How to Win AI Recommendations: The Earned Media Playbook

The study proved you need to get into the roundups. This is how. And it was never only PR.

Earlier this week I published the largest study anyone has run on how AI recommends running brands. 2,200 unaided prompts, 2,052 brands, one clear conclusion: if you want to show up in an AI answer, you get into the “best of” roundups the models already trust.

A lot of people nodded at that line. Then they emailed me some version of the same question: okay, how? Most brands have never run a real PR program. “Get into the roundups” is true and completely useless if you have no idea what to do with it on Monday morning.

So this is that. The how.

I left it out of the study on purpose, because the study’s job was to prove the thing with numbers, not to sell you a playbook. But the playbook is the part you can actually act on, and it is more specific than “hire a PR firm.” (Though if you want to do that, I certainly do have recommendations.)

In case you missed the first piece, here it is:

How AI Recommends Running Brands in 2026: The Largest Study Yet.

If you want to listen to us talk through it, here’s the Apple Podcasts link and here’s Spotify. You can also watch on YouTube!

And now onto what to do…

It was never only PR (but PR is the hero)

The last piece framed all of this as PR, and PR is the hero of this story. But a few sharp people wrote back to say the frame was bigger than the tactics, and they were right. So before the playbook, the more accurate version of what is happening.

Matt Sklar at Verde put it better than I could. The old PR model rested on media owning two things at once. It owned the validation (the journalist’s credibility, the publication’s reputation) and it owned the distribution (the audience, the readership, the reach). When you earned a placement, you got both in the same package.

AI is pulling those two apart. The distribution is moving. Google, social platforms, AI search, and retail audiences are the distribution networks now, and the gatekeepers there are algorithms, not editors. What those algorithms reward is validation: the weight of third-party voices saying the same true thing about a brand, from multiple directions, over time.

So the job is not “get press;” the job is to create validated content that feeds every distribution network that matters. PR is the single most powerful way to create that validated content, which is exactly why it is the hero of this piece. But validation now gets created and read across a whole mesh of surfaces, and if you only work the PR surface you are leaving most of the map blank. So here is the PR core first, then the rest of it.

PR just stopped being the unmeasurable line item

For a decade, PR sat next to performance marketing like the artsy sibling next to the one with a more mathematical role. Performance had clean numbers. Spend this, get that, here is your ROAS. PR had vibes and a clipping folder. Everyone knew it mattered and nobody could tell you what it returned. And it is usually the first line item to go when budgets get tightened.

The study flips that. The exact same pitch that lands your brand in a Runner’s World “best of” is now the pitch that lands you in thousands of AI answers. And because Centium can measure your presence inside the models, the thing PR could never prove is suddenly a number on a dashboard. Earned media didn’t just get more important. It got measurable.

Now the tactics.

Time everything to the refresh cycle

The models crave and depend on recency. In the study, the median cited source was 4.1 months old once you weight by use, 48 percent of everything cited was published in the last six months, and 39 percent in the last three. Old content gets ignored no matter how good it is.

Which means the single most important thing about a press trip, a product launch, or a seeding push is when it lands. You want your moment to hit right before an editor drafts the next annual or quarterly list, not three weeks after it publishes. The PR calendar is now downstream of the roundup calendar. Figure out when “best trail shoes 2027” actually gets written, and work backward from there. Timing was always part of PR. Now it is more important than ever.

Seed the specialist, not the biggest name

The most hopeful finding in the study was that authority does not transfer. Winning “best running shoe” does nothing for “best running headphones,” because for every category the model goes to that category’s specialists. rtings.com showed up in 81 percent of headphone answers. iRunFar owns trail. RunRepeat, Treeline Review, OutdoorGearLab, and Wirecutter each own their corners.

So the worst thing you can do is go super wide and without focus. A gel brand buying attention from a shoe-review site is money lit on fire. Step one is boring and it is the most important thing: map your category to the three or four outlets the models actually read for it, and concentrate everything there. You do not need to be everywhere. You need to be in the four places that matter for your one category.

Sean Van Horn at Backbone Media pushed on this from the agency side, and it is worth reading twice, because it is the exact mistake he watches brands make. There is a constant pull toward the big mainstream names, Forbes, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, because the raw traffic dwarfs the endemic outlets. Forbes has something like seven times the monthly uniques of Runner’s World and roughly fourteen times iRunFar, so a PR agency that specializes in landing that coverage is an easy sell: bigger top of funnel, new audiences who would never open the endemic press. I’ve seen this play out in organizations I’ve been in. There is real validity to that for plain brand awareness, however.

