How generative AI uses earned media coverage (fueling PR’s resurgence)

The power of PR: Earned media dominates AI searches with Matt Dzugan

In this episode of On Top of PR with Jason Mudd, we welcome Matt Dzugan, senior director of data at Muck Rack, to unpack the findings from Muck Rack’s new report, “What Is AI Reading?” Together, they explore how generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini rely heavily on earned media coverage — especially journalistic content — to shape their responses. Learn why timely, credible PR coverage is more important than ever, how to optimize your brand visibility in AI-driven search, and what PR pros need to do now to stay relevant.

Tune in to learn more!

Listen to the episode here:

5 things you’ll learn during the full episode:

How generative search engines source answers from earned media coverage
How best to influence AI-generated answers in your brand's favor
Why credibility is crucial to consumers and generative AI models
How much AI will rely on legacy media going forward
The importance of earned media and how to use it

About Matt Dzugan

Matt Dzugan is a senior software engineer at Muck Rack, where he helps develop tools that empower journalists and PR professionals to collaborate more effectively. With a background in full-stack development, he brings a thoughtful, systems-oriented approach to building reliable, scalable software that meets the media industry’s evolving needs. His work spans from backend architecture to user-facing features, all designed to enhance the transparency, speed, and efficiency of media workflows.

Beyond writing clean, maintainable code, Matt is known for his collaborative mindset and dedication to continuous improvement. He actively engages with cross-functional teams to ensure that engineering decisions align with product goals, and he’s always looking for ways to optimize performance and user experience. At Muck Rack, Matt plays a key role in helping the company scale its platform to support a growing user base while staying true to its mission of supporting a free and sustainable press.

Watch the episode here:

Quotables

“We’re building tools that PR pros actually use and value every day.” — @mattdzugan
“Better media outreach starts with better journalist insights.” — @JasonMudd9
“PR is evolving fast. You need the right tools to keep up.” — @mattdzugan
“Good PR tech doesn’t replace relationships — it enhances them.” — @mattdzugan

Resources

Episode Resources:

Additional Resources from Axia Public Relations:

Disclosure: One or more of the links we shared here might be affiliate links that offer us a referral reward when you buy from them.

Our On Top of PR sponsors:

Production sponsor: Axia Public Relations, one of America’s Best PR Agencies, according to Forbes Magazine

Presenting sponsor: ReviewMaxer, the platform for monitoring, improving, and promoting online customer reviews

Coffee Sponsor: Fans like you fuel our efforts using buy me a coffee.

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Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;17;14

Jason

Hey, guys, I'm really excited about this episode. I'm joined, by Matt Dzugan from Muck Rack, and we're talking about how generative AI is fueling PR resurgence. Muckraker recently put out a report called what is AI reading? And we're going to go through a few themes during this conversation. The first one is generative AI.

00;00;17;14 - 00;00;35;21

Jason

And I was in PR visibility Practical tips for PR pros, technical insights and muck rake tools. The future of PR and AI. And then some closing questions at the end. I definitely think you're going to want to tune into this, this episode. And not only that, I think you're gonna want to share it with your team and your colleagues that you know, in the profession.

00;00;35;24 - 00;00;46;06

Jason

This is gonna be a powerful episode, helping you better understand what's going on with generative AI systems and how the PR, the power of PR is more alive than ever. I'm excited for this topic, and I hope you are to.

00;00;46;06 - 00;00;56;05

Announcer

Welcome to On Top of PR with Jason Mudd.

00;00;56;05 - 00;01;21;26

Jason

Welcome to on top of PR. I'm Jason Mudd, your host. And today we are joined by Matt Dzugan. And our topic today is how generative AI is fueling PR resurgence or how earned media is shaping AI output. Matt Dzugan is the senior director of data at Muck Rack, where he leads data engineering and machine learning teams to enhance the platform's AI driven PR tools for organization like Google and Duolingo.

00;01;21;29 - 00;01;45;06

Jason

He joined Muck Rack about two years ago to expand its AI capabilities, driving product innovation like recommendation systems to improve journalist discovery significantly. Microsoft CEO has praised his leadership for building strong cross-functional engineering teams with analytics excellence. Matt, that's quite an introduction. Welcome to on top of PR.

00;01;45;08 - 00;01;47;14

Matt

Yeah, thanks. Really glad to be here.

00;01;47;17 - 00;02;08;23

Jason

Yeah, we're glad to have you here too. I know this is going to be an extremely popular episode with our guests or, I'm sorry, with our audience. I know they're excited to learn from you and, learn from our conversation today. So we're talking about how generative AI is fueling PR resurgence. This is a hot topic on, LinkedIn right now.

00;02;08;23 - 00;02;22;07

Jason

And, I'm proud that actually is part of that conversation. So, let's start with the big picture. Why did Muck Rack undertake this study and what were you hoping to learn about AI and media citations from it?

00;02;22;10 - 00;02;48;07

Matt

Yeah. Fantastic question. So there's been a few people talking about AI's relationship with PR. And since these AI models are not necessarily something where we can go look up in documentation exactly how they work, how exactly does ChatGPT work? How exactly does Gemini work? We figured the best way to truly understand what it does is to just test it.

00;02;48;09 - 00;03;09;15

Matt

Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of times. And kind of jot down our observations like a, like a scientist kind of testing experiment where, you know, putting different stimuli at the system and seeing what it does and of course, as you know, I'm sure we're going to get into one of our findings is AI loves earned media. AI loves journalism.

00;03;09;15 - 00;03;21;06

Matt

And that makes it quite an exciting time to be in PR again, this was kind of a hypothesis that we had going into this study, but we wanted to be able to back it up with measurable numbers and data.

00;03;21;08 - 00;03;32;00

Jason

Got it, got it. So for our our audience, we're going to first of all, I want to clarify that the name of this report I believe is called what is AI reading. Is that correct Matt.

00;03;32;02 - 00;03;33;06

Matt

Yep, that's what it's called.

00;03;33;08 - 00;03;56;00

Jason

And we're going to provide a link to access the report through Muck Rack's website. They have a, a landing, a registration page that you can register and it will automatically skew that PDF. So that'll be available in the episode notes at on top of PR or on top of PR. Dot combat Dash Dugan. But Dugan is spelled, differently than you might think.

00;03;56;00 - 00;03;58;11

Jason

Matt. How do you tell them how to spell your last name?

00;03;58;13 - 00;04;06;21

Matt

We've got. Yes. It's, these ugga and there's a silent Z in there. It's an Eastern European name. So silent Z,

00;04;06;24 - 00;04;26;10

Jason

So on top of Precomp, Matt Dash Dugan with a Z between the D and the U. So if you're listening in real time and you want to start checking that out or, follow along with the episode notes, you may do that there. So, Matt, we're talking about what is AI reading and the results that your organization figured out from that research.

00;04;26;10 - 00;04;32;15

Jason

Now, you said thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of, of searches or, queries.

00;04;33;09 - 00;04;37;18

Jason

Ballpark, what was the exact number and how did you set up that many?

00;04;37;20 - 00;05;03;03

Matt

Yeah. Great question. So the exact number was somewhere around a half a million queries. But if you think about it, if you use, ChatGPT or Gemini, any of the tools, what it'll do, you'll, you'll type a question at it and then it'll respond. And usually it's got five or 6 or 10 links on the side. So those half a million queries that we did resulted in well over a million sort of cited links.

