AI search is rapidly becoming the new brass ring in search for a good reason — it’s now the go-to for consumer research, product comparisons, and decision-making. According to a recent tally by Growth Memo, 42% keywords have AI overviews (AIO)— up from just 16% in May 2025.
Stacker helps brands get cited in AI summaries, rather than being buried among the links below, and the secret relies on beefing up what brands already do to gain brand recognition and trust: earned media.
Some of the biggest players in their industries, like Paylocity, SoFi, and Vivian Health, use earned news distribution to get featured in AI search. Here’s how they’ve partnered with Stacker to build their AI search presence..
Paylocity wanted to elevate its already sky-high search standing in the HR and payroll industry by showing up on AI summaries, as part of a new campaign focusing on thought leadership and increasing visibility around their platform.
🔊What they did: Paylocity partnered with Stacker on an earned reach campaign, generating data-driven news stories vetted by Stacker’s editorial team. Their content lived on their own blog but was also freely syndicated to hundreds of vetted news sites on Stacker’s newswire, Connect.
🚨What happened: The stories were picked up more than 1,300 times by trusted news outlets, citing Paylocity, which generated significant authority signals in search.
💡How they surfaced in AIO: Google's SGE cited these news pickups in their AI-generated answers because news articles are prioritized by the algorithm — they’re high-authority, timely, and third-party validated.
What Paylocity did, SoFi and others have done too — leveraging earned distribution through Connect to achieve visibility in the new age of AI search.
Generative AI search tools, such as Google SGE, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot, are transforming the way people search. Instead of requiring users to dig into individual websites ranked by SEO, AIO synthesizes information from multiple trusted sources to provide complete answers to users’ queries, often in concise, user-friendly language.
But for brands that don’t get cited in AIO, the risk is clear: they remain relatively unseen.
👉The top of search is no longer Position 1— but AI citations.
Appearing in AI citations is one of the most influential and new ways that you can signal trust and credibility to users.
👉AI answers are still built on traditional search signals such as content quality, authority, structure, and intent.
Traditional signals are still very important, because a certain degree of organic success is still needed to appear for highly-competitive AI keywords.
⭐Earned distribution increases traditional authority signals — by helping your brand rank organically and gain mentions and citations in AI search.
👉AI answers focus more heavily than ever on third-party citations and timeliness.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), the technique used in LLM models for AI search, checks the most relevant, recent, and high-authority sources to ‘fact-check’ their AI outputs. As a result, these domains are perfectly positioned to be included in AIO via RAG — making Stacker’s distribution network a perfect tool to get positive, attributed, third-party mentions into AI results.
TL;DR: Earned news distribution provides two core benefits for AI search ranking:
Today, brands that appear in AI search are those referenced by trusted editorial environments — news publications, industry outlets, and authoritative third parties.
Over 70% of citations in AI answers come from earned media, not brand-owned websites. In a study of 250,000 citations across AI platforms, third-party editorial content was shown to be the most frequently referenced source.
This new way of indexing online means earned media is now integrated and cited by AI from early user research stages to final product comparison, as opposed to SEO-optimized, owned content that is more siloed.
With AIO, your content doesn’t have to be ranked first to be included in the answer. This means that fears of “zero-click” searches are often exaggerated: brands that are included in the AI answer can actually drive more clicks — and higher-quality ones — thanks to the authority and visibility that AIO brings.
Mentions are now also becoming as valuable — if not more than — traditional backlinks. The reason: AI tools like Google SGE feature an average of 6.1 citations per answer, typically citing specific passages or data points over homepage links.
So don’t underestimate the value of a single quote, stat, or data point published on a prominent third-party outlet — because that can earn your brand a spot in AI search. Multiply that impact by hundreds of earned news pickups, and your brand’s presence for both branded and niche topics grows dramatically.
If your brand wants to appear in AI search results, you need significant numbers of third-party citations from trusted sources — and earned media distribution is the most reliable way to do it.
Stacker helps brands publish editorial-quality stories designed for broad distribution across high-authority news outlets. Each story’s structure is tailored for passage-based ranking, increasing the chances of being cited in AI-generated answers.
As these stories are repeatedly picked up by reputable media, the content and your brand become more visible in AI citations, making earned reach a powerful entry point into the AI search game.
This approach also boosts brand authority online, helping organic ranking and first-party citations in AI search.
In Paylocity’s case, that meant appearing in generative search results for key industry topics. But they’re not the only ones:
⭐ Vivian Health published stories about travel nurse certifications, and now they’re featured in AIO for nursing-related queries. Thanks to Stacker’s distribution, they built authority by being cited across many news sites.
⭐LawnStarter also used Stacker Connect to syndicate their data-driven stories to news domains, driving their inclusion in AI-generated responses while continuing to rank highly in traditional search.
These examples show a dramatic shift in how brands earn visibility amid a hectic marketplace. Brands aren’t just trying to rank anymore — they’re also competing to be referenced in AI search.
Stacker helps make that possible by producing and distributing the type of authoritative, third-party editorial content that AI trusts, published on the platforms that matter.
If your brand wants to show up in the answers that shape consumer awareness and trust, Stacker can help you get there.
Kevin Fowler is Head of SEO at Stacker, where he leads SEO, GEO and data strategy. With over a decade of experience, he has built and executed search strategies for brands in finance, e-commerce, media and tech. He holds an M.S. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Angelo State University and has worked in SEO roles at CoPilot, Volusion, Wunderman, and CreditCards.com.
Photo Illustration by Stacker // Shutterstock // Canva