The AI Media Arena: Journalism Is The Biggest Source For Query Answers
Journalism is the largest single information source among earned media, Muck Rack reports.
Readers everywhere are plugging into AI to ask questions. But publishers wonder—where are the answers coming from?
From their very own sites. Answers are largely being generated from journalism and earned media—99% of the links being cited are from non-paid sources, according to a new study from Muck Rack, “What Is AI Reading?”
It is not clear what this information does for publishers. As they may suspect, their content is being used for these answers, but presumably they are at least generating links.
The biggest single category of AI citations is journalistic, at 27%. Next on the list are corporate blogs and content, comprising 24%.
These are followed by aggregators/encyclopedic (17.4%), owned media (13.7%) and government (8.6%). The remaining options, academic/research, social/UGC, tech platforms, press releases and paid/advertorial are all in the low single digits or a fraction thereof.
The queries concern these topics:
Industry trend—46%
Risk/due dilligence—25%
Problem/discovery—24%
Best of—23%
How to—19%
Comparative evaluation—18%
Of course, some industries lean on journalistic content more than others. These sectors do so to the following degrees:
Media/Entertainment—36%
Finance/Insurance—32%
Sports—31%
Food & Beverage—31%
Travel/Airline—30%
Retail & E-Commerce—30%
Transportation—29%
Energy—29%
Government—26%
Hospitality—25%
Real Estate—25%
Consumer Goods—24%
Technology—24%
Nonprofit—24%
Healthcare—22%
Education—18%
Industrial/Manufacturing—19%
Each of the three big AI platforms—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—pulls from a different set of journalistic outlets, with only Forbes appearing in more than one provider’s top five: Forbes is fifth with ChatGPT and first with Gemini.
But the providers include citations to varying degrees. ChatGPT does so in 96% of its responses, and includes an average of five citations in every response.
Gemini has citations in 82% of its responses, average five per instance. Anthropic offers citations in 55% of its answers, averaging 13 sources for each one.
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