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AI visibility for public affairs comms teams

Why are public sector comms teams not tracking their AI visibility?

August 19, 2026/0 Comments/in PR, Communications, Media, Public Affairs Media Monitoring, Lumina, AI View Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

In May 2026, AI assistant GOV.UK Chat launched inside the GOV.UK app. Built on more than 80,000 pages of official guidance, it was designed to answer citizens’ questions on tax, driving, childcare, apprenticeships, and benefits. The soft launch saw great take-up, signalling to government departments, regulators, NHS trusts, and local authorities that a majority of the general public are now ‘AIing it’ versus ‘Googling it’.

But not every member of the UK public will be asking GOV.UK Chat for answers, instead going to ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Claude, which weren’t built on official government guidance. Answers from these LLMs will serve up whatever the web has indexed, regardless of whether that material is accurate, balanced, or years out of date.

The stakes are high for comms teams reckoning with this new AI-mediated information ecosystem, but even higher for public sector organisations with responsibilities to people across the country who depend on them.

When the ‘official’ answer is not fully reliable

Research from the Open Data Institute tested over 22,000 citizen-related queries against leading models including ChatGPT-4o, Gemini, and Claude, and the results found that multiple models were giving incorrect guidance on regulations including Guardian’s Allowance and Sure Start Maternity Grant eligibility. As Professor Elena Simperl of the ODI warned: ‘If language models are to be used safely in citizen-facing services, we need to understand where the technology can be trusted and where it cannot’.

What can Government agencies do to keep AI answers correct if the AI systems that supply them are drawing on sources of such diverse nature and reliability as local press, forums, campaign group websites, and out-of-date PDFs that happen to rank well?

Strategy for AI visibility needs to be different for public sector comms teams

For a consumer brand, AI visibility is primarily a matter of reputation and sales, but for public sector bodies, the stakes are whether people can access a service, meet a deadline, or continue to trust an institution.

Different types of public sector organisation carry different exposure:

Service-delivery bodies (DWP, HMRC, local councils running bins, council tax and planning, NHS trusts) depend on AI-generated answers being current. Eligibility criteria, rates and deadlines change; a chatbot repeating last year’s rules goes past inconvenience to real potential costs to a resident who acts on it.
Regulators (Ofgem, Ofcom, the FCA, the CQC, the ICO) need to be treated by AI systems as the primary, authoritative source on their own remit. If a chatbot leans more heavily on a consumer campaign site or a trade publication’s interpretation than on the regulator itself, this needs to be identified and mitigated.
Policy departments and ministries (DWP, DfE, Defra, the Cabinet Office) need policy explained with the caveats intact. Technical accuracy is not the same as genuine clarity, and AI systems can smooth away all-important nuance.
Councils, combined authorities, and devolved administrations need visibility into how residents are informed about local decisions, especially contentious ones like council tax rises or planning applications. Here, local papers, residents’ Facebook groups, and campaign pages often shape the AI-generated answer more than the council’s own statements.

Five questions for UK public sector comms teams to ask now

1) If a resident is not visiting the organisation’s website, where are they getting their answer instead, and is it correct?

2) How is the organisation’s most recent decision, incident, or policy change actually being described when someone asks an AI about it?

3) When new information is published, does it appear in AI-generated answers reasonably quickly, or is a chatbot still confidently repeating last year’s position?

4) Where is the gap between what has been published and what people are actually being told by these tools?

5) How much of the narrative is being shaped by campaign groups, opposition voices or local press, rather than by the organisation’s own primary sources?

Most comms teams currently have no reliable way of answering these questions. Traditional media can be monitored and social sentiment tracked, but few organisations have visibility into what ChatGPT or Gemini is telling people about them at any given moment, or which sources those answers are drawn from.

How Lumina’s AI View provides that visibility

This is the gap that AI View, part of Vuelio’s Lumina suite, has been developed to address. It tracks what large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are citing when they answer questions about an organisation — not only what they say, but which sources those answers are drawn from. For a public sector communications team, this means the ability to see, in one place:

Source footprint — whether AI answers are drawing on an organisation’s own official guidance, national press, trade and specialist titles, campaign sites, or forums, and how that mix shifts over time.
Competitive and peer benchmarking — how an organisation’s visibility compares with a neighbouring authority, special interest groups, a comparable regulator, or another department handling a similar issue.
Alerts when citation patterns shift suddenly — valuable when a policy announcement, an incident or a contentious local decision begins to change how AI systems discuss an organisation, allowing a comms team to respond before the narrative sets.

Consider a county council approaching budget-setting season. AI View could reveal whether questions about a proposed council tax rise are being answered using the council’s own published rationale, or drawing almost entirely on an eighteen-month-old local newspaper article and a residents’ social media discussion. This is precisely the kind of gap an organisation would want to identify while there is still time to address it, rather than after a scrutiny committee meeting has already raised it.

The GCS’s own Assist tool demonstrates that government communications teams are already comfortable deploying AI internally, for drafting plans and reviewing content. AI View addresses the other half of that picture: understanding how AI represents an organisation externally, to the people it serves.

The public are going to LLMs for answers, but do organisations know what they are being told in response, and whether they are the ones providing that answer?

Find out more about Vuelio’s AI View to see what it can reveal about an organisation’s AI visibility.

Why Do Different LLMs Say Different Things About Your Brand? (And How Comms Teams Can Take Control of the Narrative)

August 13, 2026/0 Comments/in PR, Communications, Media PR, Lumina Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

Ask ChatGPT what your company does best, then ask Perplexity, then Gemini, then Claude. If you have never tried this before, brace yourself: these LLMs won’t deliver four identical answers. Instead, each will provide a different narrative, drawn from a different combination of sources, shaped by each model’s idea of what matters about your organisation.

For years, brand reputation management meant controlling what showed up on page one of Google and landing coverage in the right titles. While that work still matters, those forming opinions about your organisation now are less and less likely to be scrolling search results, and increasingly likely to be asking an AI assistant directly, taking its answer at face value.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is becoming as important to comms teams as SEO ever was.

There’s one crucial distinction, however. As Purposeful Relations’ Stuart Bruce shared at our recent event ‘How AI is changing the way we communicate’, SEO was an instance of a power channel and mechanic – that might have been expected to sit beneath certain comms functions, at least in part – ultimately belonging entirely to a different part of the business. It is not yet clear which function in an organisation will ‘own’ GEO’; perhaps, given the pervasiveness of the tech, the answer is everyone.

Either way, understanding why models disagree about your organisation is the first step to making sure that what they are sharing about you is the story you want to be told.

The New Reality of Brand Perception in the AI Era

Stakeholders, journalists, and prospective clients are increasingly skipping the click-through altogether, and instead simply asking an AI assistant to summarise who you are, what you are known for, and who your competitors are, and then acting on whatever answer they’re given.

That would be manageable if every model gave a consistent answer… but they don’t. This can fragment your narrative exactly where you have the least control. If Claude surfaces a crisis from five years ago, while ChatGPT is citing your most recent earnings report, stakeholders forming a first impression of your organisation are working from two different stories, and both of them could be sourced from something your team didn’t write or sanction.

The 5 Reasons LLMs Diverge on Your Organisation

Models don’t disagree at random. Each divergence has a mechanical cause, and understanding it is what makes the problem solvable rather than just frustrating.

1. Different RAG and real-time search sources

Most modern LLMs don’t rely purely on pre-trained memory, but search live web indexes. Gemini leans on Google-indexed news and content; Perplexity draws heavily on Reddit, Wikipedia, and niche industry forums; and ChatGPT relies substantially on Bing’s index (given the financing and ownership role of Microsoft). If your PR strategy only targets traditional financial media, for example, you might dominate the narrative on one model, while disappearing, or being mischaracterised, on another that is pulling from consumer forums and social discussion instead.

2. Training cutoff dates and fine-tuning data mixes

Base models are trained on web snapshots taken at specific points in time. A model without live search (i.e. Claude or Deepseek) switched on may still be describing your organisation through the lens of a merger, rebrand, or crisis that has long since been resolved. Although it should be noted that even models with the mechanic enabled often won’t utilise it as part of their retrieval unless they land on a clear reason to. This kind of historical narrative lag can keep echoing an outdated version of a narrative.

3. Authority and citation weighting

LLMs assess source trust differently, weighing citations, structured data, and domain authority. Wikipedia, and Wikidata entries, as examples, are central to this. If a competitor has a clean Wikidata presence and citations from high-authority domains, models will associate them with the keywords that matter faster than a brand that’s relying on marketing copy alone.