00;05;03;03 - 00;05;21;08

Matt

And so there's sort of two interesting data sets there for us, both the actual questions and responses as well as, you know, what we are particularly interested in is what are all of these pieces of journalism, what are all these links on the side that are being cited? So that we could we could learn from those. So, yeah, that was that number of links was well over a million.

00;05;21;11 - 00;05;26;13

Jason

Wow. Okay. So great. I'm glad you're there to do it because I don't think the PR people there could have done it.

00;05;26;13 - 00;05;49;27

Matt

So yeah, that's there's a there's an interesting kind of like data point, running that many queries. You know, it's fast, but it does take a few seconds. So if you were to have run all of those queries back to back to back to back, like, you know, imagine a monkey at a computer doing back to back all those groups, it would have taken about 9 to 12 months for them all to run.

00;05;50;04 - 00;05;55;28

Matt

So yeah, there were some interesting engineering challenges on our end to actually get the answers within a week or something.

00;05;56;00 - 00;05;56;14

Jason

Yeah.

00;05;56;14 - 00;06;00;03

Jason

Awesome. That's incredible. Sometime we'll have to talk about the behind the scenes of that.

00;06;00;07 - 00;06;01;10

Matt

Yeah, sure.

00;06;01;12 - 00;06;21;20

Jason

So I've kind of outlined our conversation for today under some categories. And I want to share that up front with our audience. In fact I regret not doing that sooner. So we're going to go through generative AI in PR visibility first. Second, we're going to talk about practical tips for PR pros. Third, we'll talk about technical insights and mock RAC tools for the future of PR and AI.

00;06;21;20 - 00;06;25;04

Jason

And then we'll end with some closing questions. Does that sound good to you, Matt?

00;06;25;06 - 00;06;26;17

Matt

Sounds great. Let's do it.

00;06;26;19 - 00;06;30;00

Jason

Good. I'm glad you didn't change your mind from when we rehearsed this.

00;06;30;03 - 00;06;31;12

Matt

Yeah, yeah.

00;06;31;15 - 00;06;32;06

Jason

All right.

00;06;32;08 - 00;06;50;14

Jason

So generative AI and PR visibility. One of the most striking field findings from your report is that more than 95% of the links cited by AI are non paid media, and 20% of them are journalistic. Now, I wasn't surprised about the non PR, was not surprised, about it.

00;06;50;14 - 00;06;55;29

Jason

Not citing paid media, just because of the lack of credibility in advertising.

00;06;56;06 - 00;07;03;22

Jason

But why do you think earned media has become such a dominant input for AI generated responses? I have my thoughts, but I want to hear yours.

00;07;03;25 - 00;07;04;15

Jason

Yeah.

00;07;04;17 - 00;07;29;06

Matt

Absolutely. I think it I think it essentially comes down to for these AI models, they're the company's business model, like the those companies make money when they deliver a product that's credible. I kind of even remember almost seems like ancient history now, but I think it was around 2022 when ChatGPT, 3.5 came out and everyone was kind of using that.

00;07;29;06 - 00;07;53;03

Matt

And that was the one that really started all this hype. It didn't it never cited anything. And people were quick to find flaws and what are now referred to as hallucinations. So I actually think these companies have learned that credibility matters and they've they've had to create sort of an ecosystem to draw credibility from. And that's where the citations come.

00;07;53;03 - 00;07;58;18

Matt

So I think it all comes down to they make more money when they can deliver credible sources.

00;07;58;20 - 00;08;01;04

Jason

Sure. Yeah.

00;08;01;06 - 00;08;21;14

Jason

And I'm with you. I was extremely frustrated. I started using, ChatGPT around version, definitely by version two. And I would just have this growing frustration of, okay, where did that come from, you know, or can you cite your source and, and I and I was pleased that I knew to ask to cite the source, but there would be times where I can't cite the source for this.

00;08;21;14 - 00;08;47;28

Jason

And I'm like, well, then what is this? You know, so, and then, as you mentioned, hallucinations would still drive me crazy to this day. But, all right, so the second question, your study shows that when users ask timely or opinion based questions, generative AI tools tend to cite recent journalism. What does that suggest about the power of PR to reshape not just public perception, but AI driven answers?

00;08;48;00 - 00;09;14;27

Matt

Yeah. I think this is really one of the most compelling findings from the report. Is overall, 27% of citations are journalism. But when you ask it a question about anything recent, so instead of just saying, you know, what's the best PR software? If you say, you know, recent innovations in PR software, all of the sudden those results tend to skew way more journalism.

00;09;14;27 - 00;09;46;02

Matt

Basically about half of the citations are journalism. So that all goes to show that getting your message to land in journalism, is going to get it cited by these, going to get it cited by these AI, these AI systems in particular, we find that the most common day publish date, like, you know, if you go look at a if you go look at an AI response and you go look at all the things that's citing on the right hand side and you saying, when were all of these things published?

00;09;46;09 - 00;10;02;21

Matt

The most common day that we see things get published is yesterday or the day before. So that hyper recent content is useful. What that might mean for PR pros is, you know, try to generate as much frequent recent coverage as you can.

00;10;02;23 - 00;10;05;05

Jason

While definitely easier said than done, Matt and I know.

00;10;05;05 - 00;10;06;23

Jason

That's there and that's what that's.

00;10;06;23 - 00;10;10;29

Jason

What every PR pro is already trying to do. So thanks for adding to the pressure.

00;10;11;01 - 00;10;12;01

Matt

No. Yeah, exactly.

00;10;12;01 - 00;10;13;12

Jason

No pressure. Right?

00;10;13;12 - 00;10;28;21

Jason

Right. Well, I don't know if we got a little ahead of ourself there, but I'm just going to ask you in case there's more to add. But my next question is recency and authority play a huge role in whether a story gets cited for brands trying to improve their visibility in AI generated answers. What's the key takeaway here?

00;10;28;21 - 00;10;31;21

Jason

I think you already said it, but is there anything else that.

00;10;31;23 - 00;10;59;23

Matt

We we did we did touch on recency I we'll talk about authority too. I mean maybe you know, maybe to no one's to no one's surprise. You know I there have been a lot of since we launched this study, there have been a lot of conversations on LinkedIn and online that I've, you know, been trolling in a few comments and kind of just reading some of them, a lot of folks are saying, you know, well, duh, but I do think it's kind of reassuring to sort of see the evidence to back it up.

00;10;59;26 - 00;11;29;29

Matt

Oh, yeah, pretty good data. Like. Yeah. With exactly authority. The big the big reputable outlets, they tend to get more coverage. And I think, you know, again, is it, is it, is it is it obvious? Sure. Some would say it's obvious, but it's it's helpful to see it. And it's just a reminder to PR pros that this is why these AI are citing these sources, because they have believable credibility, like the AI actually believes your big name media outlets, maybe more than you know.

00;11;29;29 - 00;11;32;02

Matt

My own personal blog.

00;11;32;04 - 00;11;34;22

Jason

Right? 100%. I agree.

00;11;34;24 - 00;11;36;00

Jason

So, real.

00;11;36;00 - 00;11;57;29

Jason

Quick, maybe a little bit, off of the course here, but, at first I think some of the companies that specialize in, press wires, press release distribution services, they were kind of early on, Matt jumping in and, saying how important their role is in, in this process. But I'm starting to see data that might show that it's more about the earned media than it is.