But here is the question Sean keeps asking, and it lands even harder now. Even before AEO, in a normal Google search, who actually goes to Forbes to find the best running shoe, even when it ranks? AEO pushes that logic further still. Look at the outlets the models actually cite in the study: iRunFar, RunRepeat, Treeline, OutdoorGearLab, rtings, Wirecutter. They are endemic specialists, nearly to a fault. The big general-interest names that brands spend real money chasing barely appear (Wirecutter is the mainstream exception the models do lean on). And this is not only review sites. Endemic podcasts feed the corpus too, through their transcripts, which is one reason a category-specific show can punch well above its weight. (Where have you heard that before!? → “small shows hit different”)

So the traffic number is the trap. Uniques tell you about reach. They tell you almost nothing about whether you will be in the answer. The move is to double down on the endemic outlets, hire PR people who actually understand that space, and stop paying a premium for logo coverage the model never reads.

Pitch the list itself, and get ready for pay-to-play

Here is the unglamorous move most brands skip. Roundups were 53 percent of every citation in the study. The ranked list is the unit of recommendation. So the pitch is not “please write a feature about us.” The pitch is “please consider us for the ranked list.” Those are different asks, and the second one is the one that compounds.

And read where this is going. Right now inclusion is mostly editorial. It may not stay that way. The likely future could be a paid, vetted, application-based process, “apply to be considered for best gravel shoes of 2027,” the way plenty of awards already work. If that is where roundups land, the brands that already have relationships with those editors win, and the ones who waited pay a premium to catch up. Get good at this before it has a price tag.

Give the model a story it can repeat

Models do not repeat spec sheets. They repeat narratives. Boulder won “best running destination” at 55 percent, not because it is objectively the best place to run, but because the same story (hundreds of miles of dirt roads and trails, a real running culture) shows up in every source the model reads. Take that, Flagstaff! Momentous rode the Huberman association into supplement answers the same way. The sentiment attached to a person and a story, not a feature list.

So build the thing the model can quote. A founder narrative, an athlete, a single repeated claim that is easy to lift and hard to forget. If ten outlets tell the same story about you, the model will tell it too.

A press trip is a multiplier, then a habit

Start with the single highest-leverage move in PR, because it is the one most brands underrate: the press trip. Done well, one trip is not one placement. It is a dozen.

I went on a trip with Salomon via OutsidePR and I can tell you what it produced. Three podcast episodes (Grayson Murphy and Dan Green on For The Long Run, Erin Cooper on Long Run Labs). The conversation with Grayson was extremely timely, as it was right before the Emma Bates/UCAN breakup went public, and it led to some very favorable writing about Salomon due to how they are working with Grayson in one of my most popular Substack pieces yet. Mentions in at least three other Substacks. Writeups on my own site. And now here too. And I was one of a half dozen media folks in attendance. Seth from Trail Waves had quite a few Salomon mentions over the next few weeks and months too. From one trip, all with no specific obligation to write anything.

That is not luck, it is the mechanic of this entire study working in your favor. A single well-run trip seeds fresh content across a spread of trusted, independent sources all at once, which is exactly the shape the models go hunting for. Surface area, freshness, and category-specific outlets, all bought with one plane ticket.

And notice who ran that trip. Salomon leads trail shoes, leads gravel, and owns hydration vests at 87 percent in the study. That is not an accident either. This is one of the mechanisms that built those positions. The category winners are, over and over, the brands that get real people into real places and let the coverage fan out.

Now the honest part, because I do not want to oversell it. The models chase what is new, so that coverage has a half-life. The Salomon trip is working for me today, but it will fade soon (it was in March), and the freshness bias means fading is the default. (Hello brands. Who wants to hang in Chamonix?)

So the trip isn’t a trophy you win once; it’s a habit you run on a cadence. Which leads to the surface that keeps you fresh between the trips.

Ambassadors are the freshness engine

If a press trip is the spike, a standing ambassador roster is the thing that keeps you inside that 3-to-6-month freshness window all year instead of spiking and fading.

