The other day, I was thinking about an author and expert who should have been easy to find.
She is smart, credible, experienced, and deeply helpful. She has a good website, clear messaging, strong content, and a real body of work. The kind of person who has done everything people say to do and should be showing up all over the place.
But when I looked at how AI tools were surfacing answers in her space, something became clear very quickly. It was not just her website doing the heavy lifting. It was everything around her, including the interviews she had done, the articles that quoted her, the podcasts that featured her, the publications that mentioned her.
In other words, the public trail that said yes, this person is real, trusted, and worth paying attention to.
And I thought, well, there it is.
Publicity has always mattered for authors and experts. Publicists have known that for a long time. What the AI era is doing is making that truth harder to ignore for everyone.
Because now, earned media is not just publicity.
It is proof.
For years, people have been told to build their platform by creating a strong website, writing useful content, showing up consistently, publishing, and sharing what you know.
And yes, all of that is still important.
But we are living in a moment where your own platform is no longer the only thing shaping whether people find you. More and more, machines are helping sort, summarize, recommend, and surface. And machines, much like people, seem to trust corroboration. That means it is not just what you say about yourself. It is what others say about you.
That changes the game.
Your website is still your home, but earned media is increasingly one of the strongest roads leading people there.
I can feel the frustration some authors and experts carry around this. They are doing what they were told to do, and yet they still feel that others aren’t finding them. After a while, that starts to feel a little personal.
It can make good people wonder if their message is off. If their work is not landing. If they somehow missed the memo everyone else got.
Usually, that is not it.
Often, the issue is much simpler. Too much of their visibility lives inside channels they control, and not enough of it lives in places that independently validate them.
That is exactly what earned media does so beautifully.
It tells the world this person is not just talking about themselves and their work. Other people are talking about them too. A host chose them. A producer booked them. A reporter quoted them. A publication included them. A podcast handed them the mic.
Someone outside their own orbit decided they were worth the space.
People notice that, and AI does too.
If you think about how humans make decisions, this makes perfect sense. We do not rely on self-description alone. We look for outside confirmation. We notice who else is paying attention. We want some sign that the world reflects back what a person says about themselves.
This is what good publicity has always done. It creates a body of proof.
Marketing says, here I am. Publicity says, others see it too.
And in a landscape increasingly shaped by AI summaries, citations, references, search overviews, and recommendation engines, that distinction matters more, not less.
Media Darling Moment: In the AI era, publicity is not just promotion. It is verification.
This is also why thoughtful publicity strategy matters more than ever. It is no longer enough to simply put good work into the world and hope it gets picked up. Visibility today is being shaped by patterns of trust, and earned media helps build those patterns in public.
Being strategic about where and how you show up helps create a visible body of third-party trust. You want to build the kind of media presence that tells people, and now the machines too, that your ideas are being heard, quoted, included, and amplified.
If the old internet often rewarded volume, this one increasingly rewards validation.
That is earned media. And in this era, it is doing more than making you look good. It is helping to make you findable.
To your success!
Joanne
P.S. In a world where visibility is changing, being truly seen is still the point. I See You.
#EarnedMedia
#BookMarketing
#BookPublicity
#MediaDarling
If you’d like to receive juicy publicity secrets directly on a regular basis, join the Savvy Sunday Community at the bottom of this page.