Owned in an AI world
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Owned media — a company's website or self-published blogs — is rising in importance in the age of AI, according to a recent analysis by Penta Group.
Why it matters: Communications teams must structure their websites in a way that can be optimized for large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
By the numbers: Roughly 60% of cited material in LLMs comes from corporate-owned or business-produced sources, per the analysis.
- About 25% comes from traditional media, with the rest split across user-generated and third-party platforms.
- For more general queries, LLMs cite a mix of earned media (28%) and owned content (22%).
Between the lines: It seems that LLMs reward content that looks more like journalism than marketing — think clear headlines, FAQ-style formatting, named authors and regularly updated pages.
- That makes content structure and freshness a controllable lever for comms teams trying to influence how their brand appears in AI answers.
- "In a world where people aren't going to websites as much and they're going to LLMs, you want to make sure that your websites are designed to answer the questions people are asking," said Andrea Christianson, partner at Penta.
- Plus, brands are shifting from "borrowed audiences" to "borrowed expertise," partnering with niche, authoritative sources of original insights to increase the likelihood their perspectives surface in AI-generated answers.
Zoom in: This isn't just about publicity, it's also about competitive visibility.
- "A big chunk of this is going to be how your competitors show up, so you have to figure out how you show up vis-à-vis them," said Matt McDonald, CEO at Penta.
- Companies have unusual control here because they own the content, and can scale production quickly and directly feed structured information into AI systems, he added.
- Plus, brands can tap partners and other third parties by placing insights in high-authority, niche sources — the kinds of places AI systems rely on for deep, original information — to increase the odds of being cited.
Reality check: While trends are starting to take shape, no one can pinpoint exactly how LLMs decide which information to source and cite.
- "Owned is generally a good SEO strategy," says Jim Prosser, principal at Tamalpais Strategies. "What this boils down to is SEO plus good comms. They discovered that good comms works everywhere … and slapped a new acronym — GEO— on it."
What to watch: The rise of owned media as an AI input could reshape communications teams and encourage more investment in editorial and storytelling talent and closer alignment among SEO, content and comms.
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