Media Research Information and Insights

How to get your media release cited by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot

Written by Mercedes Carrin | Jun 4, 2025 3:56:27 AM

Your Media Release’s new AI superpower

As the search landscape evolves, media coverage is no longer just about public awareness, it’s becoming essential for AI-driven visibility. With users increasingly relying on AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot to discover information, public relations professionals must now optimise not just for keywords, but for LLM (Large Language Model) citations.

We are in the “prompt” era, where reliable and trustworthy sources of information are essential. AI platforms or Large Language Models (LLMs) do not really look for a brand’s social media mentions, websites and owned media to inform answers. Instead, it relies on authoritative, third-party, trustworthy and timely sources. 

According to the 2025 LEOPRD report, Reputation to Revenue: Building Trust, Authority and Visibility in an AI Era, we are seeing a significant shift in how brands achieve visibility in the age of generative AI. As AI platforms become primary sources for information discovery, third-party credibility, such as editorial coverage, reviews, and awards, plays a more crucial role than owned media content.

Editorial coverage stands out as the most influential source of citations, with 62% of brand mentions in large language models (LLMs) originating from third-party editorial sources, underscoring its paramount importance over paid or owned content.

How tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot find information

 

When answering questions, Language Models rely on these main data types:

  • Pretraining data, which includes web content, like news articles, company sites, blogs, and press releases, up to a specific cutoff (e.g. June 2024 for ChatGPT-4o, Jan 2025 for Gemini, Copilot around April 2023).
  • Real-time citations (when web-enabled) are based on open, crawlable sources that meet criteria like credibility, clarity, and recency. This allows AI tools to quote, cite, and link to current news articles and press releases. Gemini and Copilot integrate with Google and Bing search, while Perplexity defaults to live web results with source citations. ChatGPT also supports real-time browsing, but only in its paid tiers with browsing enabled.
  • Authoritative content - AI tools prioritise content that is,
    • Indexed and crawlable (Google News-approved, public, not gated)
    • From reputable outlets, wire services (e.g. AAP, Reuters), news sites with trusted domains or reputable media and brands with recognisable brand blogs
    • Clearly authored and dated for credibility
    • Structured for clarity (titles, headlines, subheadings, author name, etc.)
    • Reputable, recent reports
    • Reviews from reliable review sites.

How to increase the likelihood of your story being cited by AI tools

 

Get covered in the media (reputable, indexable platforms)
  • Target outlets that are indexed by Google News or are considered authoritative in your space (major news sites, respected trade press).
  • LLMs trained on web data are more likely to ingest coverage from these domains.
Ensure your media release or media coverage is crawlable and ungated
  • Avoid paywalls, login requirements, and PDF-only releases.
  • Plain HTML on a public-facing URL works best.
Distribute media release via a reputable media release service
Post the release or the coverage on your company  blog or newsroom
  • If your company or client’s site has strong SEO, and the newsroom is active and well-structured, content may be ingested in future versions.
  • Ensure the site is Public, not behind logins and is hosted on a domain with strong SEO signals.
  • Bonus: LLMs will treat this as a brand-authoritative source for that domain, especially if it’s a Google News–approved company blog.
Encourage third-party references
  • Secure follow-on commentary or summaries from others.

  • If your media coverage is cited in analysis pieces, opinion blogs, LinkedIn posts by credible figures or summaries from industry influencers, that helps it become part of the training or cited content.

Use structured metadata
  • Make sure your content is published on sites that use schema markup (like NewsArticle, Organisation, Author) to help both search engines and AI models classify and prioritise your content. 
  • Sites like Medianet’s NewHub repository of distributed press releases are structured in a way that is easy to be picked up by LLMs.
Use media partners or collaborators with high trust scores
  • Get your announcement cited or picked up by universities, think tanks, or institutions (e.g., CSIRO, Grattan Institute, universities, government reports), which are often included in AI training data.

How Medianet-distributed media releases are used by LLMs

 

When you distribute your media release by Medianet, you are not only making your story available to the media but also to the answers of large language models. Distributing by Medianet not only means sending it to relevant media outlets and journalists, but also hosting your release on a third-party, authoritative domain.

When you distribute your release, you are optimising your distribution by placing your release on trustworthy sources that are craved by LLMs, boosting your chances of being cited by them.

 

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Writing the perfect press release is only half the job—ensuring it reaches the right audience is equally important. Identifying and targeting the right journalists or media outlets that cover your industry or topic can significantly increase your chances of securing coverage. Equally important is understanding the journey of your press releases. Medianet simplifies this process and amplifies your reach.

Send your press release to your target journalists using our extensive media contacts databasemonitor your mentions, track their performance, and gain actionable insights—all on one seamless platform. Our plans are designed to work for you, and not the other way around. Pay for what you need - not more, not less. Just pick any combination of Outreach and Monitoring plans to fit your media strategy needs, and power it with Bespoke Media Analysis.

 

Book a demo with us today to learn more.