NEW YORK, March 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Stacker, the earned media distribution platform trusted by more than 150 organizations, today released its largest Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) study to date, revealing that distributing content through earned media channels produces a median 239% lift in AI search visibility. The study conducted over 30 days in partnership with AI Customer Experience Platform Scrunch, analyzed 87 stories across 30 clients and queried 2,600+ prompts across 8 AI platforms, providing our most comprehensive view of earned media’s impact on AI citation behavior published to date.
As AI-powered search platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews become primary discovery tools for consumers and business buyers alike, brands are urgently seeking strategies to maintain and grow their visibility. Stacker’s new research offers the first statistically significant evidence of the impact of earned media on AI search visibility.
Key Findings
- Stacker-distributed stories saw a median 239% increase in AI citations compared to brand-owned content alone.
- Syndication increased cross-platform AI coverage from 5.4% to 17.9% at the median, nearly tripling how consistently brands surfaced across AI platforms. Stacker is calling this metric “coverage breadth” and positioning it as a critical new GEO KPI.
- 97% of Stacker-distributed stories earned at least one AI citation, compared to 82% for owned content, a difference that is statistically significant (p < 0.006).
- 64% of AI citations came from third-party publisher sources. Distributed versions were 5.3x more likely to be the sole source of a story’s AI visibility than the brand’s own website.
| ‘AI search isn’t a single ranking position; it’s a long tail played across platforms, prompt variations, and answer formats,’ said Noah Greenberg, CEO at Stacker. ‘Our data shows that coverage breadth is the new authority signal. Brands that show up consistently across AI engines will define the next decade of organic visibility, and earned media is the most reliable way to get there.’ |
The study measured citations at two levels simultaneously: any citations to the brand’s own domain and story-specific citations from publisher sources within the Stacker network. Using approximately 30 unique customized prompts per story and searching across 8 AI platforms, researchers at Stacker captured a post-distribution snapshot that enabled both story-level and brand-level analysis. The expanded dataset provides far greater statistical confidence than a smaller prior study in December 2025, which showed 325% lift across an initial 8-story sample but lacked the scale to draw broad conclusions.
Validating the Role of Earned Media
While the role of earned media on AI search citations is well understood, this is one of the first studies measuring the actual lift in visibility from turning owned to earned. Third-party publisher sources consistently outperform owned content in AI citations, and this research looks to quantify incremental lift through distribution and demonstrate how owned and earned media work best in concert to maximize reach and visibility.
“If you were around for early SEO, you’ve seen this movie before,” Greenberg noted. “People over-indexed on on-page factors until external authority signals became impossible to ignore. GEO is following the same arc, and the brands that recognize it early will have a meaningful head start.”
About Stacker
Stacker is the earned media distribution platform for brands seeking visibility in an AI-first world. By transforming brand-funded content into editorially vetted stories distributed natively across 3,000+ trusted news outlets, Stacker delivers the authority signals and third-party validation that AI search engines prioritize. Hundreds of organizations use Stacker to build lasting brand visibility that compounds over time.
The full study methodology and findings are available at: https://stacker.com/blog/latest-research-on-expanding-brand-visibility-across-llms
Media Contact
Doriane Mouret
Director of Marketing, Stacker
[email protected]
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b906ef82-3f51-4b53-a1da-ddb4b1c97da9