Earned Media is Having a Quiet Renaissance Thanks to LLMs
Vested hosted a fireside chat at its New York headquarters with Chris Andrew, CEO and co-founder of Scrunch AI, bringing together senior marketing leaders from across financial services to discuss how AI is reshaping search, visibility, and brand risk. Three themes from the conversation are worth carrying forward.
The first is about websites. The argument that AI search is making brand websites obsolete misses the point. Large language models don't browse visually, they consume language, extract intent, and synthesize answers. A homepage built around a cinematic hero image and minimal copy tells a compelling story to a human visitor and almost nothing to an AI model. The website's new job, alongside its existing one, is to educate LLMs so that when AI answers a relevant question, your brand owns the response.
The second is about attribution. There is an underreported dynamic in which AI surfaces a brand's content to answer a user's question without ever naming the brand. The content did the work, but the authority went elsewhere. Fixing it requires editorial intent: content that demonstrates not just what a firm knows, but who it is and why it is the right source on a given topic.
The third is about earned media. AI models assess brand credibility by looking at owned content alongside press coverage, third-party references, and industry commentary together. A well-developed narrative across owned and earned channels strengthens both the human and the AI understanding of a brand's authority. For financial services marketers, where AI search is accelerating fastest and where research drives high-consideration decisions, that shift in how communications strategy gets resourced is already consequential.
Full story: Vested