00;11;57;29 - 00;12;11;00

Jason

The actual company releases. Talk to me just a little bit about that. Obviously, you know, newswire postings have a role. What's the role that your data showed that they have with generative AI systems?

00;12;11;02 - 00;12;35;28

Matt

Yeah. Great question. I think I think that so we do see we do see, you know, press releases show up in the citations. It's not anywhere near as high as journalism. But there's also sort of an invisible hidden link there that's sort of hard to quantify. Right? So let's say a company puts out a press release about their new flavor of ice cream or whatever.

00;12;36;00 - 00;12;58;16

Matt

The fact that that press release went out will oftentimes indirectly, sort of, you know, caused, earned media to, to sort of, happen. And then that earned media is going to be the content that gets that gets cited by the AI. So yes, it is true. We do see the press releases get cited at a lower rate than kind of journalism, but I think there's still a through line there.

00;12;58;18 - 00;13;24;28

Jason

So I want to make sure I'm hearing you correctly. Can I take away from this conversation that earned media, supersedes a, corporate release posted on a wire? But a corporate release on a wire when somebody's doing a query about a particular company would also end up being sourced, even though it wasn't necessarily, covered, by an authentic media outlet.

00;13;25;01 - 00;13;52;22

Matt

Yeah. I think the the bottom line is for press releases, whether it's from the company's own page or through a wire, they show up in citations. We do see them. Yeah. Both cases, they show up less frequently to journalism. So that's that's definitely true. Another thing to keep in mind, though, is these systems are changing.

00;13;52;23 - 00;13;59;28

Matt

They're dying. Oh, yeah. Our study is as of July 2025. Right. Who's to say where this goes in the future? But yeah, those were those are our findings.

00;14;00;05 - 00;14;05;23

Jason

Sure. I mean, this could all be null and void in a matter of weeks. In theory, I don't think it will be based.

00;14;05;23 - 00;14;06;22

Matt

On the get. Well, yeah.

00;14;06;23 - 00;14;07;10

Jason

Yeah, yeah.

00;14;07;10 - 00;14;27;01

Jason

I don't think it will be, but but we just don't know. Right. We don't control those, control them. But you know, as I'm thinking about this, just to kind of send a message here real quick, Matt. If so, every year actually gives away a scholarship to a deserving upperclass student at a university who's studying public relations.

00;14;27;04 - 00;14;27;14

Jason

If.

00;14;27;15 - 00;14;53;09

Jason

We post that on a newswire. Right. And it doesn't get covered, but somebody types in. Tell me about actually a public relations scholarship, they're probably going to pull from the press release that we posted to a newswire. But if we have a credible news outlet, whether it's PR week or maybe that person lives our recent, recipient, from just a couple weeks ago, she lives in the Atlanta metro area.

00;14;53;09 - 00;15;12;29

Jason

And so we got the Atlanta Journal Constitution to run that story. That's going to preempt any news release we might have put on our website or our newswire. But for that query where someone wants to know about, our scholarship, if there were no media coverage to speak of, it might reference our website or the newswire post. Is that a fair statement?

00;15;13;01 - 00;15;17;20

Matt

Yeah. Excellent. Excellent example. I couldn't have said it better. I think that's exactly how to think about it.

00;15;17;23 - 00;15;20;26

Jason

All right, well, let me know if Muck wrecks hiring, and, jump.

00;15;20;26 - 00;15;24;15

Jason

Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. All right. Let's pivot to.

00;15;24;16 - 00;15;43;27

Jason

Practical tips for PR pros. Because this is what, you know, my LinkedIn inbox is blowing up with DMs from PR people saying, hey, it looks like you got a really good handle on this. Help us, you know, help our PR firm or help my PR department. And, you know, I haven't done this yet, but I'm like, well, that's what people hire us to do.

00;15;43;27 - 00;15;46;07

Jason

You know, we are available to help you.

00;15;46;09 - 00;15;46;28

Jason

So.

00;15;46;28 - 00;16;09;18

Jason

But I think at the end of the day, you know, we've been early on the discussion about this and looking for ways to adopt it. And now I think people have gone from the attitude three years ago or so of, oh, I'm not going to participate because I think it's going to take our jobs. I think it's, you know, bad for whatever and say, okay, well, you you can also keep using a fax machine if you want to, but, you know, it's 2025.

00;16;09;23 - 00;16;21;02

Jason

Let's move on. Right. So so practical tips for PR pros. How can PR professionals proactively optimize their earned media for discoverability and generative AI systems like ChatGPT

00;16;21;02 - 00;16;25;05

Jason

G and Gemini?

00;16;25;07 - 00;16;29;20

Matt

Yeah. So this is this is the million, if not 10 million, if not billion.

00;16;29;20 - 00;16;36;18

Jason

Dollars million dollar question. Yep. No pressure setting the bar real low for you.

00;16;36;21 - 00;17;03;04

Matt

Okay. So, you know, basing basing the answer here in the in the findings from the report. You know, obviously, like we said, one of the findings is authority in sources matters. But, you know, not everyone's going to land. Not everyone's going to land, urban media in New York Times and writers, etc.. So another kind of very interesting takeaway from the report is that, sure.

00;17;03;05 - 00;17;27;21

Matt

You know, there's Reuters and AP news show up often across all across all these different careers. Yes. Because, you know, there's content there in every little niche. But what we found is that if you're enemies, you know, if you if you make shoes or you make ice cream or what have you, like, there are a specific set of niche specific publications that really matter in getting those citations.

00;17;27;21 - 00;17;46;07

Matt

So sure. Well, you know, you know, Ice Cream Weekly might not show up as the top number one. Number one outlet in our overall rankings. But boy, if you're in the ice cream space like Ice Cream Weekly is maybe going to be your place to go. Now, of course, that's just a fictitious outlet I made up. But the takeaway there is.

00;17;46;11 - 00;17;48;16

Jason

I should stop Google searching for ice cream weekly.

00;17;48;16 - 00;17;55;01

Matt

Yeah, you can stop that. I you know, if it if it is real. If it is real, they're, they're traffic's going to explode after this.

00;17;55;04 - 00;17;56;25

Jason

That's right.

00;17;56;28 - 00;18;13;11

Matt

But what what I was what I was going to get to is, I think, you know, how do you optimize? Like, what's the practical tip? Find those outlets. Find who are those outlets in your niece that are getting cited over and over and over. And that's kind of where to point your strategy.

00;18;13;13 - 00;18;14;03

Jason

Yeah.

00;18;14;06 - 00;18;22;27

Jason

And I got to imagine, based on what we know today, and the standards that are there today, that domain authority is probably playing a role in that.

00;18;22;29 - 00;18;40;28

Matt

Oh, of course. Yeah. I mean, we even, it didn't make the it didn't make the final report, but, you know, we did kind of internally we did a little graph where we plotted all the outlets. What is their domain authority against? How often do they get cited? And as exactly as you'd expect, it's a clear, you know, 1 to 1 trend.

00;18;41;01 - 00;18;47;01

Jason

No surprise, no surprise. I only wish I would have thought of domain authority many years before somebody else did.

00;18;47;04 - 00;18;49;09

Jason

So. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

00;18;49;11 - 00;19;11;06

Jason

You mentioned in the report, you know, and we just talked about, as you mentioned, the report, that niche specific outlets are often cited in industry specific. I queries. What should pre-teens be doing differently when targeting, vertical media? And I just want to give a shout out to vertical media because it's always been valuable. It's always more targeted, when you're truly reaching a certain vertical, you want to be in those trades.

