How Your Earned Media Data Can Work Harder for Your Content Strategy

AI is reshaping the content landscape fast and one of the biggest impacts is making earned reach more valuable than ever. Though, earning the pickup isn’t the end of the road.

The real opportunity is knowing how to read your distribution data and use it to commission content in a smarter way, reach further, and build lasting brand authority that AI search platforms actually recognize.

Your earned pickup data offers key insights if you know what to look for. Here's how to mine it.

Why Owned Media Alone Isn’t the Full Picture

The old way of measuring content performance, with page views, likes, and time on page, was always a limited picture. Owned media requires readers to already know you exist. Relying on owned media as a marker of success is like viewing a Monet up close: you miss the whole picture.

Genuinely good owned content has a much bigger life when amplified by a distribution network. At Stacker, the distribution data we extract for clients is dense with signals of brand authority and visibility that owned media metrics simply can't provide. We're talking media pickups, outlet types, geographic spread, pickup velocity, and impressions — a far richer picture of how your brand is actually landing in the world.

Our Value Team operationalizes signals. We use this distribution data to define clear authority standards and benchmark what strong earned visibility looks like across industries. Those foundational best practices stay consistent.

What evolves are the tactics.

Because we’re analyzing patterns across hundreds of brands and publishers, we can adapt our playbook in real time as algorithms shift or media landscapes change. As a result, we have a content strategy specific to each brand that’s data-backed and grounded in proven standards, while still responsive to the signals that matter most.

How to Read the Signals: Metrics That Actually Drive Decisions

Some types of metrics mean more than others. Here's what our Value Team actually pays attention to — and what we don't.

The Metrics That Matter

• Pickup velocity: When a story syndicates quickly, it's a strong signal that it's fulfilling something publishers need, whether that be timeliness, human interest, coverage of topics most outlets lack the resources to tackle on their own. Speed of pickup is an early indicator of real resonance.
• Outlet mix: When national outlets, locals, and trade publications all pick up the same story, that's a sign the angle is serving multiple audience types at once — or filling a gap that cuts across verticals. Diverse outlet mix is one of the clearest signals of a winning angle.
• Geographic spread: Wider geographic distribution means more people — in more places — are becoming aware of your brand. That kind of broad awareness has downstream value: it moves consumers through the funnel faster and makes targeted ads and owned content more effective.

What's Less Helpful Than It Looks

• Impressions: Reach numbers feel satisfying, but they don't tell you what's resonating. High impressions can mask a story that underperforms where it counts.
• Long-tail recirculation: A story that keeps getting picked up months later might look like evergreen gold — but in smaller outlets, it often just means the publication doesn't post often and is filling gaps.

Story Segmentation: Why a Story Performed the Way It Did

To go beyond surface metrics, we break down each story along several key dimensions:

• Topic: Was the angle too broad, narrow, or just right?
• Format: Was it engaging and scannable?
• Audience: Did the story target the right outlets and audiences?
• Outlet tier: What caliber of publication picked it up?
• Region: Did the pickup reflect where the brand’s target audiences live?
• Seasonality: Was the timing right relative to publisher calendars, holidays, or major events?

Each of these dimensions adds texture to the raw numbers and gives brands tailored, actionable guidance for what comes next.

Benchmarking: Context Is Everything

Performance data alone doesn't tell the whole story without context. We benchmark every story against three comparisons:

• Brand history: How does this story stack up against others the brand has distributed?
• Category norms: How does it compare to similar stories from competitor brands?
• Seasonality: How did it perform relative to similar stories at this same time last year?

Benchmarking turns performance data into perspective — and perspective is what drives strategy.

Setting the Foundation: What Does Your Brand Want to Be Known For?

Especially with the growing focus on ROI in content and the now-huge role of earned media in AI visibility, I like to level set with brands by asking the following questions:

• What do you want to be visible for? A subject or theme? A specific message or sentiment? A reputation as an opinionated thought leader in your category?
• What does the media need? What are your target outlets interested in, and where are the gaps in their coverage?
• What lane can you own? Where do your brand's goals and expertise align with what's already bubbling up in the media?