4. Model architecture and safety alignment

System prompts, temperature settings, and the reinforcement learning each vendor applies post-training all shape tone and emphasis. Claude tends to be more cautious and caveat-heavy, often surfacing risk alongside reward. Gemini leans into consumer and Google-ecosystem data. ChatGPT tends to synthesise a broad sweep of top web summaries. The same facts are presented with very different tones depending on a searcher’s LLM of choice.

5. Prompt context and user intent

Even the way a question is framed changes the answer.

‘Is [organisation X] reliable?’ and ‘Compare [organisation X] to [Competitor]’ pull from different sub-vectors of a model’s embedding space. This means two stakeholders asking about the same company, in slightly different ways, can walk away with meaningfully different impressions.

How to Audit and Align Your AI Footprint

None of this means AI narratives are beyond influence. Inputs must be managed with the same rigour comms teams already apply to press coverage. Indeed, coverage itself is one of the strongest shaping forces.

Start by mapping your AI source footprint: work out which outlets, review sites, and publications are actually being cited when each major model discusses your organisation. From there, the shift from SEO to GEO means writing press releases and corporate updates with clear entity-attribute statements — plain, factual descriptions of who you are and what you do, rather than flourishes and adjectives that a model has no structured way to parse.

It also means making sure your strongest media placements land in outlets that LLMs actually index and cite, not just the ones with the biggest print circulation (don’t forget tier 2 and trade titles — LLMs are proven to value them). And where a model is clearly pulling outdated or negative information from an obscure forum or a stale article, the fix is to out-publish it: build fresh, authoritative citations in high-weight outlets until the newer, more accurate narrative is what gets surfaced.

Monitor what LLMs are saying to control your story

Lumina, our intelligent AI suite built for modern PR and comms teams, is designed to evolve traditional media monitoring into genuine narrative intelligence for the AI age. Lumina AI View is built specifically to track what tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are saying about your organisation, which sources are shaping those answers, and how your AI citation footprint stacks up against that of your competitors.

Lumina AI View gives comms teams three things they currently have almost no visibility into: citation source tracking, so you can see exactly which outlets are driving your narrative across each model; competitive AI benchmarking, so you can compare your citation strength and share-of-voice against industry peers; and narrative shift detection, so you get an early warning when citation patterns move because of breaking news or a shift in sentiment, before it becomes a bigger problem.

LLMs usher in a major change in the comms space, but PR & comms teams are far from powerless. In fact, through the quality, authority, and distribution of the sources feeding it, they can have a massively meaningful impact on the organisation or business in question.

Get in touch to register your interest and see what Lumina AI View can do for your organisation’s AI visibility today.

Health in Focus: Yvette Cooper & Social Care

August 13, 2026/0 Comments/in Politics, Public Affairs Political Services, Political Database, Political Monitoring Blog Posts /by Aidan Stansbury

Yvette Cooper and her new ministerial team now officially have a foot in the door, and can stake their claim on the new Burnham agenda. The appointment of Alison McGovern as Minister for Social Care is the most notable point for the Department, taking on responsibility for adult social care, palliative care, hospital discharge, mental health, and disabilities. While broad in scope, this role sees a departure from former Minister of State for Care Stephen Kinnock’s brief, which included primary care and general practice. Announcing her appointment on Instagram, McGovern noted her pride in tackling the ‘overlooked’ issue of adult social care and diagnosed its disarray at the hands of the Tory Government and cuts to councils over 14 years. No doubt, McGovern and retained Secondary Care Minister Karin Smyth, who holds the portfolio for health devolution in England, will be working in tandem to deliver localised health policy through the lens of Manchesterism.

McGovern’s description of adult social care as overlooked, while true, does not acknowledge the structural inhibitors that have led to its failures and policy paralysis over recent decades. Burnham’s urgent call to action by labelling adult social care the perpetrator of an NHS on the brink of collapse would usually serve as a wake-up call for policymakers, professionals in the industry, and the public. Rather, it diagnoses the same symptoms which have perpetuated this growing sense of gloom and irrevocable nature of the adult social care system. The word ‘overlooked’ paints a picture of a democratic state that has chosen, through political, monetary, social, or cultural factors, to disregard adult social care. The reality is far more complex than individual decision making from Ministers, party caucuses, or policy experts, but it stems from the nature in which adult social care has become an untouchable policy. On the surface, previous attempts have been misguided, resulting in the incessant and crude labelling of a ‘dementia tax’ and a ‘death tax’. Such a media reaction likely explains why Burnham called out the damage of political point-scoring and short-term media headlines to the issue. Building a cross-party coalition is the first step to achieving a deliverable consensus for reform.

The second sits in the intersection of a confusing paradox. The last few years have shown MPs frightened of any policy that could negatively affect the elderly; winter fuel payments led to media backlash and collapsing political capital for a party with a near-supermajority, and the triple lock isn’t even flirted with, let alone touched, by major parties despite organisations like the National Institute of Economic and Social Research calling it unsustainable. A well-known element of this stems from the fact that older people are more likely to vote, contributing to political strategies operating from the assumption that their voices are kept in the tent. From this outlook, adult social care, a policy that primarily concerns older people, would be at the top of the Government’s priorities to reform and improve, yet it has faced years of inaction and decay.

Adult social care is a fragile issue, steeped in emotional pain, personal sacrifice and arbitrary unfairness. Some people may have parents who pass away instantaneously and never enter the system, while others can be saddled with hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt to tend to their loved ones, especially when long-lasting debilitating conditions like dementia are involved. This creates a scenario where those before adult social care are fearful of the issue, sweep it under the rug and hope its failures won’t touch their family. Those involved in adult social care fear becoming the guinea pig for wide-scale reform of an overly complex and unequal system. Further, fear and mistrust are a plague on modern politicians’ political will; Blair’s astronomical approval ratings seem like a pipe dream in the divisive nature of modern politics. Burnham himself has managed to reach positive figures, while Starmer sat plunged at the Mariana Trench of ratings for around two years.

Without the public buy-in, policies become difficult, and adult social care is either an issue people do not want to think about or do not trust a politician to deliver. When there is no mandate for change from the public, media intensity becomes hotter and political tensions become sharper and more damaging, leading to policy paralysis and leading to the status quo being reinforced. However, reforms can be delivered and a vision for adult social care, not just a policy paper, is needed to shape public perception on the issue. That is where Burnham must deliver.

The problem of adult social care is clear, catastrophic costs, undervalued workforce, widening gaps in provision and rising dissatisfaction. Burnham has the policy, the Dilnot Commission, including the ‘cap and floor’ model, proves an absence of ideas and passable reforms was never the issue. But he must gain the political. He has the sheer volume of MPs to pass legislation but he must bring the public on board. To truly achieve this, Burnham must build a narrative about what adult social care can provide for people, not what it should provide in the worst situations. This involves reframing the debate away from rationalising higher care costs as a means of greater and more bureaucratic public expenditure but to how a properly funded and fairer adult social care system can create a more just transition into later life, build a society built on solidarity and frame adult adult social care as a social good. Burnham must confront this tenuous issue of adult social care, deliver a vision that puts people’s families and pockets at the centre, and give a reason why change is required, not just how.

Elsewhere, McGovern will also have to contend with developments within the assisted dying debate. Recently, Burnham said the debate on assisted dying should wait until adult social care and palliative care funding is fixed, noting that it is very challenging to introduce this wider debate when people aren’t receiving the right care. With Lauren Edwards MP set to reintroduce the Bill to Parliament in September as a highly prioritised Private Member’s Bill, its repassage through the Commons will prove important and a unique political conundrum for Burnham. His outlined position is no doubt personal, and he may offer this from his point of view as a mere one MP of 650. Or he may take a more distinct approach and look to politicise the issue from the perspective of preventing the failures of adult social care from causing further harm. Politicising the issue is something the Starmer Government steered clear of, allowing MPs to vote on a personal basis. However, to convince the public of his mission to fix the broken adult social care system, deciding to grant a policy which many argue could cause more harm than good to older people may run juxtaposed to this agenda. An important decision lies here, and will no doubt increase scrutiny on the forthcoming Bill.