00;19;11;06 - 00;19;19;23

Jason

And now this is just showing yet another layer, and rationale for optimizing and targeting, those outlets.

00;19;19;25 - 00;19;39;10

Matt

Yeah. Totally agree. I think that's, that's one of the real kind of cool takeaways from this report, is that it sort of confirms a lot of the kind of conventional, sort of maybe tribal wisdom within the PR community that has been around for a while. It just puts data behind it. So. Right. Absolutely.

00;19;39;12 - 00;20;00;28

Jason

Yeah. We do strategic insights for our new client, our newest clients. And the key takeaway for everybody that participates in that process is this was so helpful to have attributable sources, to cite things that we assumed, perceived or knew to be true, but just had no, you know, data, to put it all together or back it up or attribute to a third party.

00;20;00;28 - 00;20;05;13

Jason

Besides, the founder decided to start this company because they knew there was a problem, right?

00;20;05;13 - 00;20;06;09

Matt

Yeah, absolutely.

00;20;06;09 - 00;20;16;25

Jason

And that's what I feel like this is doing as well, is it's giving data points to say, you know, our instincts on this weren't wrong. In fact, they were right. And here's the numbers in the independent study to back it up.

00;20;16;28 - 00;20;18;12

Matt

So yep.

00;20;18;15 - 00;20;31;27

Jason

All right. Last question before we hit a break here, which is given the I rewards journalistic content more than paid or owned media. How should companies rebalance their content strategies?

00;20;31;29 - 00;20;57;03

Matt

Yeah. And I think, you know, the answer here depends on every PR team's kind of goals. And who are your sort of personas and who are your users? I mean, you know, maybe, maybe you might work for a specific company that just the industry you're in, the niche you're in, you know, maybe you don't have to worry about the problem of people checking in on your brand and AI system.

00;20;57;03 - 00;21;20;13

Matt

So I think, you know, take these, take this response in the context of like, really what I might any of my suggestions here are in the vein of how do we look good to the AI, right? But do this point, yeah. I mean, I guess it's, it's, it's in the headline, like the, the journalism, the, the credible journalistic sort of earned media sources are the way to go.

00;21;20;13 - 00;21;50;00

Matt

It's like every, every, every dollar that you spend there is worth double what you might spend. You know, doing owned media. That's just how the findings work. And I think it's probably because, again, like I said at the very outset, these AI models are incentivized to create credible sources, and they've probably just built in some logic that says, hey, these earned media sources are going to be as credible to the broader audience.

00;21;50;00 - 00;22;02;04

Matt

Now, that's that's not to be said that it never uses them. I mean, you can see in our study it's certainly sites owned media around 10% of the time. So it's not zero. But, it's certainly not as often as journalism.

00;22;02;07 - 00;22;19;28

Jason

Well, I think it comes back to what we've been talking about, domain authority. Right? I mean, at the end of the day, if your website, if your corporate website has a higher ranking than The New York Times or, you know, Wall Street Journal or something else, then yeah, maybe you will be more, you know, credible, in that lens.

00;22;19;28 - 00;22;28;10

Jason

But I would say good luck to a company that's trying to have higher domain authority, especially a B2B brand. Right. Than those would be. So.

00;22;28;13 - 00;22;29;26

Jason

Yeah. Yeah. All right.

00;22;29;28 - 00;22;52;23

Jason

Matt, this has been a great conversation. I'm excited to finish it up here on the other side, but we have to take a quick break. And so with that, let's do that and we'll come right back with more from Matt Dzugan. Murk Rack talking about this pretty cool study they did of what I is reading for our topic today of how generative AI is fueling PR resurgence and how earned media is ultimately shaping, AI output.

00;22;52;25 - 00;22;54;29

Jason

So we'll be right back with after this message.

00;22;54;29 - 00;23;04;09

Jason

This episode is brought to you by audible. Enjoy 30 days free of Audible Premium Plus by going to on top of Pre-comp audible.

00;23;04;09 - 00;23;28;26

Announcer

You're listening to on top of PR with your host, Jason Mudd. Jason is a trusted advisor to some of America's most admired and fastest growing brands. He is the managing partner at Axia Public Relations, a PR agency that guides news, social and web strategies for national companies. And now, back to the show.

00;23;28;26 - 00;23;45;29

Jason

Hey, welcome back to this episode with Matt Dzugan with Muck Rack. We are talking about AI and PR and the exciting future of PR and AI working together. I don't think there's been a more exciting time in the last several decades to be part of public relations and the the power of media relations and getting earned media coverage for your employer or your clients.

00;23;46;01 - 00;24;04;22

Jason

The last couple of things we're gonna talk about in this half of the episode is technical insights and metric tools, the future of PR and AI, and then some closing questions together as we wrap up. So here we go. Matt. Welcome back. Thanks for being here. This is a very timely subject. In fact, during the break, I was just talking to my podcast team about let's get this live.

00;24;04;22 - 00;24;27;07

Jason

As soon as possible, even if that means, unfortunately, preempting or bumping a couple of our other guests. Because I think this topic is, is is is on fire right now. And we want to make sure we do a good job of helping our audience stay on top of PR. So, technical insights and Muck Rack tools, of course, is a commercial for Muck Rack, but you guys are really the disruptors in this space.

00;24;27;07 - 00;24;46;06

Jason

You've done a great job with that over the years. I'm really, proud of what your company has done. And here you are still doing it. And the AI citation era. So you lead the data and machine learning team at Muck Rack. Can you share what went into the analysis of more than a million AI citations, and what made this study technically challenging or unique?

00;24;46;12 - 00;24;50;00

Jason

You've alluded to it a little bit, but let's let's dive in just a little bit deeper.

00;24;50;02 - 00;25;21;02

Matt

Yeah, yeah. Like I mentioned, the, the pure time, it would take to run all these, citations and queries would take, would take months. So what we had to do is we, you know, just because of our dedication to answering this question and sort of gaining more insights about this topic, we were able to kind of like rent, you know, one of those high performance computing clusters like, think of those things, the classic image of the big hallway with the big racks of computers all the way down the hallway.

00;25;21;04 - 00;25;35;28

Matt

We were able to, like, set up a little system like that to run a bunch of these queries at the same time so that rather than waiting, you know, nine months for this whole thing to finish, we could just do it in a weekend. So, that was that was certainly a fun part of this.

00;25;36;00 - 00;25;58;24

Jason

Yeah, that's crazy and admirable and something that, you know, I think, like, you know, Steve Jobs would be proud of you guys for doing kind of thing. Right? I mean, that's pretty cool. So it sounds like you were a big data center. And, you know, with a bunch of servers and, co-location environment, and we're able to do that where you were you still manually doing the queries, or did you have those programed to be done automatically?

00;25;58;24 - 00;26;02;20

Jason

And were you, were you by the pool for the weekend while this was all happening? Matt.

00;26;02;23 - 00;26;18;23

Matt

That's true. Yeah. So actually great question. We were able to kind of do it all programmatically. And even the cool thing about, you know, I don't want to get too far into the technical weeds, but in the, the modern day of cloud computing and all these things, we don't even have to be in the same room or state as these computers doing all the work.