These answers become the north star for everything that follows.

Defining Success: Building a Real KPI Set

Working backwards from your goals, the core metrics for an earned reach strategy include:

• Pickups: early signal of reach potential
• Balance of brand vs. publisher fit: sets realistic expectations for content direction
• High-DR* pickups: authority and quality indicators
• Link quality & add-on readership: credibility and visibility
• Brand authority signals: earned mentions and qualitative visibility in AI-surfaced content

Now that Scrunch and Stacker are working together, we can measure and show the impact each distributed story has on a brand's AI visibility across the 8 major LLMs (from ChatGPT to Google's AI Overviews).

Having GEO reporting that is easy to understand, helps teams advocate for the work they’re doing and show quantifiable impact of smart content strategy.

These AI Search Visibility Analyses will be available to all our Growth and Scale customers.

*NOTE a good pickup isn’t defined solely by having a domain rating (DR) of 90+. DR isn’t linear– it’s logarithmic, meaning the higher the number, the harder it is to move up. That means publications in the DR 70-85 range often represent well-established, credible outlets, even if they don’t cross an arbitrary 90+ threshold.

In reality, DR 90+ sites make up a very small percentage of the web.

Strong visibility strategies aren’t built on chasing the rarest domains. They’re built on earning consistent, quality placements across a diversified mix of high-quality, respected publications.

Turning Pickup Patterns Into Strategy Decisions

Instead of walking into your next review meeting saying "this story did well," distribution data lets you reframe the conversation around forward-looking decisions.

💡 Distribution patterns reveal whether a story reflects a legitimate angle-market fit — or just got lucky.

💡 Outlet clustering shows your "syndication magnets": where your content naturally gains traction, whether that's national, local, or vertical-specific publications.

💡 Pickup velocity and decay indicate how well the story hit the mark on timeliness and shelf life — and whether there's a repackaging opportunity worth pursuing.

Geography as Signal: Where Relevance is Strongest

Geographic concentration can be either a gift or a warning sign, depending on the context.

It's a gift when a story has a genuine local hook — think regulatory data, state cost-of-living figures, or regional news-you-can-use angles. AI isn't snobbish about local coverage. In fact, it prefers it in many cases.

It becomes a warning when the concentration reflects overly narrow framing or missing broader context — when the story is reaching a tight geography not by design, but by default.

To take advantage of strong local resonance, a localization program can be transformative: national stories with modular state and city data sets, distributed as regionally tailored versions that speak directly to local audiences and their implications. Our Stacker Local program enables brands to localize stories quickly and amplify reach exponentially.

To Localize, Rewrite, or Leave It: A Framework for Story Decisions

Not every story needs the same treatment. Here's how we approach it:

Distribution-Driven Commissioning: Building Next Quarter’s Plan

Getting consistent, meaningful pickup requires time and deep, trusted relationships with publishers. A distribution partner like Stacker doesn't just provide pickups — it provides signal, forecasting, and best practices that shape your editorial calendar.

• A portfolio approach: opportunities to double down on what's working, experiment with new formats, take calculated seasonal bets, and refresh high-performing content with updated data
• Signal intelligence: your "next 10 stories" informed by distribution performance data
• Best practices: guidance on how to pitch a story idea in a planning meeting and set a content ops cadence that holds

What Changes When Your Distribution Becomes Your Strategy Input

When earned media becomes a cycle rather than a dead end, everything compounds.

Distribution data feeds your next campaign. Fewer stories go nowhere. Commissioning gets clearer. Iteration from idea to publication gets faster. And the value of your organic content is much more visible in internal conversations around resourcing and impact.

Tired of "helpful reporting" that stops there?

The Value Team turns your distribution data into a content strategy that keeps building — story after story, quarter after quarter.