Another notable inclusion in the ministerial team is Chris McDonald, who will be the Minister for Science, Innovation and Investment. McDonald will look to bridge the gap left by the dissolution of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, ensuring that science and its ties into healthcare and medtech stay grounded and are not deprioritised in the departmental reshuffling. Medicines, medtech, research, and rare diseases will now be split across two Ministers, McDonald and James Frith, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health Innovation. While Burnham has been silent on this area of healthcare, it looms prominently in the background of the health policy debate. Recent changes to the Innovative Licensing and Access Pathway, MHRA-NICE Aligned Pathway, NICE Thresholds and VPAG rebates are institutionalised and their benefits will be assessed in forthcoming cycles. However, challenges lie just around the corner, most notably on NHS adoption, and complexity surrounding the NHS reorganisation and its effects on specialised commissioning and the formulation of Offices for Pan-ICB Commissioning (OPICs). On the one hand, the new Ministers, and specifically McDonald, will be welcome news for pharmaceutical companies who will hope this bridge between health and business will tie in life sciences funding and improved access to medicines. On the other hand, recent changes to the NICE threshold and ambitions to increase spending from 0.3% to 0.6% have been criticised by health economists, citing a potential increase of excess preventable deaths. Burnham may opt to target this space for cuts to unlock funding elsewhere, delivering on his core missions in adult social care and maintaining manifesto commitments on waiting lists.

The Health Bill also produces a political conundrum for Burnham. While key cabinet Minister Wes Streeting has probably washed his hands of the NHS, his legacy is maintained through the Health Bill, with Karin Smyth responsible for the Bill’s passage. With the abolition of the NHS, many powers and responsibilities were left homeless, and comprehensively the Department of Health and Social Care has brought most of them under its remit. This includes elements of commissioning, power to direct Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), medicine and data governance standards, digital infrastructure, and most notably, Healthwatch, which has become a key contested point in the Bill. Burnham’s devolution agenda proposes moving power away from Whitehall towards local powers – exactly what the Bill does not do. With the Bill pending a Report Stage and Third Reading, summer recess has given Burnham and the new health team ample time to morph the Health Bill, which was not in the manifesto, into a new Burnhamite vision for the organisation of the NHS. Any amendments to elements of the Bill may look to preserve local voice in decision making whilst maintaining the core rationale to cut overall bureaucracy in the overly bureaucratic maze of the health service.

Burnham’s premiership and Yvette Cooper’s tenure could provide a fundamental shift in the apparatus of the healthcare system. Immediate challenges on the Health Bill persist, but through carefully considered amendments it also provides the opportunity to begin turning the wheels on the devolution of care, immediately solving longstanding bureaucratic challenges and structural pain points, and beginning the pathway towards reforming adult social care and revolutionising local healthcare integration. Meanwhile, planned pharmaceutical investment could prove a challenge for Burnham, who will face pressure from health economists and the voices on the left who will ask for money to be redirected from ‘pharma giants’ to hospital beds. Most prominently, adult social care has the greatest capacity to be a legacy Burnham can point to. While past governments have been willing to talk about symptoms, diagnosis and solutions, delivering this, and importantly how it is delivered, can be a defining legacy for a Labour Government whose definition has been hard to find.

For more on how Andy Burnham’s tenure in leadership has been received by the press and public so far, read our overview of key stories and perspectives of his first few weeks as PM.

How Vuelio’s stakeholder management and outreach tracking can help you navigate the changing political ecosystem

August 11, 2026/0 Comments/in Politics, Public Affairs Stakeholder Engagement, Political Services, Political Database, Political Monitoring, Stakeholder Management Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

Public Affairs and policy professionals once again find themselves operating in an entirely altered reality following rapid changes under Andy Burnham’s leadership. Secretaries of State are settling into new roles, special advisers are being reassigned, and Committee memberships, departmental priorities, and Westminister’s informal networks are being reformed in real time.

The stakeholder maps built six months ago may already be out of date, but knowing who is who is only half the challenge. The other is having a system that empowers Public Affairs professionals to log, track, and act on relationships as they shift, without losing the institutional memory built up over months or years of engagement.

That’s where a fully-integrated approach to stakeholder management, engagement tracking, and distribution becomes essential…

The Cost of Fragmented Relationship Management

Many Public Affairs teams still manage stakeholder relationships across a patchwork of spreadsheets, inboxes, and personal notes. But if someone leaves the team and takes their contextual knowledge with them, or a reshuffle scrambles half your target list overnight, nobody can know with confidence when a key contact was last spoken to, or what was discussed.

In a period of political flux — new ministers, new special advisers, new committee line-ups — that fragility can quickly become a liability. Teams need a single, reliable source of truth for who they’re engaging with, how that relationship is progressing, and what has been said so far. Anything less risks duplicated effort, missed follow-ups, and outreach that lands on a desk that has already changed hands.

Fully Integrated Stakeholder Management and Engagement Tracking

Vuelio’s revamped suite for Public Affairs is built to solve this problem. At its core is a fully integrated Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) system that sits directly alongside Vuelio’s Political Database.

Every contact, every interaction, and every piece of context lives in one place, rather than scattered across separate tools.

Key capabilities include:

Stakeholder segmentation: Build custom stakeholder maps, filter contacts by group type, and add people to lists in seconds. Track the health of each relationship with a simple Red/Amber/Green status, so it’s immediately clear where a relationship needs attention as roles change.
Centralised interactions management: Keep a single, searchable log of every stakeholder interaction, automatically linked back to the relevant contact profile. Nothing lives in someone’s personal inbox, but is findable in a secure, exportable record the whole team can rely on.
Customisable engagement tracking: Define your own fields for categorising interactions in a way that fits your team’s workflow, whether that is by campaign, issue area, or engagement type. Everything integrates with your Political, Media, and Private Contacts databases for one overview of activity, rather than three separate ones.
Built-in analytics: Monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of your outreach as you go, with reporting that surfaces patterns instead of requiring manual number-crunching. Add private contacts with bespoke categorisation to build out your own picture alongside Vuelio’s Political Database of 55,000+ contacts.
Safe, secure, and GDPR compliant: Every interaction is logged and managed in a way that keeps your stakeholder data compliant, without adding friction to your team’s day-to-day work.

The result is a stakeholder mapping and tracking function that doesn’t need to be rebuilt every time the political landscape shifts. When a minister moves department or a special adviser changes hands, your team can update the record and carry on, rather than starting from scratch.

From Insight to Action: Distribution That Keeps Pace

Knowing who to speak to is only useful if you can reach them efficiently, and demonstrate that the outreach is working. Vuelio’s integrated distribution tools are designed to turn stakeholder intelligence directly into action.

From within the same platform, teams can:

Send branded, personalised emails directly from the platform, using client-specific templates and their own asset library to embed images, statements, and other collateral — so every message is visually consistent and on-message.
Track engagement in detail, with email statistics that capture unique, time and date-stamped interactions for every recipient.
See who opened, clicked, or didn’t engage, and build targeted follow-up lists from that data — rather than sending the same generic follow-up to an entire distribution list.

For a team managing outreach to newly appointed ministers, reshuffled special advisers, or a suddenly-relevant select committee, a combination of speed and precision matters. It’s the difference between broadcasting into the void and having a genuine, evidence-based read on how your campaign is landing.

A Single Source of Truth for a Fast-Moving Landscape

What separates public affairs teams that stay ahead of that churn from those who are constantly playing catch-up is whether their tools can keep pace with it.

Vuelio’s fully-integrated suite for Public Affairs, combining an industry-leading Political Database with fully integrated SRM, engagement tracking, and distribution tools, gives your team exactly that: a single, current, evidence-led view of who holds the influence, how your relationships with them are progressing, and how your outreach is actually performing.

As the new government beds in, now is the moment to make sure your team’s stakeholder intelligence is as current as the landscape it is tracking.

Find out more about Vuelio’s fully-integrated solutions for Public Affairs here.

The battle for AI visibility: Why Tier 2 titles shouldn’t be overlooked by PR and comms

August 5, 2026/0 Comments/in PR, Communications, Media PR, Press and Bloggers, Lumina Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

PR and comms professionals have never had more channels to manage, but also perhaps less clarity about which ones actually matter. Budgets are stretched, newsrooms are shrinking, and audiences are fragmenting across platforms that didn’t exist a few years ago. And now, there’s a new stakeholder to consider in AI.

Large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are increasingly mediating between organisations and the people trying to understand them. Ask an LLM about a company, a campaign or a crisis, and it will synthesise an answer from whatever it can find across the web — comparing owned claims against journalists, government databases, academic institutions, and industry bodies.

For comms teams, this is a huge challenge, and one without a universally agreed strategy for winning visibility within them. Tier 1 national coverage still matters, but it isn’t automatically the most influential source feeding an AI-generated answer.

Here is why Tier 2 titles deserve a bigger share of PR and comms attention in this new landscape…

LLMs reward quality and specificity, not just prestige

When an LLM assesses how credible a piece of coverage is, size of masthead isn’t the deciding factor.

