The LLMs are your new press office and nobody sent them a brief.

Think about the last time someone recommended your business without being asked. Not a referral, not a review you chased. A spontaneous mention, from someone who had never met you, to someone who had never heard of you.

That used to be the job of a PR agency. You'd brief them. They'd place you in the right publications. You controlled the message because you controlled the relationship.

That job still exists. Nobody hired the new agency. And they didn't wait for a brief.

When someone asks ChatGPT who to hire for digital marketing in Dubai, something is generating that answer. Not your website. Not your service pages. A Reddit thread. A Trustpilot review. A mention in an article that didn't even link back to you.

The LLMs are your most influential press office yet. They just don't know your story.

What follows is a reframe of a model most of us learned early in our marketing thinking. Not to replace it, but to update where the weight sits and why the most under-invested category right now might be the one that matters most for AI visibility.

What is the earned, owned, paid model and why does it still matter?

Earned, owned, paid. If you've spent any time thinking about marketing strategy, you know the framework.

Owned is what you build and control. Your website, your blog, your email list. Earned is what others say about you. Press coverage, word of mouth, reviews. Paid is what you buy. Ads, sponsored content, placements.

For years, the logic was simple. You invest in owned to build your foundation. You buy paid to accelerate reach. And earned was the reward. The validation that came when the work was good enough to get noticed.

Except earned got complicated. Somewhere between the rise of Instagram and the creator economy, a grey zone appeared. Brands started paying influencers to talk about them. Ambassadors signed contracts. Reviews got incentivised. The line between earned and paid blurred to the point where a lot of what looked like organic recommendation was quietly sponsored.

Not dishonestly, necessarily. But earned stopped being purely earned.

The framework still holds. What changed is the weight of each category, who decides what counts as earned, and whether you can still buy your way into it.

What did LLMs actually change in how your brand gets recommended?

Owned media did not disappear. But its role shifted. When ChatGPT or Perplexity decides whether to recommend you, your website is not where that decision gets made. It is where the decision gets confirmed. The LLM checks your site for facts once it has already decided you are worth mentioning. Getting the mention is a different game entirely.

Sponsored recommendations don't really exist yet in this space. You cannot buy a placement in a ChatGPT answer the way you buy a Google Ad. Perplexity launched ads in 2024. Google AI Overviews is testing sponsored placements. But thinking out loud: if LLMs follow the same monetisation path as search engines, sponsored recommendations feel like a logical next move. For now, that layer is not open for most businesses. When it does open, it will change the game again.

Which brings us to earned. And this is where the displacement is real.

The LLMs did not invent earned media. But they changed which version of earned they trust. Polished brand narratives and press releases might start to score low. And honestly, it reminds me of what happened with influencer campaigns. We got so used to sponsored content disguised as authentic recommendation that we stopped knowing what was real. The AI seems to have the same problem with corporate polish. What it seems to trust more is messier, more human, and harder to fake.

A community thread. An unprompted review. A mention from someone with no contract and no affiliate link.

Has earned media always been this messy, or is this something new?

I want to think out loud here for a second.

Earned media has always followed the dominant distribution layer of its time. When print was king, earned meant a journalist writing about you. When social took over, earned became influencer mentions and ambassador programmes. Which, as we just noted, quietly started looking a lot like paid.

It is food for thought more than a proven thesis. But the pattern is hard to ignore.

What the arrival of LLMs did is create a new hierarchy inside earned. And it is not the one I would have expected.

According to Profound, an AI visibility platform, brand-owned content represents a small fraction of what gets cited on category-level queries. Forums, community threads, review platforms and third-party mentions appear far more often than polished service pages. The AI is not reading your homepage the way a potential client would. It is reading what other people said about you, often in places you were not paying attention to.

The other shift is about links. Backlinks built the SEO era. There is growing evidence, notably from an Ahrefs study cited by Hallam Agency, that unlinked brand mentions, your name appearing in a conversation without a link back to your site, may carry more weight for LLM recommendation than a linked feature ever did.*

This is not a reason to abandon press or content. It is a reason to stop assuming that owned and paid earned are enough on their own.

What should go in your brief, and where does your business actually need to show up?

This is where it gets practical. And personal.

The brief is not a content plan. It is a question: where do your future clients go for advice on problems you could solve, before they have ever heard of you?

That conversation is happening somewhere. On a subreddit. In a LinkedIn comment thread. On a review platform. In a WhatsApp group you will never be invited to. The platforms that matter for your citation footprint are the ones where your specific audience already gathers to ask questions, share experiences and recommend people like you.

For me, that would be LinkedIn and Reddit. LinkedIn because the founders and SMB operators I work with are there, talking about marketing, growth and tools in public. Reddit because communities like r/Entrepreneur and r/smallbusiness are the kind of authentic, unsponsored conversation that LLMs tend to trust.

But the reasoning shifts depending on what you do.

A restaurant would look at where real customers leave real opinions after a real meal. A SaaS product would think about the platforms where buyers compare tools before making a decision. A B2B consultant would consider where their industry peers and potential clients discuss challenges and ask for referrals. A local service business would start with wherever their community goes when they need a recommendation they can trust.

The question is not which platforms exist. It is where your clients already talk about problems you solve.

That is your brief. Not what you want to say about yourself. What you want to make it easy for others to say, in the places the LLMs are already listening.

Your new press office is already open , so what now?

The framework did not break. Earned, owned, paid still makes sense as a way to think about your marketing. What shifted is where the weight sits, and who is doing the talking.

Your website still matters. It is where the story gets confirmed. But the decision to include you in an answer, to recommend you to someone who has never heard of you, that happens somewhere else. In a thread. In a review. In a mention that does not even link back to you.

You have always needed others to speak for you. The difference now is that the press office running your reputation is an AI system pulling from places you may have never thought to show up in.

So the real question is not whether the LLMs are talking about your business. It is whether you have given them anything worth saying.

Sources Profound, AI citation analysis, category-level queries, 2025 Ahrefs, brand mention correlation study, cited by Hallam Agency, 2025. To be read with the caveat that vendor incentives exist on this topic.