Look at Nuun, tied at the top of electrolytes at 74 percent, sitting on a decade-plus of ambassadors quietly writing and posting every single year. Skratch is up there too, out-earning its size in the one category it cares about. People love Skratch. They love the products, they love the people at the brand, and those things find their way into writing. Those positions were compounded, story after story, by real humans with a reason to keep talking.

That is the part most brands miss when they think about ambassadors as a logo-on-a-singlet deal. The singlet isn’t the value; it’s the steady drip of fresh, independent, category-specific content that a roster produces without you having to run a campaign every month. Build the team, give them something real to say, and let the consistency do the work.

Reddit and the forums are the surface you are (most likely to be) ignoring

Here is a surface almost no brand plans for, and it is one of the most heavily weighted the models read: community discussion. Reddit and the sport’s forums are where people say the true, unprompted thing about your product, and running has some of the most active communities anywhere (r/AdvancedRunning, r/RunningShoeGeeks, r/trailrunning).

This is the Skratch mechanism again, just filed under its real name. “People love Skratch” is not a PR placement; it’s community, and community is earned the same way PR is: by being good enough that people bring you up on their own.

One warning, because this is the surface where brands do the dumbest possible thing. Do not fake it. Fake posts and planted praise get sniffed out fast, they torch the trust you were trying to borrow, and they can poison the exact signal you were trying to build. The play is to earn the conversation, show up honestly when you are already being discussed, and make a product worth talking about. Check your own category in these communities before you do anything else. You will usually learn what the models already think of you.

Publish your own research and become the source

Every tactic so far is about getting other people to cite you. There is a higher-leverage version: be the thing everyone else cites.

I am the case study for this one. I published a 2,200-prompt study nobody else had, and it is now getting quoted and crawled precisely because it is primary data. That flips your position entirely. You stop being a brand the models talk about and start being a source the models quote from. Original research does not decay the way a press trip does, and you own the asset outright.

I tested the smaller version of this too. On a Sunday I put up one ranked “best running podcasts of 2026” page. By Thursday it was the most-visited page on my whole site, beating things that had been there for months. The models are out there hunting for exactly that format, and when you hand it to them, you show up. It is now my most visited page, by both human visitors and AI crawlers.

You do not need my sample size. A brand sitting on its own usage data, testing results, or category survey has citation bait most of its competitors will never bother to produce.

Build your site like a citable source, not a brochure

Living on your own website is not a strategy, at least not the way most brands do it. Brand-owned sites were under 5 percent of all citations in the study. There was exactly one real exception, and it is instructive: Runna, the most-cited brand-owned site in the entire dataset, because it publishes its own ranked guides instead of product pages. It behaves like a publication, so the models treat it like one.

So the rule is not “your site does not matter.” The rule is “your site earns citations when it is built like something worth citing.” In practice that means ranked guides over product pages, question-shaped headers, clean FAQ blocks, a consistent one-line description of who you are on every page, and structure a model can actually read. Behave like media and you get read like media.

Two adjacent moves the data backs. Contribute to Wikipedia, ethically and factually, because it is ChatGPT’s single most-cited source across everything Centium has ever measured, and make sure your basic entity facts (Wikidata, consistent naming, no confusion with a similarly named brand) are clean so the model knows exactly who you are. And do YouTube right: the models index the transcript, not the video, so actually talk through your picks out loud so it can be transcribed and read via captions.

Do not forget retail and the aggregators

One more distribution network feeding the models: retail and review aggregators. Review volume and, just as importantly, review recency on the big retail surfaces are signals the category sites and the models both lean on. A wall of recent, real reviews is its own form of validation, and sites like RunRepeat plus review-heavy blogs like Runtothefinish are partly reading exactly that. It is less glamorous than a press trip and it compounds quietly in the background. And sites like those are leading to a lot of shoe sales via e-comm channels. Trust me on that.

Manage what the corpus already says about you

Everything above is additive: put more good validation into the world. But there is a defensive half most brands never think about. The models are already saying something about you, and it might be wrong, stale, or built on a story you have since moved past.

This is where measurement stops being a scoreboard and becomes a diagnostic. Before you spend a dollar adding new signal, find out what the corpus currently believes, where it got that idea, and which of those sources are due for a refresh. Sometimes the highest-leverage move is not a new trip. It is correcting the one outdated claim that ten other sources keep repeating about you.

The loop nobody is closing

Now the part that actually matters, and the reason I wanted to write this at all.