As Vuelio’s Executive Director of AI Strategy Ngaire Crawford summarised during a recent Vuelio roundtable on managing reputation in the AI age:

‘The quality of the coverage will really inform whether the model uses it as a source. It needs to help answer the question with clear facts and validated endorsement… sometimes smaller sources are surfaced because there simply isn’t that quality in more reputable publications.’

A focused, well-sourced article in a niche title can do more work for an LLM than a broad, generalised piece in a national paper, because it gives the model something concrete to cite.

Trade and specialist press are becoming a go-to source for LLMs

This plays out clearly in sector-specific research. For Vuelio report ‘The role of AI, LLMs, and earned media in shaping reputation‘, Head of Insights Strategy Amy Chappell looked into supermarket citations across LLM platforms. She found that the sources doing the heaviest lifting were trade titles like The Grocer and the Grocery Gazette, not the national press.

Purposeful Relations’ Stuart Bruce, speaking during Vuelio’s ‘How AI is changing the way we communicate‘ panel, saw the same pattern:

‘It’s not necessarily going to be your tier 1 titles. It could be trade press. It could be expert blogs. And that’s because LLMs know that it is a specialist source – this is going to be where to find reliable information.’

If your sector has trusted trade or specialist outlets, they should be core to your outreach and not an afterthought.

Local media is getting an unexpected AI-driven boost

After more than a decade of decline, local press may be finding an unlikely source of renewal. Speaking during Vuelio webinar ‘How to build an AI comms strategy: Lessons from regulated industries‘, SSE plc’s Ross Easton saw a silver lining for a subsector PR and comms professionals have often overlooked:

‘AI is giving a kind of renewal to those local outlets, because their content is being picked up, and often it’s not behind paywalls.’

He anticipates more licensing deals between publishers and AI providers as a business model develops, concluding: ‘I do think that earned media is still a really important place to invest time and effort, absolutely.’

Local titles are often more accessible to AI crawlers than paywalled nationals, and closer to the communities an organisation most needs to reach. Well worth a fresh look for comms teams weighing up where to invest limited outreach time.

Freshness and relevance signal reliability to AI models

LLMs hold vast amounts of historical data within their static models, but when a user asks a time-sensitive question, the engine has to look outward for real-time information.

‘They’re going to be looking for really up-to-date, recent information. You’re constantly feeding the beast and making sure that your information out there is recent,’ says Stuart Bruce.

In practice, that means refreshing web pages regularly and labelling any that are out of date. Trade press and specialist titles tend to publish more frequently and specifically on a given organisation than national outlets can, giving comms teams more chances to keep their evidence base current — a signal that an organisation remains an active source of information, not one the model only knows through outdated mentions.

Multiple touchpoints beat a single big splash

Perhaps most importantly, LLMs build confidence in a fact through corroboration.

As Stuart Bruce put it during Vuelio webinar ‘AI as the new PR & comms stakeholder‘:

‘AI creates content in the same way a journalist or an analyst might, by synthesising countless bits of information from across the web. The more touchpoints the AI finds to verify a fact, the more likely it is to include it.’

He illustrates this with a university industrial dispute where the AI’s narrative ended up dominated by the trade union’s perspective: the union had provided multiple touchpoints (website statements, social media and media quotes) while the university responded only to journalists.

‘The trade union gave them half a dozen quotes. The university gave them one. It just wasn’t credible,’ Bruce notes.

A strategic mix of Tier 1 and Tier 2 placements, reinforced across owned and earned channels, builds a corroborated footprint; a feat one big splash would struggle to achieve.

None of this diminishes national coverage. But it does mean comms strategies built solely around Tier 1 hits are leaving potential visibility undiscovered, at exactly the moment AI platforms are becoming a meaningful route through which people discover and evaluate organisations. The real challenge is knowing which sources are shaping how AI represents you, and where the gaps in your evidence base are.

This is what Vuelio’s Lumina AI View was built to solve — an AI visibility solution specifically geared towards PR and comms. Lumina AI View helps you understand what AI knows about your organisation, and where it learned it from, tracking the sources that models such as Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude cite when representing you and revealing where you stand, and how to impact this.

Brand relevance is perhaps less than ever the preserve of Tier 1 publications alone. Tier 2 titles, be they trade press, specialist outlets, expert blogs or local media, are proving just as capable of shaping how AI talks about an organisation as the biggest national mastheads, sometimes more so.

By ensuring your earned media strategy is continuous, highly credible, and verified across multiple digital touchpoints, you can make sure your organisation, and the clients you work with, are indexed by the algorithms, and also trusted by them.

Find out more about Vuelio’s AI View.

Why Communications Must Lead on AI Reputation: Inside Vuelio’s Charity Roundtable

August 4, 2026/0 Comments/in Charity, Communications, Media Media Database, Media Monitoring, PR, Press and Bloggers, Public Sector, Lumina Blog Posts /by Katherine Amenumey

Vuelio recently hosted a roundtable with a group of our charity clients, bringing together senior communications and media professionals for an open, peer-led discussion on a rapidly growing challenge: managing organisational reputation within Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models (LLMs).

The roundtable brought together experts from leading charities, including the British Heart Foundation, Age UK, and the Stroke Association. The discussion explored how charities are navigating the emerging risks and opportunities associated with AI-driven search, reputation management, and organisational visibility in an increasingly AI-mediated information landscape.

Following a quick AI jargon-buster with Vuelio COO Kyle Lindsay, the conversation quickly moved to a broader strategic question:

As AI increasingly becomes another way people discover and understand organisations, what role should communications play in stewarding organisational reputation and public understanding?

For the senior communications and media leaders around the table, one thing was clear: AI is increasingly influencing how audiences discover, understand, and form opinions about organisations.

Rather than focusing solely on how organisations can optimise for AI, the discussion explored what this shift means for communications. AI hasn’t created an entirely new discipline for communicators, but has introduced another audience – one that interprets, combines, and redistributes information about organisations, often before someone has visited a website, read a news article, or spoken to an expert.

Drawing on the experiences, concerns, and practical approaches shared during the roundtable, here are key insights to help communications teams better understand what this shift means for organisational reputation, measurement, and future communications strategy.

1. AI is changing how reputation is formed

For decades, the path a supporter or journalist took to find your charity was predictable: Question → Google → Click → Read. Today, that journey is changing. Millions of active users are bypassing traditional search engines entirely, going straight to platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.

Instead of receiving a list of links, users get a synthesised answer.

‘People are reading the synthesised answer, not the article. Reputation often now forms inside the AI response.’ – Amy Chappell, Head of Insights Strategy, Vuelio

If a major donor or a journalist queries an LLM about your cause tomorrow morning, they will likely absorb that generated snapshot before ever reaching your website or reading the original source material. Increasingly, the first impression of your organisation is being formed within an AI-generated answer rather than through a direct interaction with your own channels.

That doesn’t replace traditional media relations or stakeholder engagement. It does, however, introduce another place where organisational reputation is formed – one that Communications teams increasingly need to understand and measure.

2. Who owns AI reputation?

‘If ChatGPT gave a highly inaccurate answer about your organisation tomorrow, who owns fixing it?’- Amy Chappell, Head of Insights Strategy, Vuelio

Is it IT? Digital? SEO? Marketing?

The consensus around the table was clear: while AI itself spans multiple business units, reputational challenges firmly sit within Communications and PR.

If your website had a typo, communications might not patch the code. But if that typo damaged your public standing or made its way into a journalist’s brief, comms would lead the response.

That perspective closely reflects Gartner’s recent view that communications is evolving beyond distributing messages towards stewarding public understanding across media, search and AI.

Rather than introducing an entirely new responsibility, AI reinforces many of the responsibilities communications teams already have: building trust, earning third-party credibility, shaping organisational narratives, and ensuring they are accurately understood.

Because LLMs synthesise information from multiple trusted sources rather than relying on a single source of truth, their understanding of an organisation is only as strong as the wider evidence ecosystem surrounding it. That makes consistency, credibility, and corroboration increasingly important – not just for the audiences communications teams have always engaged with, but for AI as well.

The role of communications isn’t to control every AI response. It’s to understand, influence, and measure the information ecosystem shaping those responses.

3. Understanding AI’s Information Ecosystem

Different AI models can return different answers, and different questions about the same organisation can surface different sources. Even the same prompt may produce differing responses over time as the information landscape evolves.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t patterns. While each platform has its own approach to retrieving and synthesising information, there are often consistent themes in the types of sources, organisations, and evidence that influence AI-generated answers. Rather than trying to optimise for one individual response, the discussion focused on understanding those broader patterns and the information ecosystem shaping them.