00;26;18;26 - 00;26;29;06

Matt

So yes, I literally kicked off the stuff and then I was, I was, I was, smoking, smoking a pork shoulder on my deck at the same time while it was happening. So.

00;26;29;09 - 00;26;31;19

Jason

I guess I missed the phone call to come over and enjoy it.

00;26;31;19 - 00;26;32;24

Matt

Yeah. Sorry, Jason.

00;26;32;26 - 00;26;35;03

Jason

We can talk about this ahead of time, so.

00;26;35;05 - 00;26;35;17

Jason

Yeah. Yeah.

00;26;35;22 - 00;27;01;10

Jason

I don't know if there's any truth to this, rumor that computers overseas are less expensive to run than than computers in the United States. That's just a really bad joke. That's all that is. So, anyway, All right, so your generative pulse tool, could be very helpful to the profession. How does it help PR teams monitor and improve their brand presence in generative AI search results?

00;27;01;10 - 00;27;15;04

Jason

But before we do that, we. Oh, a quick intro of what, this generative pulse tool actually is. And then we can get into how does it help PR teams monitor improve their brand presence in generative AI search results?

00;27;15;06 - 00;27;39;19

Matt

Yeah, sure. I'll kind of I'll try to tackle both both sides a little bit. So you can think of generative models as much like, you know, this, this report kind of took the PR world by storm. A lot of people been talking about it, you know, the, the, the utility of earned media, the utility of journalism. We did that broadly, like I mentioned across many queries, some of these queries were in the finance industry, some were in, you know, health care somewhere.

00;27;39;19 - 00;28;03;19

Matt

You know, every every niche we touched. Think of Generative Pulse as the version of this report, but for your brand. So basically what it allows you to do right. In a couple details about your brand, you know, pick the brand that you're supporting. If you have any specific kind of like sub focus areas within the brand. So you know, maybe, maybe I run a hotel chain instead of just typing in the name of my hotel chain.

00;28;03;19 - 00;28;32;11

Matt

I can also say that I'm in particular interested in catering to families or, you know, and any sort of, goals or key messages you might want to focus on. And then we take the hard work of running many, many, many prompts into these eyes. And we don't just hit ChatGPT, we hit all sorts of them ChatGPT, Gemini, etc., etc. we will direct these prompts at these AI systems.

00;28;32;16 - 00;28;55;07

Matt

We will analyze the results, in particular analyze the citations, and then we will create a dashboard for you. And the dashboard updates every day. You can see how these things change over time. And the important part here is like and this is kind of especially the Nutcracker strength here. Every time these AI systems cite a link to say, hey, here's where I got my answer from.

00;28;55;07 - 00;29;21;12

Matt

Here's why I'm saying this. Here's where my opinion is coming from in The Nutcracker tool generative pulse. We're saying, here's that journalist. You can go pitch to them, here's their media outlet, go send them a pitch. So we're kind of connecting it back to our core database of journalists and outlets. So really the way that the way, you know, kind of to go back to your, your initial question, how can people use the tool to improve their presence?

00;29;21;14 - 00;29;35;11

Matt

What the tool lets you do is see who are the journalists that matter in your space, who are the outlets that matter in your space, in your niche, for your brand. And then you can go pitch them.

00;29;35;13 - 00;29;37;21

Jason

Got it? Yeah. So that tool.

00;29;37;21 - 00;29;59;00

Jason

Is now available or I think it just became available. So I signed up for it like early is like, okay, we'll tell you when it's ready. And then I got an email saying it's ready. Is that going to be part of the subscriber feature or is that available to the public and for how long or what what's the what's the deal?

00;29;59;03 - 00;30;20;10

Matt

Yep. Great question. So it is available to, market customers, but there's also, an opportunity to demo it. So if you're not a, if you're not a market customer, there's a, there's a flow on our website where you can go in and you can sign up to it'll get you in touch with someone at Muck Rack and they can hook you up with a trial of it.

00;30;20;13 - 00;30;27;22

Jason

Okay. So that could be a standalone product, or is it, required to have a form crack subscription?

00;30;27;25 - 00;30;47;26

Matt

We do kind of like, treat it as a, as a standalone piece of functionality. As far as how the, how the, you know, billing and accounting works and everything, like, yeah, you will get the rest of Muck Rack if you sign up for this thing. So think of it as a separate product. But if you sign up for this product, you'll get the rest of them, like.

00;30;47;28 - 00;30;48;21

Jason

Okay, okay.

00;30;48;26 - 00;30;53;06

Jason

Well, we'll let the sales department deal with all those questions, Matt. But I want you to get some guidance there.

00;30;53;06 - 00;30;54;22

Jason

So yeah okay. Awesome.

00;30;54;24 - 00;31;09;17

Jason

Thank you for sharing that. Okay. Question nine on my list here is what industries seem to be best positioned or perhaps most at risk, Matt, when it comes to being cited by AI, based on your findings?

00;31;09;19 - 00;31;31;08

Matt

Yep, absolutely. So of course, best position. I mean, like the, the elephant in the room, is that, of course, journalists and journalism have been sort of hurting over the last, several years. And in the last 5 to 10 years, sort of a downward trend. And just, you know, what crack does reports.

00;31;31;08 - 00;31;42;12

Matt

You know, employment, employment numbers and of course, monk ranks very involved in the community and trying to post job postings and help journalists, stay employed because just we believe in that kind of as a principle.

00;31;42;18 - 00;31;43;21

Matt

Sure. Good.

00;31;43;21 - 00;31;44;27

Jason

For the industry profession.

00;31;44;28 - 00;31;46;04

Matt

Good for the industry, of course.

00;31;46;04 - 00;31;46;17

Jason

And.

00;31;46;17 - 00;31;48;13

Jason

Good for the world overall. Not to interrupt you.

00;31;48;14 - 00;32;08;17

Matt

Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally agree. An important part, you know, not to get too philosophical, of course, but, part an important part of society in general. But yeah. So I think, you know, it will be interesting to see how the exact economics of this all play out. Right? Of course, most, you know, these companies are for profit.

00;32;08;20 - 00;32;39;16

Matt

For profit organizations, and there's money exchanging hands, whether it's between the AI providers and the and the media organizations themselves. But at the end of the day, what we're seeing is that these AI systems need journalism and earn media to survive. And so, again, I don't know exactly how the economics will shake out, but one thing's for certain is that ChatGPT and Gemini, their product, suffers if journalists disappears off the face of the earth, and so they're not going to let that happen.

00;32;39;18 - 00;33;02;23

Jason

Interesting. Well, I will be watching to see, how that unfolds, because that's, that's that's an interesting item there. And so perfect segue into the future of PR and AI. Matt, what trends do you see emerging as AI evolves? And how might this how might this affect how PR professionals pitch stories or work with journalists?

00;33;02;25 - 00;33;29;21

Matt

Yeah. So I think we touched on this briefly at the top. But if you if you kind of play out the trajectory that we've seen in the last three years since this kind of AI hype cycle has started, we've seen a, credibility become an important factor. Right? We both you and I kind of shared anecdotes where, initially when we first started using these tools, you know, your jaw drops on the floor.

00;33;29;21 - 00;33;48;10

Matt

Wow. How does this happen? And then you give it a second look and you're like, wait, you know, there's there's how many hours in strawberry? I don't know if you saw there was a just like the chatbot couldn't count how many hours were in strawberry. Right. But so I think, we've seen these systems again in their own self-serving needs to survive.

