When marketing teams put together content, their goal is often to get as many eyeballs on it as possible. The more people who see it, the better the exposure for your brand.
And while that may still be true, if you’re optimizing for AI visibility, placement quality matters more than placement volume.
LLMs look for authority signals when they decide what sources to cite. Muck Rack’s research has repeatedly found that appearing in editorial content on high-quality sites correlates with strong AI visibility.
In the context of editorial syndication, having a large proportion of high-authority publications pick up your content may matter more than getting the highest number of pickups possible. Stacker and Scrunch’s research late last year found that 64% of all AI citations went to the distributed version of a story rather than the brand’s own site, suggesting that it was the publication’s authority profile that drove the citation more than the content itself.
To see how this looked in practice, we studied the 1,619 stories that were distributed on Stacker’s network in the first quarter of 2026 to better understand what earned media metrics matter in the age of AI.
One of the ways that brands can measure authority is by looking at the Domain Rating (or DR) of the sites where they are being mentioned. DR is a metric created by Ahrefs that grades a website’s authority on a scale of 0-100. It’s calculated by looking at how many domains link to a particular site and weighting those domains’ own DRs.
The higher the DR, the more authoritative a site. However, the scale is logarithmic, meaning that it’s more difficult to improve your score the higher up you go.
DR is fundamentally an SEO measure, but it’s relevant to GEO as well. LLMs don’t actually check DR, but they do make judgment calls about what content seems trustworthy. High-DR publications tend to be the sites that AI trusts the most — not because they have a high DR, but because they follow high editorial standards, use clear sourcing practices, and are frequently cited by other trusted sources.
Domain diversity — or being placed on many different, high-authority sites — also matters. For example, a brand that appeared on 100 DR50+ sites would have a very different authority profile from one that had 100 links from one high-DR site.
In that sense, looking at DR can serve as a proxy to understand which earned placements contribute most to AI visibility. Getting pickups on sites with higher DRs increases your chances of acquiring citations.
Brands that distribute their content on Stacker’s network have access to a large pool of high-authority sites. It’s made up of local, regional, and national publications with large, established audiences. Each of the 49 large local publishers is DR50+, as are 203 of the 210 midsize local publishers.
Zooming in further, 47% of pickups in the first quarter of 2026 were on sites that had a DR of 50 or higher. DR50+ sites are in the top 0.57% of domains in terms of quality, so earning a placement on one of these sites puts your content in a tier that AI has been shown to favor.
This pattern held especially true in categories like Education, Personal Finance, Transportation, Small Business, Real Estate, Money, and Business & Economy. All seven of these categories outperformed the network with a DR50+ pickup rate of over 50%.
Education was a particularly strong performer, with 61% of its pickups coming from sites with a DR of 50 or higher. It’s worth noting that Education as a category saw only 37 stories published in Q1 — much lower than the 117 stories that each category published at the median.
While DR50+ pickups don’t align perfectly with increased AI visibility, the authority signals that earned editorial distribution generates do. With that in mind, brands that measure authority metrics will be building the structure they need to appear more in LLMs’ responses.
Here are some metrics brands can add to their earned media measurements to better capture authority:
Traditionally, what mattered most was reach. But when AI visibility is the top priority, brands shouldn’t be chasing reach without also tracking authority. Tracking both means setting your brand up to be more visible to LLMs.
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 tech startups.