Earned Media
In one line
Earned media covers exposure you didn't pay for directly — press coverage, word of mouth, organic mentions and user reviews.
Going deeper
Earned media is exposure you don't pay for directly — press, organic word of mouth, social mentions, unsolicited influencer shoutouts, even your Wikipedia entry.
Its biggest strength is credibility. A third-party voice carries far more weight than a brand's own ad, so the same message lands much harder. The trade-off is loss of control: you can't fully dictate timing, tone or framing.
In the GEO and LLMO era, earned media matters even more. Press, Wikipedia and reviews make up a large share of LLM training data, which means the reputation signals living outside your own site shape how AI answers describe your brand.
Related terms
Paid Media
Paid media is any channel where you pay to be seen — search ads, display, social ads, video and OTT all fall under this umbrella.
MarketingOwned Media
Owned media is any channel your company directly controls — your website, blog, app, newsletter and customer accounts all count.
MarketingInfluencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is the practice of partnering with creators who hold an audience's attention so they deliver brand messages in their own voice.
MarketingUGC
User-generated content (UGC) is content created by customers themselves — reviews, photos, videos, social posts — and acts as both a credibility signal and a low-cost reach engine.
GEO·AEOLLMO
LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) is the work of shaping content, data and context signals so that LLMs understand and cite your brand correctly.
How does your brand show up in AI answers?
Villion measures how your brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, then automates the work that lifts citation rate and share of voice.
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