That ecosystem can include:
– Owned content
– Earned media
– Government and regulatory information
– Academic and research institutions
– Reference sites
– Industry bodies
– Partner organisations

The balance between these sources isn’t fixed. It changes depending on the organisation, the sector, the country and, perhaps most importantly, the question being asked.

‘Our own analysis demonstrates this. While individual responses vary, the broader evidence ecosystem influencing an organisation often shows clear and measurable patterns.’

This was one of the reasons the group discussed treating AI as another audience rather than another search engine. Just as different stakeholder groups consume information differently, AI-generated answers are shaped by different combinations of trusted evidence depending on the context.

Understanding those patterns is becoming increasingly important. It provides a blueprint for ‘winning’ AI, but also helps communications teams understand how their organisation is being interpreted, identify which evidence is shaping those answers, and measure how that evolves over time.

4. Trust is built through corroboration

There is a common misconception that Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) or ‘AI SEO’ is a game of technical tricks. The roundtable data debunked this. LLMs do not simply parrot your press releases, but look for corroboration.

When synthesising a profile, an LLM compares your owned website claims against trusted third parties: journalists, government databases, academic institutions, and industry bodies. High-quality earned media footprint can heavily influence how these systems talk about you.

‘Earned media hasn’t become less important in the AI era. It’s arguably become more important because it increasingly influences the systems people are using to access information.’ – Amy Chappell, Head of Insights Strategy, Vuelio

This led to one of the most interesting debates around the table – what actually makes earned media influential in AI-generated responses. Is it simply coverage in the biggest, most recognised publications, or does the prominence and substance of an individual article matter more?

We took that question to Vuelio’s Executive Director of AI Strategy, Ngaire Crawford. Her view was that the answer is both:

‘The quality of the coverage will really inform whether the model uses it as a source. It needs to help answer the question with clear facts and validated endorsement, so quality absolutely comes into it. Sometimes smaller sources are surfaced because there simply isn’t that quality in more reputable publications.’

For communications teams, that’s an important distinction. The objective is to go beyond securing coverage in the largest publications to build a strong, consistent evidence ecosystem around your organisation and your cause.

It’s another reminder that there is no definitive blueprint for ‘winning’ in LLMs yet. The models continue to evolve, and their weighting of different signals isn’t transparent. What remains consistent is the importance of producing accurate, trusted and well-corroborated information across the wider information landscape. And those are principles communications teams have always understood.

Practical Tips for Comms Teams:

The discussion concluded by moving away from theory and towards practical application. If AI is becoming another audience, what does that mean for day-to-day communications planning?

The consensus wasn’t that communications teams should completely rethink their strategies. Instead, it was about building on the principles they already know work.

Build a consistent evidence ecosystem

AI-generated answers are shaped by information from multiple trusted sources. Consistency across owned content, earned media, thought leadership, research and partner organisations helps reduce conflicting narratives and gives AI a stronger evidence base from which to build an understanding of your organisation.

Understand which sources shape AI’s understanding

Rather than focusing solely on traditional media lists, consider which publications, organisations, and evidence sources are consistently influencing AI-generated answers about your organisation and your sector. Those may include national media, but they could also include trade publications, academic research, government sources or trusted industry bodies.

Think beyond coverage

Communications teams have traditionally measured success through metrics such as coverage, reach, and engagement. Increasingly, there’s also value in understanding how that coverage contributes to the wider evidence ecosystem influencing AI-generated answers.

Keep humans in the loop

While AI can support research, planning, and content creation, the discussion reinforced that authenticity, judgement, and critical thinking remain essential. AI can accelerate communications, but it shouldn’t replace the expertise required to build trust and protect reputation.

Final Thoughts: Measure, Don’t Speculate

The session concluded with a shift toward measurement. Because AI systems are probabilistic and non-deterministic (meaning the same prompt can yield a different answer on a different day), tracking reputation requires a systematic framework over time, which is what Vuelio’s “AI View Score” is designed to do. Bringing several visibility signals together into one easy-to-track metric which can be shared internally to inform not only the Communications team but the wider stakeholders.

Throughout the roundtable, one theme consistently emerged: AI doesn’t replace the fundamentals of good communications, but expands them.

Just as communications teams have spent years measuring media reputation, stakeholder influence, and campaign effectiveness, AI introduces another audience whose understanding can also be monitored, measured and learned from.

Amy Chappell, Head of Insights Strategy at Vuelio, said:

‘The goal isn’t to optimise for individual AI responses but to understand how your organisation is being interpreted over time, in the same way we’ve measured media reputation for years. AI simply introduces another audience whose understanding we now have the opportunity to measure and impact.’

Rather than asking whether an organisation can ‘win’ individual prompts, the discussion focused on understanding broader patterns: which evidence is shaping AI-generated answers, how that changes over time, and where communications teams have opportunities to strengthen organisational reputation.

Because AI systems continue to evolve, there will never be a single definitive answer to what AI says about an organisation. That’s why measurement matters. Looking beyond individual responses to understand the wider information ecosystem gives Communications teams a more meaningful way to track reputation, identify emerging trends and make informed strategic decisions.

This is the thinking behind Vuelio’s AI View. Rather than focusing on isolated prompts, AI View helps organisations understand the wider evidence ecosystem influencing AI-generated answers, bringing together visibility, authority, freshness, sentiment and dominance into a measurable framework that can be tracked over time.

Ultimately, communications has always been responsible for helping organisations earn trust, build credibility, and shape public understanding.

Get in touch with the Vuelio team if you’d like to see how AI View can help you understand your organisation’s visibility in AI-powered search. If you’re also interested in attending future roundtable events, just let us know – we’d love you to join us.

Burnham’s first few weeks: What 500+ Perspectives Reveal About the New PM

July 30, 2026/0 Comments/in Politics, PR, Communications, Media, Public Affairs PR, Political Monitoring, Public Sector, Lumina Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

Andy Burnham has been Prime Minister for barely a week, and the UK media has already produced a staggering volume of coverage on him. Main themes: tax cuts, prison releases, a Scottish Labour resignation, and a running argument about whether any of it is actually funded. This is a week of coverage that would usually take a government months to generate.

We ran media coverage from 21–28 July through Vuelio‘s media intelligence tool Lumina, which uses AI to surface the stories getting the most traction, the different angles being taken on them, and the people and organisations driving each narrative. Across this single week, it picked up more than 100 distinct stories and more than 1.9k separate perspectives – a lot of noise for one Prime Minister’s first days in office, and a useful case study in how quickly a political narrative can splinter once it hits the press.

Here are the stories and perspectives that stood out…

The VAT Cut That Split the Party Before It Split Public Opinion

The single biggest story of the week, by media volume, was Burnham’s decision to scrap the 5% VAT on domestic electricity bills. Downing Street framed it as a straightforward cost-of-living win: a Prime Minister acting fast to give households breathing space. Burnham, Chancellor John Healey, and Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds all leaned into the same language of significant statements of priorities.

But the story that actually spread was the one about how it’s being paid for. The government said the £850 million cost would come from scrapping the Digital ID programme. Then Darren Jones, a sacked minister and Starmer loyalist, publicly pointed out that Digital ID was never funded in the first place, so cancelling it wouldn’t actually free up any money. That single social media post turned a tax-cut announcement into a story about Labour infighting on day two of the new government.

Consumer champion Martin Lewis added his own dose of realism, warning that the average £45 saving would likely be wiped out entirely by an expected rise in the energy price cap the same month the cut takes effect. Between Jones undermining the funding claim and Lewis undermining the actual benefit, what should have been a clean early win turned into a week of ‘yes, but’ coverage.

Anas Sarwar’s Exit Turns Into a Scottish Labour Civil War

If the VAT story was about funding, the Sarwar story was about loyalty, and it generated the most media items of any single event in the week, with over 1,700 pieces of coverage. Anas Sarwar resigned as Scottish Labour leader to take a ministerial post in Burnham’s government and a seat in the House of Lords, just weeks after leading the party to its worst-ever Holyrood result.

The reaction from within his own party was brutal. Scottish Labour insiders and MPs deemed it ‘failing upwards’ and ‘shameful’, with one Executive Committee member branding it a reward for five years of failure. First Minister John Swinney piled in from the SNP side, calling out the ‘incredible hypocrisy‘ of Sarwar accepting a peerage after previously saying he had no interest in the Lords and wanted to abolish it. Reform UK and the Scottish Conservatives joined the pile-on too, meaning the story would not leave the pages of the main papers quickly.

