By Gretel Going, President & Founder, Channel V Media
Getting attention in the U.S. market has never been easy. But for companies expanding into the States, whether from Europe, Asia-Pacific or Latin America, the challenge used to be relatively straightforward: invest in the right media channels, build awareness with the right audiences, and differentiate your product in a crowded field. Hard work, but a known playbook.
That playbook is now being rewritten. Not because the fundamentals of good PR and communications have changed, but because the environment in which those fundamentals operate has shifted beneath everyone’s feet. AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini have become the first stop for the buyers, investors, journalists, and partners that companies entering the U.S. market need to reach. And these engines aren’t presenting people with a list of options to evaluate. They’re delivering fully formed narratives about who a company is, what it does and whether it’s worth their time.
For companies already established in the U.S., this is a strategic challenge. For companies trying to break in, it’s existential. If AI engines don’t know your story—or worse, have assembled one from outdated fragments—your U.S. market entry starts at a deficit before you’ve made a single pitch.
Attention Is Now the Scarcest Resource in Marketing
We recently published a report, Tapping Into the Attention Economy, based on a survey of 250 U.S. marketing executives conducted in partnership with Dynata. What we found confirmed something many of us in the industry have sensed: Attention itself has become the primary bottleneck.
Sixty-two percent (62%) of marketers said that simply getting noticed is one of their biggest challenges–and has become even more difficult than generating leads (52%) or driving user adoption (34%). Sixty percent (60%) said differentiating from competitors is equally painful. This is due to the sheer volume of competing products, the growing number of channels to market them through, and the flood of content vying for people’s attention have created an environment where even strong products can be invisible.
This is the reality that any company entering the U.S. market walks into. It’s not enough to have a compelling product or a well-funded launch. The U.S. market is saturated with companies that look and sound alike, and audiences—both human and AI—are filtering them ruthlessly.
AI Engines Are Disproportionately Shaped by Earned Media
Here’s where it gets interesting for communications professionals. When we asked the AI engines themselves what sources they draw on when constructing brand narratives, earned media coverage in editorially vetted publications directly accounts for roughly 43% of what they reference. Company-owned content contributes about 22%, user-generated and community content around 13%, industry and analyst reports 10%, open knowledge databases 6%, and other specialized sources about 5%.
When you trace how PR indirectly supports those other categories, such as by lending credibility to owned content, sparking community discussion and feeding analyst narratives, the total influence of a company’s earned media efforts climbs to as much as 75% of their AI visibility.
This has massive implications for companies building a U.S. presence. Owned content alone (landing pages, blog posts, press releases) doesn’t carry much weight with AI engines unless third-party sources corroborate it. A company can say whatever it wants about itself, but credibility requires someone else agreeing. And in a new market where you haven’t yet built that third-party validation, AI engines have very little to work with.
The good news is that this is within a company’s control. Earned media has always been the fastest way to build credibility in a new market. What’s changed is that the impact now compounds. Every placement doesn’t just reach the audience who reads it, it feeds the AI narrative that reaches every audience from that point forward.
AI Engines Are the New Gatekeepers of Companies’ Narratives
Coincidentally, AI prefers some of the same trust signals that human audiences do—and those which are baked into the foundation of a strategic public relations program. Across dozens of AI engine audits, here are a few patterns that consistently determine how companies show up.
Getting into high-authority media outlets is more important than outlets with huge audiences. A placement in a focused industry trade outlet with 10,000 monthly visitors can carry more weight with AI engines than getting a passing mention in a general-interest publication with millions of readers. This is because AI engines value topical authority and depth within a particular domain. For companies entering the U.S., this means that targeted trade and industry coverage in their specific vertical can be more strategically valuable than chasing broad-reach outlets.
Confusing messaging creates confusing AI narratives. If a company describes itself as a “marketing technology with enterprise clients” in one place and an “AI-powered SMB tool” in another, AI will reflect that confusion. Companies expanding into a new market sometimes adjust their positioning for different audiences, which makes sense, but the core narrative needs to hold together. AI is synthesizing everything, and contradictions dilute authority.
Be specific rather than use superlatives. Companies from every country love describing themselves with superlatives, such as “industry-leading” or “best-in-class.” But these descriptors not only don’t mean anything when they’re used by the company to talk about itself, they also give AI nothing to anchor. By contrast, concrete, quantified data points, such as revenue processed, costs reduced and/or users served, get embedded directly into AI narratives. Companies entering the U.S. with proprietary research, benchmark data, customer success stories or original market insights have a structural advantage.
Frequency and recency are important. AI narratives aren’t static. Companies that had a strong launch but then went quiet will find their narratives overtaken by competitors who are consistently putting new signals into the market.
Invisible Companies Want to Be Seen
All of this is especially important for companies selling things people can’t see or touch before they buy, such as software, professional services and consulting. Our data shows these sectors are spending significantly more to break through with audiences. Thirty-five percent (35%) of manufacturing companies and 32% of professional services firms report annual marketing budgets of $4 million or more, compared to just 19% of consumer goods companies. When a product is “invisible,” getting attention isn’t just a marketing priority, it’s a survival cost.
By focusing on earned media coverage, these companies don’t only differentiate themselves in their markets, but also with the AI engines that their prospective customers rely on to learn about and make decisions about them.
Earned Media Gives Companies a Compounding Advantage
What makes this moment different from anything we’ve seen in communications is the compounding nature of AI visibility. In the search era, a great article was a discoverable artifact. In the AI era, it’s a data point that feeds an evolving narrative capable of reaching millions of people—including people in a market a company hasn’t even entered yet.
For companies breaking into the U.S., this is both the challenge and the opportunity. The companies that invest in building a credible, consistent, earned-media-backed narrative from day one aren’t just creating awareness. They’re training AI engines to tell their story to every buyer, investor and journalist who asks, long before they’re in the room themselves.
The attention economy rewards those who earn it. And increasingly, earning it once means earning it everywhere. Read Channel V Media’s complete report here: Tapping Into the Attention Economy.