates.
AI is accelerating content creation across every channel, but that only increases the importance of curation. Journalists remain the filter. Earned media is the signal. And that signal is increasingly shaping how information is surfaced, summarized and trusted by AI systems. When so much outreach looks and sounds the same, relevance becomes more visible. A pitch that is clearly aligned, timely and genuinely useful stands out faster than it used to. Not because the standards are lower, but because the contrast is sharper.
Earned media today doesn’t just influence what people read. It influences what AI learns. The brands that recognize this and invest in precision over volume will have an advantage not just in coverage but also in how they are represented in the next layer of discovery.
Use AI to move faster and sharpen your inputs, but keep the strategy grounded in relevance and insight. What gets covered is what gets remembered by audiences and by the systems increasingly shaping how information is found.
