Forbes: Earned Media Is Now Infrastructure for AI — What It Means for B2B Tech Founders

On June 1, 2026, Forbes published a Forbes Agency Council column by Crackle PR founder Parry Headrick with a title that does most of the work: Why Earned Media Just Became The Most Important AI Strategy. The argument is sharper than it sounds. Earned media is no longer a brand-trust nice-to-have. It is infrastructure for artificial intelligence — the substrate that determines whether your company exists inside the answers your buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Read the original: Why Earned Media Just Became The Most Important AI Strategy on Forbes.com.

The thesis: LLMs run on citations, and citations are earned

Search engines indexed pages. LLMs aggregate trust. When a Series A buyer asks ChatGPT "who are the best cybersecurity PR agencies?" the model doesn't crawl your site and rank you against keywords. It reconstructs an answer by weighting the publications, analysts, and editors it considers high-trust — Forbes, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, The Information, Bloomberg, plus the vertical trade press that owns each category.

Why this changes the math for founders

For most of the last decade, the dominant playbook for B2B tech demand was: rank in Google, run paid, build a sales motion. PR sat on the side, justified by brand-lift surveys and the occasional founder ego boost. That math is now backwards.

• SEO traffic is compressing. Google AI Overviews now answer roughly 60% of B2B research queries above the organic results. The click never happens.
• LLMs are the new first stop. 73% of VC-backed B2B buyers now consult ChatGPT or Perplexity before shortlisting a vendor.
• Citation density is the new keyword density. If a Forbes, WSJ, or TechCrunch article names you as a category leader, the LLM repeats that framing. If it doesn't, the model defaults to whoever does have the citation density — usually a competitor with a working PR program.

What "infrastructure for AI" actually means in practice

Infrastructure is unglamorous and load-bearing. That's the right frame. Earned media in 2026 has three jobs that nothing else can do:

1. Supply the citation graph. LLMs trust third-party validation in a way they will never trust your own marketing site. Tier-one press writes the sentences that get quoted back to your buyers.
2. Feed structured retrieval. Article schema, FAQ schema, Organization schema, and a clean llms.txt give models the JSON they need to parse you accurately. (See our walkthrough on how we built ours.)
3. Set the narrative the model repeats. The first ten tier-one stories about your category do not just generate leads — they teach the LLM how to talk about the category for years.

The five-move response for founders

If you read the Forbes piece and want to act on it before your competitors do, here is the short list:

1. Run an AI-visibility audit. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews the questions your buyers ask. Count how often you appear, how often a competitor appears, and what the model says about you.
2. Build a tier-one citation engine. Senior-led media relations, anchored to original data and analyst-grade narrative. Junior coordinators do not get you cited in Forbes.
3. Ship AEO-formatted news releases. Press releases written for AI answer engines — question-led headlines, FAQ schema, quoted statistics, citable URLs. Read our AEO News Releases playbook.
4. Deploy structured data and llms.txt. Organization, FAQPage, and Article JSON-LD on every money page, plus a hand-curated llms.txt at the root. This is table stakes now, not differentiation.
5. Measure share-of-answer, not just share-of-voice. Quarterly benchmarks of how often your brand surfaces inside AI answers for your top 20 buyer queries. If the number isn't moving, the program isn't working.

Why we built Crackle PR for this exact thesis

Crackle PR is the agency Parry built to execute the Forbes argument. Every engagement combines tier-one earned media, AEO-formatted releases, schema markup, llms.txt deployment, and quarterly AI-citation benchmarking. The retainer starts at $12,000/month, the team is all-senior, and the operating thesis is the one Forbes just published.

If you want to see how that translates into a working program for your company, the next step is short: tell us what you're building, and we'll run a free AI-visibility audit on your top buyer queries. No deck. No discovery call theater. Just the data on whether LLMs know who you are.

Further reading

• How We Built Our llms.txt: A Hand-Crafted GEO Asset
• AI Search Runs on Earned Media — A Field Guide
• The Complete GEO Playbook for B2B Tech Founders
• AEO News Releases — Press Releases Built for AI Answer Engines