There is also a quieter but sharper angle running underneath: several commentators framed Sarwar’s promotion as reward, since he was the most senior Labour figure to publicly call for Keir Starmer to go, effectively paving the way for Burnham. Whether or not that is fair, it is the kind of narrative that sticks as it’s simple and plausible – exactly the sort of narrative communicators need to watch for.

The Prisoner Release Scheme Becomes a Test of Burnham’s Nerve

The early release scheme controversy generated two overlapping stories worth close to 1,500 media items combined, driven almost entirely by the case of PC Andrew Harper. His widow Lissie Harper and mother Debbie Adlam gave the story its emotional core, calling the policy ‘deplorable’ and an insult to justice.

In 2024, the Labour government announced separate and temporary emergency measures to release some prisoners early to ease overcrowding.

Burnham paused the scheme within days, framing it as a necessary act of listening to victims. But the perspective that latterly carried the most weight for the press wasn’t the victims’ campaign or the Conservative’s demand for emergency legislation (though Kemi Badenoch made plenty of noise), but the operational one. Former justice secretary Sir David Gauke and prison governors warned that pausing the scheme without a plan would risk running prisons out of capacity by November, and causing unrest among inmates who were told they’d be released. A tension that Burnham now has to manage, with a policy that is politically convenient to pause now, but could bring substantial risks if suspended longer-term.
A surprising key driver of the story – Sally Jameson, a Labour MP and former prison officer, seemingly without a justice brief, becoming a spokeswoman for the prison release scheme’s cancellation in the press.

Pubs Get a Tax Break, Others Are Annoyed

The 20% business rates cut for pubs, clubs and live music venues produced the widest spread of reaction of any story this week, and it serves as a lesson in what can happen when helping one part of an industry and not the rest. Pub landlords were broadly pleased, though many said the estimated £1,100 annual saving barely covers rising insurance and energy costs.

What caught the attention of the press was who got left out. Restaurant chain Leon’s co-founder John Vincent called the policy unfair for excluding restaurants and cafes on the same high street. Hotel groups, beauty salons, pharmacies and convenience stores all made similar complaints. Even the vape industry pushed back on being labelled ‘anti-social’ to help fund the cut.

Commentator, journalist, and tax lawyer Dan Neidle was one of the key spokespeople quoted in the press on this issue, tapped to comment in newspaper reporting and YouTube commentary. Spokespeople outside of the political sphere can be a useful resource for the media and drive a narrative.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies added a structural criticism that is also worth flagging for anyone advising on this space long-term: rather than reforming the business rates system, the government is picking specific sectors each year, which the IFS says makes the whole system more arbitrary, not less.

Devolution, Welfare, and the Premiership Verdict

A few smaller but connected threads round out the week. Burnham’s ‘No 10 North’ launch in Manchester drew both genuine enthusiasm from northern business groups and accusations of being a ‘gimmick’ and a ‘coup’, particularly after it emerged the building had been made ready with suspicious speed.

It’s worth flagging a disconnect here for anyone working in public affairs: the shift in political concentration that No 10 North represents is a significant story within that world, given its direct impact on lobbying access and stakeholder engagement. But the media’s interest was narrower – less concerned with what this means for the machinery of government long-term, and more focused on hunting for the conflict angle (the ‘gimmick’, the ‘coup’, the suspiciously fast building work). For public affairs teams, that’s a reminder not to rely on general media coverage as a proxy for how significant a structural change actually is.

His £2 bus fare cap and hints at tightening PIP eligibility for young claimants both split Labour’s own backbenches, with left-wing MPs already threatening the kind of rebellion that sank Starmer’s welfare reforms.

And running through all of it is the broader question of who Burnham actually is as a leader. Polling shows better initial approval than his predecessors, but deep public scepticism about whether he’ll deliver anything lasting. As one Times commentator put it, the public wants to know if this is a genuine reset or just a more charismatic version of the same problems.

What This Means for Communicators

There are a few elements here worth taking into any planning session over the following week.

Funding mechanisms are now a bigger media risk than the policy itself. Every announcement this week that promised a saving was immediately met with ‘how is this paid for’, and that question outlasted the positive news cycle.

Communicators should also watch out for the excluded party narrative. Any targeted support measure will generate its own counter-story from whoever wasn’t included, often within hours.

Internal party dissent is being amplified faster than ever. A single social media post from a sacked minister reshaped a national funding story in real time. If you’re advising a client with internal critics, assume they’ll surface quickly, and plan your response before they do.

Final Thoughts

Burnham’s first week shows how fast a clean policy win can fracture into a myriad of competing storylines once journalists, opposition MPs, industry bodies, and disgruntled colleagues all get their say. The stories that travelled furthest weren’t always the biggest announcements – often, they were the smaller signs of stressors: an unfunded claim, an excluded sector, a broken promise about the House of Lords.

What’s just as telling as the stories themselves is who was driving them. A backbench MP with a prison officer background, a sacked minister’s social media post, a tax lawyer providing commentary to broadcasters – none of these are obvious spokespeople, yet each one shaped a national narrative. For comms teams, knowing the story is only half of the job. Knowing which individuals and organisations are actually driving each perspective – and why – is vital for stakeholder engagement strategies, from who you brief early to who you monitor closely for potential sources of reputational risk.

To see what Lumina can surface for your organisation’s coverage, take a look at what it can do.

Why in-house expertise remains non-negotiable for modern Public Affairs

July 16, 2026/0 Comments/in Politics, Public Affairs, Influencers Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

The UK political and media landscapes have never moved faster, with policy changes that used to take months now unfolding quickly. Public affairs professionals tasked with anticipating what lies ahead need data-driven insights to track this multi-channel environment – but algorithms alone cannot decode the nuance of a Westminster shift, or the subtle implications of a select committee briefing.

The modern public affairs toolkit requires the combination of data and human-led policy expertise, something Vuelio offers as part of its multi-channel suite for public affairs professionals.

Human support in an AI-enabled world

In an ecosystem of fragmented audiences and intersecting channels of influence, having a single source of truth is vital. Vuelio delivers this through a fully integrated platform that connects political monitoring, stakeholder management, and media intelligence – with the support of a dedicated, in-house Policy Research team.

Operating as an authentic extension of your team, Vuelio’s sector-specific Policy Researchers understand the unique regulatory, economic, and political challenges facing the public affairs industry. Many of these researchers come directly from the political landscape themselves, bringing hands-on experience and a seasoned understanding of how Westminster and Whitehall function. Access essential context, institutional memory, and forward-looking horizon scanning that turns raw data into strategic intelligence.

Tailored intelligence, delivered proactively

The true test of political services is the ability to eliminate the noise of the 24/7 news cycle while highlighting critical alerts. Vuelio’s suite balances automation and human curation to give public affairs leaders a 360-degree view of their environment.

Aligned researchers actively manage monitoring briefs, adapting them as government personnel change, or as corporate goals evolve. This includes:

Contextualized Briefings: Rather than wading through thousands of uncurated alerts, teams receive tailored daily and weekly updates, such as Westminster Daily, Devolved Daily, and sector-specific horizon scans, curated by analysts who know exactly what your organisation cares about.
Live Coverage and Ad-Hoc Support: During high-stakes political moments like the Budget, Autumn Statement, or party conferences, the Policy Research team provides live coverage, detailed summaries, and impact analysis on request.
Deciphering Devolved and Regional Governance: Vuelio provides thorough monitoring across the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru, Northern Ireland Assembly, Greater London Assembly, and local combined authorities. Researchers track regional consultations, council press releases, and assembly debates, ensuring you never miss a local regulatory risk or regional opportunity.

A partnership built for strategic success

Navigating a complex policy environment is a time-consuming task with an overwhelming number of data points. Attempting to manage this through siloed platforms or uncurated feeds inevitably leads to blind spots.

With Vuelio, public affairs teams have a multi-disciplined support network — combining a sector-specialised Policy Researcher, a trained Account Manager, and advanced technical support. From the initial tailored trial process through to setting your goals for the parliamentary year, this collaborative partnership ensures your intelligence solution matches your strategic workflows.

In public affairs, having the right information at the right time is valuable, but having the expert context to understand exactly what it means for your organisation is vital. By blending innovative software with human expertise, Vuelio ensures your team is always informed, securely prepared, and strategically positioned to shape the conversation.

Find out more about Vuelio’s fully-integrated solutions for Public Affairs here.

How real-time broadcast and podcast monitoring redefines Public Affairs strategy

July 9, 2026/0 Comments/in Politics, PR, Communications, Public Affairs Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

In the fast-moving world of UK Public Affairs, timing is everything. A single comment made during a select committee hearing, a breaking news interview on morning television, or a candid revelation on a political podcast can reshape policy debates, pivot stakeholder agendas, and shift public opinion in a matter of minutes. For Public Affairs teams, policy professionals, and campaigners, staying ahead of these shifts requires awareness of the full political landscape.