00;33;48;10 - 00;34;14;13

Matt

We've seen them try to adopt citations and other techniques to become more credible. That's only going to further continue. Like you've said, you know, in the recent past, you've had to ask it for citations, like, we're going to get to the world where it's never going to do anything without checking the web, checking for a reputable citation. So I think the reliance on citation and therefore earned media journalism is only going to go up, only going to increase.

00;34;14;13 - 00;34;25;16

Matt

It's going to be something that we just take for granted. So I think, again, it's it's it's going to be a pretty compelling story arc for, for PR and journalism.

00;34;25;18 - 00;34;43;16

Jason

Yeah, I think so too. And I'm just going to insert kind of three quick thoughts that I have here. Matt. Generative AI is exactly what I thought PCs would be when I first got on a PC at my friend's house. You know, I literally from from TV, right, from movies and howl and things like that.

00;34;43;18 - 00;34;57;16

Jason

And war games. I just thought I would type in what I wanted to do, like, you know, hey, build a video game where a kid does this and does that and are boom, let's go, you know, and I and I remember I was staying at my friend John's house and his mom had a computer before most anybody else I knew.

00;34;57;16 - 00;35;07;21

Jason

And he was like, you know, how to use a computer? I'm like, oh, yeah, I know what you you're I'm not a programmer. You know, he's I was like, you know, I, I, do you have any games on it? He's like, no. And I'm like, I bet we could program one. You know? That was my attitude.

00;35;07;21 - 00;35;25;27

Jason

Like, let's just tell it the game we want to play and it should start playing. So. So I'm really excited to, you know, in my lifetime to have seen computers go from being early in people's homes to what I always thought it would be, and then when I was a college student, we had email and it was all done through like telnet or something, where it was just text based.

00;35;26;00 - 00;35;44;18

Jason

And, you know, I think it's at least, Gary Vaynerchuk is at least known for saying, I don't know if he was the origin of saying, but marketers ruin everything. And so I think back to how simple email was back then. You know, you just type some text and you send it. You couldn't really format anything. You couldn't link things, just basic text.

00;35;44;23 - 00;36;01;22

Jason

But it was perfect. It was so simple and easy. Kind of like what text messages were like when they first came out. But then next thing you know, we start having graphics and formatting and ads and all that stuff, and that's what's going to happen ultimately to these generative AI platforms. You're going to see sponsored content, you're going to see colors.

00;36;01;22 - 00;36;23;10

Jason

It's going to just be quite a bit different than it is today. And we're all going to look back and say, oh, it's so much simpler and easier back then, you know, without all the stuff. But they've got to learn how to make money beyond just subscriptions. Kind of paid subscriptions. And those are the three things I really want to just kind of throw out there because not everybody, but I think you and perhaps our audience would appreciate what I'm talking about.

00;36;23;13 - 00;36;30;11

Jason

You know, and. Yeah, kind of, you know, eager to see what us marketers do to kind of ruin the simplicity of of how it works today.

00;36;30;17 - 00;36;32;28

Jason

Yeah. Any thoughts on that, Matt?

00;36;33;01 - 00;36;52;29

Matt

I mean, I, I do think that is a, I do think that is a garyvee quote or. Yeah. I don't know if he originated it or what have you, but yeah, I think I think you're on to something there. And, you know, I think the thing, at least as far as I can see, you're right, these things are going to go in a direction that none of us can, can, can predict.

00;36;52;29 - 00;37;16;19

Matt

They're going to get a lot more advanced. But I, I really do think, especially just the way that, the first couple months have played out and even even seeing just people online, you know, people will post images of these fake, you know, fake movie titles, like, there's all sorts of weird stuff out there on the internet, you know, these fake movie trailers and like, fake books and fake commercials.

00;37;16;19 - 00;37;46;04

Matt

Yeah, like all that stuff is out there. And what I actually think, yeah, you could take a pessimistic approach and say, oh, you know, the world's going wild. What what is what is happening here? But I actually think it's kind of training society in a way to be skeptical and be, hungry for credibility. I really think that that's likely before us in our very eyes as we're training the general population to want credibility.

00;37;46;06 - 00;37;48;15

Matt

And I think that's a really cool thing.

00;37;48;17 - 00;38;08;11

Jason

Yeah, I like that too. And, you know, the other thing is you were talking about it is, you know, it's a great opportunity also to kind of, you know, you could create a product and not, you know, a prototype of a product using AI visually and then start building commercials and all the things you're describing here for it, just to see if it goes viral and if people are genuinely interested in it.

00;38;08;11 - 00;38;21;03

Jason

And that would save you so much time from a, you know, R&D and, you know, market research and putting together product type, if you have this big idea for something unique. So that's something pretty exciting about this as well.

00;38;21;06 - 00;38;38;17

Matt

Yeah. I actually just saw a post on, excuse me, forgive me, but I just saw a post, a Google, a Google engineering and product leader just done. I think it was LinkedIn earlier today saying something very much along those lines, like it used to be at Google. We required what they called like a writing first culture.

00;38;38;17 - 00;38;59;05

Matt

You had to get all your thoughts on on paper, and then people could go into your document and like throw stones at your ideas and your research. And the point was actually, well, actually, now the cost of trying stuff is so low, right, that sure, you might want to have some good ideas, but like, let's just try stuff and get reactions as opposed to being super methodical.

00;38;59;05 - 00;39;02;24

Matt

So that's another thing. It'll be interesting to see that dynamic play out.

00;39;02;27 - 00;39;20;28

Jason

And look, we're I'm not saying we're dogging on paid media. We're making it clear the role paid media is playing in this. But to that point, what you just described and I describe, if you want to roll out a test product, use paid media to do it, you know, to amplify this content that you're developing, and then you can kind of get more input from it, you know, much quicker.

00;39;20;28 - 00;39;23;13

Jason

So, that's another option as well.

00;39;23;21 - 00;39;24;07

Jason

Okay Matt.

00;39;24;07 - 00;39;25;25

Jason

So do you think.

00;39;25;25 - 00;39;35;19

Jason

Newsrooms decisions and journalists coverage will shift now that their work is influencing AI outputs directly.

00;39;35;21 - 00;39;57;04

Matt

Yeah. So this one this one it's tricky for me. You know, I my background engineering data never been a part of a newsroom. Of course being being at at Muck Rack here, I've had the opportunity to work very closely with a lot of folks in, in journalism and PR. But at the bottom line, you know, the old saying is kind of follow the money, right?

00;39;57;04 - 00;40;19;19

Matt

And I do think that what we're seeing here is, you know, many of these newsrooms and media outlets are striking major deals with the with these AI organizations like, you know, we're talking big, big, big paychecks. So, I do think I do think, there will be changes I get it's another one of those where it's hard to predict exactly what's going to happen.

00;40;19;19 - 00;40;50;13

Matt

But if these newsrooms, if these media companies know that part of their audience is essentially an AI system, absolutely. They're going to be catering to do that. In fact, I have a I have a colleague that I just met with this morning who works at, who works that works as part of a newsroom. I won't disclose which one, but he was he was just telling me that, you know, they've been doing a bunch of analysis on what types of content.

