Investing in strong content helps marketing teams build their brand and the authority that drives visibility in AI search.
To be visible in the modern search world, you need to earn it. The most recent iteration of Muck Rack's "What Is AI Reading?" report found that 84% of AI citations go to earned media sources, compared to the 0.3% of citations that go to paid media.
AI has upended how people search for information and discover brands.
With Stacker Connect, brands can earn pickups on hundreds of high-authority sites. Brands submit their content to our editorial team, who reviews it to ensure it meets our editorial standards and then distributes it to the more than 3,000 news outlets on the Stacker network. The publishers in our network decide whether to pick up each story that comes through the Newswire, which means that our bar for quality is high: each brand story must be evidence-based, transparent in its methodology, fair, and complete.
Brand teams can see how their content is performing in real time, with access to metrics like pickup counts, average views, and response presence rate, which measures how often a brand appears in an AI-generated answer.
If brands publish content on their own sites, they may well get cited for relevant queries. But if they distribute that same piece of content across a hundred different news outlets, they increase the surface area where LLMs can encounter their brand and deem it authoritative, especially if the content includes first-party data and is structured so that it answers common consumer questions.
We've seen this in our own research. In March 2026, we published a study of 87 brand stories and found a 2.4x lift in how often those brands were cited after their stories had been distributed on the Stacker network.
Distribution also nearly tripled how often brands were surfaced across AI platforms — an important finding given that LLMs are probabilistic models that each have their own philosophy for sourcing information and weighing its credibility.
Optimizing for AI visibility has become a more urgent priority for marketing departments over the past year.
"Two years ago, I was silently doing this work on my own," Michael Farr, senior manager of marketing at Paylocity, said onstage at Stacker's Cited 2026 conference. "A year later, the C-suite comes banging on the door… 'What are you guys doing about this?!' The tone has changed a lot."
The dynamics of how AI platforms find and weigh sources are continuously evolving, which makes broad, credible reach all the more valuable.
"The ground beneath companies that are invested in this space will continue to shift over the next months and years ahead," said Jack Caporal, director of research content and data storytelling at The Motley Fool. "Owning your fundamentals, which includes reach, will be really important, and that places Stacker at the center of it."
Madeline Stone is the Content Manager for Editorial & Insights at Stacker. She was previously a longtime business and tech journalist at Business Insider and a content and communications consultant for startups.
