AI Is Now the Gatekeeper to News. PR Needs a New Playbook.
Generative AI has become a primary entry point for news discovery, and that shift is quietly redrawing who gets cited-and who disappears. A new analysis by the UK's Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found AI systems lean on a narrow slice of outlets, with some top platforms excluding trusted brands entirely.
In the study, the BBC-often ranked as the UK's most trusted news source-wasn't cited at all by ChatGPT or Google's Gemini across 100 news queries. Meanwhile, The Guardian appeared in 58% of ChatGPT responses and 53% of Gemini answers, dominating the results.
Why this matters for PR and Communications
- Distribution power has shifted from search engines to AI gatekeepers. Your brand's visibility now hinges on which outlets AI favors.
- Over-reliance on a few sources narrows the narrative window. It can amplify specific viewpoints without users realizing it.
- Smaller and regional media face exclusion, which reduces earned media upside in local or niche campaigns.
What's driving the skew
- Licensing deals: Media with agreements (e.g., The Guardian with OpenAI) show up more. Outlets that block AI crawlers-like the BBC-get sidelined.
- Platform preferences: Each AI tool displayed clear source patterns, creating new winners and losers in the news ecosystem.
Traffic and revenue fallout you can't ignore
After Google rolled out AI Overviews, click-throughs from search to news sites fell from 15% to 8%. Publishers expect search-driven traffic to drop 43% within three years.
Scraping dwarfs referral traffic: estimated ratios were OpenAI 179:1, Perplexity 369:1, and Anthropic 8,697:1. In short, AI uses media content far more than it sends readers back-putting ad- and subscription-based models under stress.
Global ripples
Similar disputes are emerging elsewhere. In South Korea, a complaint alleged that Naver used news content without permission to train its HyperClova LLM.
At the same time, some groups are monetizing access. Axel Springer struck a licensing deal with OpenAI, while News Corp secured a five-year, $250 million agreement starting in 2024.
Policy pressure is building
IPPR criticized an AI news environment "controlled by a small number of tech companies" with limited transparency and accountability. It proposed measures including a joint licensing market (to fairly compensate regional and smaller outlets via a government-led task force) and a "news nutrition label" that shows users which outlets and viewpoints an AI cites.
Action plan for PR and Comms teams
- Map your media mix to AI visibility: Track which outlets your audiences trust that also appear in AI answers. Prioritize pitches and partnerships accordingly.
- Negotiate inclusion and rights: Explore licensing or structured content feeds with platforms and aggregators. Clarify crawler permissions and compensation terms.
- Optimize for AI answers: Publish concise Q&A explainers, clear fact boxes, and up-to-date summaries. Ensure entity names, dates, quotes, and stats are unambiguous.
- Use technical signals: Keep sitemaps current, reinforce canonical pages, and add structured data. Decide where to allow or limit AI crawlers via robots.txt and meta tags.
- Build linkable authority: Release original data, short research notes, and transparent methodology pages to earn citations that AI can confidently surface.
- Measure beyond clicks: Track brand mentions and source citations within AI responses, branded search volume, newsletter signups, and direct traffic.
- Own your distribution: Strengthen newsletters, communities, and press rooms. Reduce reliance on intermediaries that may never send traffic back.
- Set up an "AI monitoring" workflow: Regularly query major models for your brand, executives, products, and issues. Log citations, flag errors, and submit corrections.
- Crisis readiness: Prepare fast-turn statements for AI hallucinations or misattributions. Define escalation paths to platforms and publishers.
- Engage in policy: Support transparent licensing standards and labeling that discloses sources. Align with industry coalitions pushing for fair compensation.
Questions to put on the table this quarter
- Which outlets cite us most-and which ones AI favors in our category?
- Do our robots.txt and terms reflect our stance on AI scraping and licensing?
- What's our target split between earned placements in AI-preferred sources and owned channels?
- How will we report "AI visibility" alongside traditional PR metrics?
- What's our response protocol for AI-generated inaccuracies?
Helpful resources
- Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)
- About Google AI Overviews
- Skills upgrade: AI for Marketing and PR
Bottom line: AI platforms are now the gatekeepers of what audiences see first. Treat AI visibility as a core PR channel-plan for it, optimize for it, and measure it with the same rigor you apply to media relations.
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