00;40;50;15 - 00;41;17;22

Matt

Much like much like our site, what types of content gets cited and linked to more. And he's taking it from the angle of, you know, not just like what types of media outlets like, like, Mark Rock was looking at, but he was going even a step further, like, you know, if you put bullet points at the top or if you do long run on sentences or if you do a lot of quotations like those sorts of stylistic choices he's starting to analyze for his own newsroom to see, you know, how they can optimize their own coverage.

00;41;17;22 - 00;41;40;06

Matt

So, that's something that excites me, too. I'm sure that, Muck Rack, we'll take a look at that and produce something public facing as well. So you can be on the lookout for that. But that is all to say. Yes, newsrooms will change. And I think, you know, like the stylistic bullets versus sentences versus quotes, I think that's that's all going to be part of it.

00;41;40;08 - 00;41;40;26

Jason

Matt.

00;41;40;28 - 00;41;49;17

Jason

First of all, I want to applaud you because you're always kind of, one half, one step ahead of my questions and whether you're dissipating those or reading my mind or what. But that's really good.

00;41;49;20 - 00;41;50;02

Jason

Because.

00;41;50;02 - 00;41;51;23

Matt

Like the rehearsal we did.

00;41;51;25 - 00;41;52;00

Jason

Have.

00;41;52;01 - 00;41;53;22

Jason

Right or lack thereof. Right.

00;41;53;25 - 00;41;54;27

Jason

So.

00;41;55;00 - 00;42;19;06

Jason

Tell me though, this is, this is perfect setup for our next question. But first, I just want to kind of add a little commentary in this is that to me, this is a really good reminder. So I started doing search optimization and candidly by accident in 1998, and a colleague was like, hey, look, you know, I've figured out a little way to, you know, help this client that ranked higher back then on Yahoo!

00;42;19;08 - 00;42;32;28

Jason

And we didn't know to call it search and optimization. We just say, this is cool, let's do more of it. So we started doing more of it. We started selling it to companies and we just said, hey, we can get you ranked higher on Yahoo! And obviously that sounds great because Yahoo was what, you know, Google was a year or two ago, right?

00;42;33;01 - 00;42;58;11

Jason

And so people thought that was really important. The reason I'm bringing this up is because early in search and optimization, the best practice was always and has always been do what's best for the human first and long term. That's the best search optimization strategy, right. And so you could do a few tactics and techniques that will, you know, kind of fool the engine temporarily to get you ranked a little higher.

00;42;58;18 - 00;43;17;15

Jason

But it was always what was best for the human first. And so I would lean back into that conversation with the colleague you just mentioned at the news outlet and say, absolutely, you figure that stuff out, but be just be knowing or know that Google has never done anything that goes counterintuitive to what the human wants, right? Or the what's in the best interest of the human.

00;43;17;17 - 00;43;39;06

Jason

And now employment practices. And, you know, what is it? Don't do evil or whatever they say aside. I mean, at the end of the day, that's do no evil, you know, the ideas. That's the direction they've always taken. And that's why Google's been so successful with their search, is because they've always done what's best for the human, first, not the company, not the, SEO people and stuff like that.

00;43;39;08 - 00;44;04;03

Jason

So I think we need to keep looking at generative AI under the same lens that if we were to do a crystal ball, it would be, you know, of course, humans and human behavior changes or evolves over time. So will search engines, so will generative search, responses. So to that end, the question 12 I had here, you know, it's let's talk about PR strategy and what's becoming an AI focus world.

00;44;04;03 - 00;44;25;16

Jason

I reworded that from being AI first because I think you still, as I just said, you got to be human first, human focus first. But we're now really starting to focus, especially as a profession on AI. So what role what role do you believe data and machine learning will play in the future of earned media success? And once again, you've already kind of hit on this a little bit.

00;44;25;18 - 00;44;29;25

Jason

But I think you've teed up the question real nice if you want to hammer home any other points.

00;44;29;28 - 00;44;56;09

Matt

Yeah, I think yeah, there's a few things we've already touched on. I will, I will bring up, I think one, when we talk about data, like one thing that's interesting to me and gets me excited is I think, you know, a lot of a lot of folks that I've talked to, you know, a lot of our partners with a lot of our customers, just people and people that I meet at conferences.

00;44;56;12 - 00;44;59;23

Matt

PR is tricky.

00;44;59;25 - 00;45;01;06

Jason

To.

00;45;01;08 - 00;45;20;14

Matt

Measure oftentimes, like, you know, sure, we've got things where we can talk about number of mentions, number of placements. We could talk about the domain authority or, you know, monthly visitors of those outlets where we're getting placements. But still, you know, sometimes I think a lot of PR pros struggle. You know, if they're talking to their CEO, their CEO might say so what?

00;45;20;16 - 00;45;45;14

Matt

I think what this these generative results, these citations, I think what it represents is kind of a really cool barometer that is kind of like everyone understands. Everyone understands how to talk about like, hey, we got all this earned media coverage and look at what it did to our AI results about our brand. Like, to me, that's kind of a really cool sort of side effect of this for the PR community.

00;45;45;14 - 00;45;53;22

Matt

Is it maybe makes part of the PR pros job, like just a little bit easier to quantify?

00;45;53;24 - 00;45;54;12

Jason

Yeah, I like.

00;45;54;12 - 00;46;14;28

Jason

That, Matt. And you're making me think, you know, and you mentioned this earlier. Of course you did. But, you know, you mentioned earlier about, you know, Google, for example. And let's not forget, you know, other search engines that are out there too, that are also influential, like being they don't go around and saying, hey, here's how we changed our algorithm exactly and why we did it and all this stuff.

00;46;14;28 - 00;46;33;02

Jason

You know, they keep some of that stuff is, you know, like they should is, you know, proprietary information. We can expect the same thing from these generative AI tools. So we're not always going to know. But, you know, you know, there may be some fine print that says you shouldn't do what you guys did for your, for your study or something like that, but at the end of the day, you know, good luck stopping you.

00;46;33;02 - 00;46;36;13

Jason

You know what I mean? And so, you know, at the end of the day, like we.

00;46;36;13 - 00;46;36;21

Jason

What.

00;46;36;23 - 00;46;51;14

Jason

We turn tuned to turn to experts who can kind of give their opinion, you know, and things like that. At the end of the day, I prefer the data like you guys did. But as I tell my team, if we have data, let's follow the data. If we don't have data, let's follow our instincts and recommendations.

00;46;51;14 - 00;46;52;02

Jason

Absolutely.

00;46;52;08 - 00;47;12;06

Jason

So I think it's an exciting time, and I think that eventually, you know, I love collaboration. You know, Elon Musk is a guy who collaborates, you know, gives away a lot of his intellectual property, you know, and things like that. And, you know, that's probably one of his top qualities, I would say. And so to that end, I'm a big believer in collaboration as well.

00;47;12;09 - 00;47;29;29

Jason

And I know some people aren't. And they just, you know, they're in it for making money and things like that. But I think at some point these AI platforms, the ownership, the leadership has a decision to make of, you know, how much do they want to open their code and things like that, and collaborate versus getting, you know, closer and tighter to the vest.

00;47;29;29 - 00;47;51;05

Jason

And I think as it becomes more competitive and we start to see fewer and fewer players, you know, as there's always ends up being 3 or 4 major players in any space. Okay. My closing questions are going to be, what's the one thing you wish every communicator understood about generative AI and its influence on media strategy?