The study raised an uncomfortable tension and left it open. If AI strip-mines the publications for their rankings, and runners get the answer without ever clicking through, what happens to the outlets producing the rankings in the first place? Michael told the editors at a major magazine that AI was leaning on them constantly and expected them to be thrilled. They were not stoked. The models take the work, the publisher sees none of the traffic.

I floated a couple of possible fixes in that piece. Here is the real one, and it was sitting in this playbook the whole time.

Go back to Matt’s frame. Media used to own validation and distribution together. AI took the distribution and left the outlets holding just the validation, which is the part that no longer pays the bills on its own. Press trips, product seeding, sponsored reviews, launch events. Those are brand-to-publisher deliverables that already exist and always have. And as AI drains the traffic revenue those outlets used to live on, that brand-side spend becomes a bigger and bigger share of what keeps them solvent. Which means the exact same dollar you spend to get into the roundup is also part of what keeps the roundup alive. (Yes, I host a podcast network and obviously want this to be true. The math works anyway.)

One more time. The PR budget you deploy to win AI visibility is quietly propping up the content economy that AI is eroding. The lever that gets you into the answer is the same lever that funds the source of the answer. Brands that understand this are not just buying visibility; they are buying the survival of the machine they need in order to stay visible inside of it.

That is not charity; it’s the most aligned that brand spend and media health have been in years, and almost nobody is naming it.

And coincidentally, it is some of my favorite work I have been doing lately.

What this means if you are a...

Brand. Map your category to its outlets, concentrate there, and start now, because the clock is longer than you think.

Small brand. This is your door. You do not need Nike’s budget. You need to own one category’s roundups, one active ambassador roster, and one honest forum presence, and that is a fight you can actually win.

Agency. You are holding the keys, and for the first time you can prove a return you could never prove before. Sell that. And measure it.

Creator or media. You are the trusted source the models read now. Publish ranked lists on a cadence, and please protect that trust like the asset it is, now that it is more important and valuable than ever before.

The bottom line

PR went from the line item you couldn’t measure to the most direct, trackable lever on the channel that is becoming the top of the funnel. It is earned, it is won category by category, and because the models chase what is new, it is a habit you keep rather than a trophy you win once. And it is the hero of a bigger cast: ambassadors, forums, your own research, your own site, retail, and the story the corpus already tells about you.

And the kicker: the money you spend getting into the answer is helping keep the answer worth trusting. The shops that internalize both halves of that win the next two years.

FAQ

How do I time PR to AI visibility? Work backward from the roundups. The models lean on fresh sources (median cited source 4.1 months old, weighted), so you want coverage landing right before an outlet drafts its next annual or quarterly “best of,” not after. The roundup calendar sets your PR calendar.

Which outlets should my brand pitch? The specialist for your category, not the biggest name in the sport. Authority does not transfer, so map your one category to the three or four sources the models actually read for it (rtings for headphones, iRunFar for trail, RunRepeat, Treeline, OutdoorGearLab, Wirecutter) and concentrate there.

Is this only PR? No. PR is the highest-leverage way to create validated content, but the models read a whole mesh of surfaces: ambassadors publishing on a cadence, community discussion on Reddit and the forums, your own research and ranked guides, retail review signals, and your basic entity facts. PR is the hero, not the whole cast.

Do forums like Reddit really matter? Yes, community discussion is one of the more heavily weighted sources the models read, and running has unusually active communities. Earn it honestly and never fake it, because fake praise gets caught and poisons the signal you were trying to build.

Does my own website matter for AI recommendations? Barely, on its own. Brand-owned sites were under 5 percent of all citations. The exception is publishing like a publication: Runna gets cited because it puts out its own ranked guides, not product pages. Your site earns citations when it behaves like media, with ranked guides, question-shaped headers, and clean structure a model can read.

How long before PR shows up in AI answers? Longer than you want. AI visibility is a trailing indicator, so a deal or push today may not surface for months (see PUMA sitting behind Nike in Hyrox despite the title sponsorship). Start now, measure patiently, and treat it as a compounding habit rather than a campaign.

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This is a companion to the full Centium AI study and my conversation with Michael Rueckert on Long Run Labs. If you want the broader practical arc, this is the fourth part of my multi-part AI-for-marketers series. Want to see how your own brand shows up inside the models? Centium has tools for exactly that.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle.