If you’ve been trying to get your coaching brand to show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity, you’ve probably heard that you need to “build your online presence.” That advice is right, but it skips over the most important detail: what kind of presence actually works in 2026.
The answer, backed by several independent research studies from 2025 and 2026, is earned media.
You need to understand what it means and how it differs from the other things you might be doing online.
What is earned media
Earned media is coverage, mentions, or publicity your brand receives from a third party who chose to give it without being paid.
- A journalist writes about your coaching practice.
- A health publication runs a guest piece with your byline.
- A podcast hosts you as a guest.
- A directory recommends you.
- Someone on Reddit references your article as a helpful resource.
All of that is earned media.
The word “earned” is the important part. You didn’t buy placement in an ad, and you didn’t publish it yourself on your own blog.
Someone else decided you were worth talking about, and they said so in a context you don’t control.
The traditional three-way split in marketing breaks it down like this:
Paid media is anything you spend money to place. Google Ads, Instagram sponsored posts, sponsored content on a health blog. You control it fully because you’re paying for it.
Owned media is everything you produce and publish yourself. Your website, your blog, your newsletter, your social media profiles, your YouTube channel. You control it because it’s yours.
Earned media is everything else. The press coverage, the reviews, the third-party recommendations, the mentions in other people’s content. You don’t control it, and that’s precisely what makes it valuable.
Why AI tools prefer earned media above everything else
This is where the 2025-2026 research gets interesting.
Muck Rack analysed over 25 million cited links from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini across 17 industries and found that earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations, with journalism alone representing 27%.
Paid and advertorial content, by comparison, accounts for 0.3%. AI tools are not citing brand websites and sponsored content. Instead, they are citing third-party editorial coverage at an overwhelming rate.
A University of Toronto study described AI engines as showing “systematic and overwhelming bias towards earned media over brand-owned and social content.” The language is strong, and the mechanism is not hard to understand: AI tools are designed to surface trustworthy information. They use the same signals humans use to judge credibility, and an independent publication saying you’re a credible longevity coach carries far more weight than you saying it yourself on your own website.
Stacker and Scrunch ran a controlled study across five leading LLMs and found that distributing content through third-party news outlets produced a median 239% lift in AI search visibility, with some cases reaching 325% improvement compared to publishing only on your own site. That’s not a marginal difference.
For health coaches specifically, earned media power changes where the priority sits. Publishing on your own blog matters, but it matters less than getting your name and your expertise into publications your prospective clients trust and that AI tools already cite as credible sources.
Earned media vs. link building: a real distinction
If you’ve done any SEO work, you might be wondering whether this is just link building with a different name. It isn’t, though the two overlap.
Traditional link building is the practice of acquiring backlinks to your website to improve your search rankings. Guest posts, link insertion outreach, link exchange, directory submissions. The goal is the link, and the content is often secondary.
Earned media is closer to journalism. A piece placed in a health publication under your byline, where you’ve contributed genuine expertise to their editorial content, is earned media. A press release picked up by news sites is earned media. A podcast interview that generates a show-notes page linking to your site is earned media. The defining characteristic is that someone with independent editorial standards decided to include your content or cover your brand because it was worth their readers’ attention.
The reason the distinction matters: Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that branded web mentions — which are what earned media produces — had a 0.664 correlation with AI Overview visibility. Traditional backlink metrics scored 0.218. Brand mentions are three times more predictive of AI visibility than backlinks alone.
SearchAtlas data from 2025-2026 shows that backlinks now account for roughly 45% of off-page ranking weight, down from 80% in 2012, while brand mentions and entity signals now make up 55%.
Traditional link building is just no longer sufficient on its own, and for AI visibility it was never the dominant signal to begin with.
There’s also a practical durability difference. A Forbes placement from 2024 still generates AI citations in 2026 because AI engines index authoritative content indefinitely. A backlink acquired through outreach may remain in place but carries none of the ongoing citation benefit that genuine editorial coverage provides.
How earned media works alongside owned content
Your blog, your newsletter, your website pages are still necessary and important. But they work differently in the AI visibility ecosystem than most coaches assume.
Owned content builds topical authority. When you’ve published 30 posts on sleep coaching, all covering different aspects of the topic in depth, AI tools recognise you as a source with real coverage of that subject.
Your site becomes the kind of source a model might retrieve when generating an answer about sleep coaching. That’s owned content doing its job.
Earned media does something owned content cannot: it gets third parties to validate you. AI tools treat your own website as something you control and therefore something to weigh with appropriate scepticism. When a health publication publishes a piece by you, or about you, that publication’s credibility transfers to your name. The model reads your name and sees it associated with a trusted source — one that predates your publishing it yourself.
The two work together in a specific way. Your owned content provides depth and gives journalists and publications something to reference when they’re considering you as a contributor. Your earned media provides the external validation that AI tools need to feel confident recommending you. Neither replaces the other.
Google’s February 2026 Discover update made entity-based authority explicit: site authority is now assessed topic by topic, not domain-wide. That means a coach with ten strong earned media placements on health and longevity publications, plus a solid body of owned content in that specific area, will have more AI visibility than a generalist site with hundreds of backlinks but no coherent entity signal in the coaching space.
What this looks like practically for coaches
For a health coach who has been focused mainly on their own website and social media, moving toward earned media usually means a few things:
Getting your name into relevant health publications, either as a contributor or as a quoted source in other people’s articles. You don’t need to immediately write for Forbes. A strong placement in a reputable wellness publication, a niche health coaching blog, or a nutrition and fitness trade site carries meaningful weight.
Being a podcast guest. Podcast show notes pages typically link to guests and include biographical information. They live on the host’s domain and are indexed by AI tools. A pattern of appearances across reputable podcasts in your niche builds both entity recognition and citation surface area.
Getting listed and reviewed on trusted directories in the health coaching space. These function as earned media because a third party has published information about your practice in a context you don’t control.
Contributing original data or research, even at a small scale — a survey of your clients, an analysis of a trend in your niche — gives publications something to cite and gives AI tools something to retrieve. Princeton and Georgia Tech GEO research found that content including original statistics improves AI visibility by 30-40%.
Press releases, used properly, are earned media when they get picked up by real editorial outlets. A release announcing a new service, a study you’ve contributed to, or a significant result a client has achieved with your permission can generate legitimate coverage. The release itself is owned; the coverage it generates is earned.
In practice, you need to work for earned media and put yourself out there. Sometimes you can disguise a paid post or a blog network placement as earned media – but it can backfire if done incorrectly, you need to vet your placements carefully.
None of this happens quickly, and that’s the point. Earned media is genuinely harder to acquire than a backlink bought through outreach, and that difficulty is exactly why AI tools trust it more. The coaches building this kind of presence now, while most in the health and coaching space haven’t started yet, are the ones who will be consistently recommended in AI answers 12 months from now. Read our AI visibility guide for coaches to get started on this journey.
If you’d like to understand what your current earned media footprint looks like and where the gaps are, get in touch.
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