00;47;51;08 - 00;48;27;18

Matt

Yeah. So I guess the the bottom line one liner would be there are there are patterns that your niche, your brand can detect and tap into for your industry. So there are absolutely specific journalists, specific outlets, specific types of content out there on the web for your brand that are influencing what I says about you. So I think, you know, it's your job, the communicator, the PR pro, it's your job to figure out what that where is, you know, where is that little corner of the universe, right?

00;48;27;18 - 00;48;31;07

Matt

And, you know, set your sights there.

00;48;31;10 - 00;48;32;29

Jason

Okay? Okay.

00;48;33;01 - 00;48;37;23

Jason

Matt, we talked about that. We're going to put a link in the episode notes from on top of PR

00;48;37;23 - 00;48;38;06

Jason

slash

00;48;38;06 - 00;48;50;08

Jason

Matt dash. Dugan. Dugan has a Z in it, folks. And, we'll put a link to the full report. We'll also put a link to the Generative pulse, landing page, where they can go learn more about that as well.

00;48;50;08 - 00;49;09;15

Jason

So that'll save you from having to give us an exact URL on your website to do it. We'll just figure it out and add it to the episode notes. So everybody go to on top of pr.com/matt Dash, DCU, G and to check that out. And Matt, as we're wrapping up here, what excites you the most about where all this is headed?

00;49;09;18 - 00;49;13;20

Jason

Whether that's PR or somewhere else in this age of AI?

00;49;13;23 - 00;49;43;17

Matt

Yeah, I think, you know, really the thing that's most exciting is, I mean, almost the entire summary of this conversation, the entire premise of why you have me, a data guy on your podcast. Like, that's what's cool about this to me, is PR is really seeing a, resurgence, kind of like a, you know, a second wind or a third wind, like there's a, there's a huge momentum that people are understanding and wrapping their heads around it.

00;49;43;19 - 00;50;05;08

Matt

And we're living through it right now on a day by day, week by week basis. Oh. Holy cow. That earned media that. I get these these through lines, these key messages that I'm landing in these key publications and key journals. That's getting more eyeballs than just the readers of that publication, that's getting the eyeballs of anybody who searches anything about this topic.

00;50;05;08 - 00;50;17;28

Matt

So. Right. I think it's just such a huge, like multiplier on the audience and sort of downstream impact of what PR does. So that's frankly why I'm excited about it.

00;50;18;00 - 00;50;45;03

Jason

Yeah. The same I mean, I feel reinvigorated as, you know, PR agency owner and leader and I see it in my team and, you know, I've encouraged them. Hey, start talking to your friends and family about this and help them understand how all this works and why what you do matters and how you know you may not be working for, you know, an AI company, but you're working at an agency that's helping other companies compete and thrive in the AI era, which to me is pretty darn exciting.

00;50;45;03 - 00;51;01;17

Jason

And I think, you know, I'm a dad of two young adults. I think, you know, maybe my cloud is going up a little bit in their eyes as opposed to just being, you know, a PR guy that's positioning companies well in this public spotlight. So I, I'm digging it. It's help me go back to my roots of early technology and just kind of seeing how it's all working.

00;51;01;17 - 00;51;22;20

Jason

And, you know, if anybody ever claimed that PR was dead or stale or whatever, you know, we've talked a lot about the challenges of PR, but here's something very exciting to kind of, you know, help us because PR has been named many times, is maybe you've heard as one of the most stressful positions in America, usually number one to number five ranked year over year.

00;51;22;26 - 00;51;40;00

Jason

And so, you know, nothing helps people. I tell us all the time, hard work and feeling value out of your work is a great way to deal to to alleviate stress, right? If you're working hard and you feel like there's no point to it or it's not, you're not making progress. And you're not seeing change, then of course you're gonna get frustrated.

00;51;40;02 - 00;51;50;11

Jason

But coming home from work every day and feeling like you contributed and helped and that you're on the cutting edge of something that's very powerful is a great paradigm shift in something to be very excited about.

00;51;50;13 - 00;51;52;15

Matt

I absolutely agree.

00;51;52;17 - 00;51;53;05

Jason

Yeah.

00;51;53;07 - 00;52;01;28

Jason

All right, Matt, if people want to connect with you on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, where do they best find you and how would you like them to connect with you?

00;52;02;01 - 00;52;22;01

Matt

Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think LinkedIn is great for this. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, and especially with all this stuff with the report and so feel free to find me on there. Again, it's I don't know the exact URL, but it's LinkedIn slash. And then, you know, my full name, Matt. Again, you can find me you can send me a DM.

00;52;22;01 - 00;52;23;20

Matt

I'd be happy to chat.

00;52;23;22 - 00;52;25;26

Jason

Yeah. Perfect.

00;52;25;26 - 00;52;41;15

Jason

Man. This has been a great episode. Thank you for sharing your smarts with us. Thanks for doing this report because it's very valuable not only to obviously, you know your organization, but to the industry and the profession itself. And, really cool that we're able to talk about it so early after you guys released it.

00;52;41;17 - 00;53;01;14

Matt

Yeah, absolutely. And kind of to, you know, you were mentioning earlier about, you know, open and sharing intellectual property, that was a key thing with us too. We could have we could have said, hey, let's run this study. Let's keep the results to ourselves and just build the best darn product we can out of these results. But we wanted to, you know, we found some good findings and we wanted to share it.

00;53;01;14 - 00;53;07;08

Matt

So I'm happy to chat with you about it. I'm happy to chat with anyone about it who you know, finds me on LinkedIn.

00;53;07;10 - 00;53;25;06

Jason

Yeah, lots of credit to your CEO. Is being, innovative, disrupting and forward thinking. So, you know, he of, according to your bio, right? He he had some great praise for you. And I have some great praise for him. So it's it's all full circle here. Maybe somebody at my track will say something nice about me one day.

00;53;25;06 - 00;53;28;08

Matt

So anyway, I will,

00;53;28;10 - 00;53;45;06

Jason

Hey, just for the record, we're recording this on Friday, August 1st, 2025. Should you be catching up on this episode later? Because anything we said here today could be changed, in 15 minutes. But that's where we are at this point in our journey. Matt, since it is Friday, I want to say thanks for being here.

00;53;45;06 - 00;54;00;24

Jason

Have a great weekend. I hope some great hams to you this weekend. And right back to our audience. I want to close by saying, hey, I hope some great hams to you today as well, and I hope something great happens to you in your profession and in your work. Because you took the time to invest in yourself and this episode in this topic today.

00;54;01;00 - 00;54;16;20

Jason

To that end, if you thought it was helpful, please take a moment to share it with a friend or colleague. Let us know how you felt about this episode. What other topics you'd like to see us explore? We are very listener and audience friendly and eager to connect with you on LinkedIn or otherwise. So with that, this is Jason Mudd thanking you for giving me the opportunity to be on to help you stay on top of PR.

00;54;16;20 - 00;55;12;12

Announcer

This has been On Top of PR with Jason Mudd presented by ReviewMaxer. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode and check out past episodes at ontopofpr.com.

About your host Jason Mudd

On Top of PR host, Jason Mudd, is a trusted adviser and dynamic strategist for some of America’s most admired brands and fastest-growing companies. Since 1994, he’s worked with American Airlines, Budweiser, Dave & Buster’s, H&R Block, Hilton, HP, Miller Lite, New York Life, Pizza Hut, Southern Comfort, and Verizon. He founded Axia Public Relations in July 2002. Forbes named Axia as one of America’s Best PR Agencies.

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