Yet, traditional methods of political monitoring are increasingly struggling to keep pace in this environment. Relying on siloed tracking tools, manual reviews, and waiting hours for official written records means Public Affairs teams are often reacting to news that has already evolved. Today’s fast-moving ecosystem demands a live, omnichannel solution that delivers immediate visibility across all media types.

Recognising these challenges, Vuelio has revamped its comprehensive suite for public affairs, introducing real-time broadcast and podcast monitoring capabilities. By breaking down the walls between media intelligence and political insights, these updates ensure you never miss the critical conversations shaping the legislative agenda.

The power of an integrated strategy

Historically, public affairs and media relations often functioned in isolation; one team tracking legislation and stakeholder engagement, and another managing press coverage and public relations.

Today’s political and media landscapes are deeply symbiotic. Media coverage directly drives parliamentary debate, and parliamentary proceedings instantly fuel the 24-hour news cycle. If your political monitoring doesn’t automatically connect with your media monitoring, you are only seeing half the picture. An integrated approach ensures that organisations see the full scope of an issue as it unfolds.

Vuelio’s updated suite solves this by offering a fully connected platform designed to act not just as a means of capturing coverage and insight, but as a centralised corporate memory. By blending political intelligence, media monitoring, stakeholder engagement, and audience insights into a single, user-friendly dashboard, Public Affairs teams can track multiple channels, functions, and metrics simultaneously. Organisations to build more cohesive, agile, and impactful campaigns that resonate both inside Westminster and across wider public discourse.

Real-time broadcast monitoring: Moving beyond Hansard

One of the most significant advancements in Vuelio’s revamped suite is the introduction of real-time broadcast monitoring, specifically tailored to the high-stakes needs of public affairs professionals.

Are you missing the key parliamentary conversations that are shaping policy right now? In a fast-paced crisis or during a crucial legislative vote, delays can mean the difference between actively shaping the narrative and being left out of the conversation entirely. With multiple parliamentary committees sitting at the same time, it is physically impossible for teams to watch every stream manually.

Vuelio’s live omnichannel solution monitors Parliament Live TV continuously, delivering instant alerts for keyword mentions alongside concise summaries of what is happening live on the floor or in committee rooms. These can be sent straight to your inbox, and are also available directly in-platform.

Whether it’s an unexpected amendment proposal, a direct mention of your organisation, or a shift in tone from a key minister, you are notified the moment it happens. Public Affairs teams can immediately brief stakeholders, draft reactive statements, or adjust lobbying strategies in real time. Beyond parliamentary coverage, Vuelio’s broader broadcast monitoring captures comprehensive TV and radio across national and regional stations, granting vital visibility over the political audio-visual landscape.

Why podcast monitoring is central to modern campaigning

While television and radio remain vital pillars of broadcast media, the digital audio ecosystem has expanded dramatically. Over the last few years, political podcasts have transitioned from niche commentary into a dominant force in UK political discourse. Shows like The Rest is Politics, The News Agents, and Political Currency have gone beyond reacting to the news, to actively setting the political agenda. Meanwhile, smaller, independent shows capture emerging or niche perspectives, broadcasting them to concentrated, loyal audiences.

Podcasts have become the new public square where politicians trial policy ideas, journalists break insider insights, and key opinion leaders shape public sentiment in a relaxed (and relatable), long-form format. For public affairs and communications teams planning campaigns for 2026 and beyond, ignoring this medium is risky.

Former No.10 Press Secretary and The Rest is Politics Presenter Alastair Campbell outlined the growing influence of podcasts in Vuelio’s webinar with the Institute for Government ‘The Trump challenge: Chaos, confusion and government communications’:

Vuelio has made advanced podcast monitoring central to its campaign planning tools. Using speech-to-text technology, the platform tracks thousands of podcast episodes for specific keywords, brand mentions, and policy topics.

Instead of manually listening to hours of audio content, public affairs professionals receive automated alerts and transcripts when their areas of interest are discussed. Identify emerging risks, discover new political allies, track competitor activity, and understand the deeper nuances of political debates before they hit the mainstream press. Proactively tracking these audio channels allows you to intercept narratives early and align your messaging with the conversations driving the political zeitgeist.

A comprehensive, future-proof solution

The political and media landscapes will always remain in a state of constant flux, with patterns of influence continuously reshaping themselves. To successfully navigate this environment, public affairs teams need tools that are as agile and interconnected as the world they monitor.

With over thirty years of experience supporting policy professionals, campaigners, and stakeholder engagement teams, Vuelio’s updated suite is designed for today’s challenges. Backed by the global expertise of the Pulsar Group and fully accredited for data security (including ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials, and GDPR compliance), Vuelio delivers a trusted, robust, and holistic view of the political landscape.

By combining real-time broadcast alerts from Parliament Live TV with deep-dive podcast monitoring and media insights, Vuelio ensures your organisation is informed, prepared, and ahead of the conversation.

Ready to transform your political monitoring strategy? Find out more about Vuelio’s live omnichannel solutions and discover how real-time insights can empower your team: Explore Vuelio’s Political Monitoring solutions.

Andy Burnham’s path to Westminster: Inside the inner circle

July 7, 2026/0 Comments/in Politics, Public Affairs Political Services, Political Database, Political Monitoring Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

The UK political landscape continues to evolve at a fast pace, and a figure commanding high speculative attention at the moment is potential future leader Andy Burnham. Widely dubbed the ‘King of the North’, the Greater Manchester Mayor’s national ambitions have long been a subject of intense scrutiny across Westminster and the wider public affairs sector.

For the lowdown on the individuals advising and anchoring a potential Burnham administration, the Vuelio Political Team has compiled an exclusive, comprehensive downloadable guide: ‘Speculation Doc: Burnham’s Inner Circle – Rumoured Advisers’.

What is included

Vuelio’s in-house political analysts have mapped out the key figures across four critical pillars of a potential Burnham operation:

Operational: Discover the strategists tipped to lead transition planning and Whitehall operations. The briefing covers James Purnell, the reported chief of staff and Blairite moderniser tasked with reassuring business and utility investors, alongside Kevin Lee, Burnham’s long-serving “right-hand man” and operational architect.

It also highlights Baroness Sue Gray’s behind-the-scenes advisory role on Downing Street’s configuration, Caroline Simpson’s potential elevation to a ‘No. 10 North’ deputy chief of staff role, transport specialist Tom Whitney, and Manchester Deputy Mayor Kate Green, who is reportedly liaising with MPs.

Economic: Gain insights into how ‘Manchesterism’ could scale nationally. We profile blue-chip economic heavyweights like Lord Jim O’Neill, who advocates for substantial infrastructure borrowing, and former Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane, who brings market credibility alongside regional growth instincts. It also looks at the technical expertise of former OBR chair Richard Hughes, GMCA strategy director John Wrathmell, and soft-left strategist Lord Stewart Wood.

Policy: Understand the ideological currents shaping future governance. Read about tech and AI policy expert Josh Simons (former MP for Makerfield), Compass director Neal Lawson, whose advocacy for proportional representation and cross-party cooperation could prove crucial in a hung-parliament scenario, and Common Wealth founder Mathew Lawrence, who provides an eco-socialist framework for public ownership.

Communications: See who will be projecting the message. Find out more about Grace Pritchard, the head of communications seconded from Ed Miliband’s team, international communications specialist Donjeta Miftari, and digital strategist Abby Tomlinson, the platform-savvy creator of ‘Milifandom’.

Stay ahead of the political curve

This downloadable intelligence briefing gives you the precise institutional insights required to understand how a future Burnham government could function, what fiscal rules it would navigate, and what to expect from its communications.

Don’t wait for the Westminster system to shift – download the full Vuelio Speculation Document on Andy Burnham’s Inner Circle to ensure your public affairs strategy is fully prepared for what comes next.

Factoring AI, fragmentation, and uncertainty into your comms strategy

July 6, 2026/0 Comments/in PR, Communications, Media Media Monitoring, PR, Press and Bloggers, Lumina, Media Database Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

With AI now integrated into the very fabric of the media and informational landscape, the rules of PR and corporate communications are being rewritten. But are traditional PR skills a thing of the past?

To unpack what is changing in comms and what will endure in this AI-enabled era, Vuelio hosted an expert panel discussion.

