Hi friends 👋🏻
This week, I have some recommended reading for you about how to make sure your organization (and brand) stays VISIBLE as the way people find information changes in this AI era.
It's a thought-provoking read, and relevant for communications professionals, executives, and consultants across the nonprofit space.
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How are you thinking about visibility for your organization and brand?
The article I think you should read is from Gini Dietrich, creator of the PESO model. PESO stands for Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media, and it's a model to help you think through how your communications activities all fit together.
In August, Gini wrote an article titled Why Comms Pros Are the New Visibility Engineers.
The messages aren't specific to the nonprofit or social impact space, and the examples are all about buyers and the business world. But the messages are important for us to think about in the nonprofit world too, whether you're a communications professional, an executive, or a consultant to a nonprofit team.
Here's what I think is most important.
- As AI rises, the way people find information is shifting. If someone wants to identify the most prominent organizations tackling gun violence in the US, they might start by asking ChatGPT where in the past they might have started with a Google search.
- In Google, we would have focused on ranking specific URLs from your website for specific search terms. But in AI tools like ChatGPT, your organization's visibility depends on citations and whether your work is being discussed by the most authoritative sources in your field.
[AI] systems aren’t just quoting your media coverage. They’re learning from it. They’re making judgments—about your brand, your credibility, your relevance—based on what’s been published, when it was published, and by whom. And they’re doing it before a customer clicks anything.
Gini's article focuses on the impact of media coverage specifically, drawing on a 2025 MuckRack study. Here's another key finding:
The big stat is that 95% of links cited by AI are from non-paid sources. That means nearly all the content AI leans on to answer questions comes from earned, owned, or publicly available information.
And of those links, 27% are from newsrooms. They’re not just reporting stories—they’re shaping AI’s worldview.
If your brand appears in media outlets, you’ve just placed a breadcrumb in the discovery trail. If you don’t? You’re a blank space.
But it’s not just what is cited—it’s when. AI models, particularly OpenAI’s, show a strong bias toward recency. Content published within the last year is significantly more likely to surface in responses, especially for timely or opinion-based queries.
This means that old coverage—even if it was a media relations home run at the time—has a short shelf life in the age of AI.
What should you do to remain visible in this new landscape?
It's more important than ever to make sure on-message, on-brand, up-to-date content about your organization spreads out across multiple channels.
And not just your owned channels (meaning your website, social platforms, etc.)
The study cited in this article shows the important of appearing in earned media. Earned media channels demonstrate trust and credibility, and the big player in earned media: old-fashioned media relations! Not paid placements. Media placements built on authority and relationships with the most authoritative voices in your space.
This means leveraging all those storytelling skills that create compelling pitches and demonstrate how your work makes a difference.
It means monitoring your brand reputation, and working to ensure your mentions and profiles across the web are consistent, aligned, and up to date.
I particularly like this line from the article:
You intentionally feed the system with high-authority sources: timely earned media, structured owned media, and credible third-party validation. You make your brand easy to cite, hard to ignore, and impossible to hallucinate away.
There's lots more detail in the article about how the different components of the PESO model can all work together to drive visibility. Here's that link again. I hope you find it as thought-provoking as I did!
Until next time ✨
— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)
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