‘How to Factor AI, Fragmentation, and Uncertainty Into Your Comms Strategy’, hosted by Vuelio’s Head of Content Marketing Alex Bryson, brought together three industry leaders, each offering a distinct perspective on the evolving requirements of the profession. Pearson‘s Director of Financial Communications Laura Ewart, who brings 20 years of experience in financial, corporate, and executive communications, provided a practitioner’s lens on the pressures of modern, high-stakes environments. Diego Bironzo, a Vice President at Edelman Intelligence, offered deep experience in navigating reputation management and trust in the wake of crises, providing a strategic view on how brands can maintain authority in an AI-mediated world. Representing the measurement and intelligence side, Amy Chappell, Head of Insights Strategy at Vuelio, joined the conversation to share findings from our curated media analysis and observations from her breadth of experience in the PR and media landscape.

Is AI an accelerant, rather than a paradigm shift?

While AI is often discussed as a revolutionary force, the panel noted that its primary immediate impact has been to intensify existing trends.

‘My view is that AI, at least at the moment, is not so much a paradigm change when it comes to comms, but an accelerant,’ said Diego.

‘This technology has accelerated some of the shifts we’ve been seeing for a number of years as digital became more prominent… including speeding up story cycles and fragmenting audiences. As a result, increasingly, we’re also seeing the effects of “context collapse”: the messages that, for my grandparents’ generation, would have been mediated by mass media, now are appearing completely unmediated, distributed across platforms to various audiences, traveling in unexpected ways.’

Amy explored how AI is changing the way people access information and form opinions about organisations. While reputation has always been influenced by a mix of media coverage, expert commentary, and stakeholder discussion, AI platforms are increasingly becoming another route through which people discover and evaluate information.

Amy examined the role of AI and LLMs as a mediator for messaging and the news cycle:

‘Using Vuelio’s AI View tool, it’s possible to look into citations of organisations mentioned across the major LLM platforms. In this example, one thing that stands out is the different sources that are feeding the LLMs – earned media overwhelmingly dominates AI citations.

‘AI and LLM platforms, seemingly, at least in this sector, aren’t just looking for the most recent coverage. In this example, we found that LLMs weren’t looking for the most recent; it was a combination. A crisis that happens one week doesn’t automatically affect how LLMs cite organisations the next.’

Amy found that the sources feeding into the supermarket citations were mainly trade titles – The Grocer, the Grocery Gazette, for example. For each new story, or campaign, traditional ‘Tier 1’ titles aren’t automatically going to be the first port of call for LLMs.

‘Clear messaging and spokespeople are still so important to have. So, if Tesco or Sainsbury’s continue to target those types of publications that are feeding the LLMs at the moment, that may have a positive impact on their reputation in the future.’

The emergence of AI as a stakeholder

One of the most significant shifts identified by a growing number of PR practitioners is AI’s active participation in the information ecosystem as a stakeholder.

‘Increasingly, what we’re seeing is AI ultimately being another audience,’ said Amy. ‘In terms of what LLMs are serving about organisations, it’s almost another consumer base.’

Diego expanded on the implications for brand management: ‘I like the idea of treating AI as an additional audience, a stakeholder, because LLMs play a role in mediating your message, adding a layer of interpretation before your content is served up to audiences. As a consequence, perceptions can be shaped from a number of different signals, and these are increasingly harder to keep control of.’

But this doesn’t just have an impact on brand reputation – Laura emphasised the financial implications:

‘AI is an audience as well as a tool, especially in financial comms, where investors are using AI to synthesise lots of data. You’ve also got AI bots, which are automatically trading without humans in the loop – so you need to think of it as an audience when you’re putting your press releases and your content together.’

The strategic necessity of human authenticity

As AI platforms become central to how information is served, the demand for high-quality, authentic human content has increased. When audiences and algorithms alike are flooded with synthetic noise, trust becomes a primary differentiator.

‘Over the past year, there has been a growing expectation upon PRs to use AI in their everyday comms, but it’s not just about knowing how to prompt an AI, it’s also about how to use your critical thinking and judgment to know how and why you’re going to be using AI,’ Laura said.

Where critical thinking is needed, and PRs luckily have this in their wheelhouse already, is in channel selection.

‘For actually getting cut through, we’re finding the best things to do are op-eds, comment pieces, and podcasts. People are looking for voices they can trust and which they feel are authentic, and I think that’s why we’ve seen the rise of the podcast.’

Diego echoed this focus on the human element, noting that earned media has become ‘more relevant than ever’ because of the way it feeds into AI search and interpretation:

‘Increasingly, an authentic and culturally relevant message is becoming more and more important, and that’s the kind of content that people are going to want to see. It needs to be both informed by data and insights as well as have that “human in the loop” touch for authenticity and empathy.’

Practical Integration

As organisations look to position themselves within this new infrastructure, the panel stressed the importance of factoring Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) into strategies.

Regarding how to appear in AI search results, Laura advised a long-term approach:

‘Think about how you can tailor your content to adjust for AI search – there’s lots of different tips and tricks that we’re learning as we go along. For example, LLMs draw from FAQs a lot, so that’s something to think about for website content.’

Diego added that this requires consistent monitoring:

‘People are at the stage of establishing a baseline of where they appear in searches on GEO, being mindful of the fact that answer engines are highly dynamic and constantly changing. It’s important to start understanding what is the baseline, what behaviors and sources shape answers, and think about how it impacts strategy, how we can start to feed the right type of content to LLMs.’

The Future of the Profession

Ultimately, the consensus among the panelists was that AI will not replace the PR professional, but rather demand a more sophisticated, intelligence-led approach to strategy.

Amy summarised the outlook:

‘I’m a big advocate in thinking that AI has actually increased and enhanced the role of the PR. Human skills are going to be increasingly important. It’s still about trust, so getting out there, meeting with journalists, and building relationships with them will continue to be really key.’

As the industry moves through these stages of maturity, from narrative stewardship to influence intelligence, successful comms teams will be those that treat AI as a central stakeholder, prioritise evidence-led communication, and double down on the human connection that algorithms cannot replicate (for now…).

Find out how LLMs are representing your brand and clients in their answers with Vuelio’s AI View.

For more on how AI is changing the way we communicate, check out key insights from our previous Vuelio panel event with Purposeful Relations’ Stuart Bruce, the British Heart Foundation’s Nicole Yost, and JournalismAI’s Tshepo Tshabalala.

Navigating today’s interconnected landscape: Introducing Vuelio’s revamped suite for Public Affairs

June 25, 2026/0 Comments/in Politics, Public Affairs PR, Political Database, Political Monitoring, Public Sector, Political Services Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

In an environment where policy and campaign issues traverse multiple channels simultaneously, every single touchpoint alters the message. Vuelio understands the importance of evolving to meet this modern multichannel challenge, which is why we have revamped our product suite for public affairs.

Adding to over thirty years of experience partnering with public affairs professionals, policy teams, and campaigners, additions to Vuelio’s integrated platform supports teams tasked with turning communication challenges into strategic clarity.

The power of a unified ecosystem: Why integration matters

In today’s fast-moving environment, tracking the media and political landscape using disjointed, siloed tools will mean missed insights. Audiences are increasingly fragmented, and lines of influence intersect in ways they never have before. A single message can prompt a cascade of media requests, social media posts, parliamentary questions, and stakeholder feedback. Without a unified platform, teams can spend hours trying to connect these disparate data points.

Vuelio’s revamped suite resolves this complexity by serving as a comprehensive corporate memory and single source of truth. It functions seamlessly across a number of core pillars to deliver actionable insights directly into your workflow.

Core pillars of Vuelio for Public Affairs

1. Advanced Political Monitoring

Our updated Political Monitoring service offers deep, real-time tracking across the entire legislative spectrum. We monitor Westminster alongside the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru, Northern Ireland Assembly, and the Greater London Assembly. Coverage includes daily schedules, active debates, tabled questions, committee proceedings, and votes.

Beyond central government, the tool extends to regional government consultations, council press releases, and announcements from think tanks, charities, and trade unions. To help you catch key commentary before it hits official channels, the service automatically tracks the social media accounts of political figures and the top 50 political journalists.

2. Live Broadcast Monitoring

Waiting for official parliamentary transcripts can put your organisation on the back foot. Vuelio’s revamped Broadcast Monitoring ensures you receive instant alerts on what is happening on Parliament Live TV, straight to your inbox and in-platform. Mentions and context summaries are delivered as they are broadcast, complete with analytics for instant trend analysis. For specialised campaigns requiring deeper evaluation, our in-house experts are available to build bespoke reports.

3. Comprehensive Podcast Monitoring

Podcasts have emerged as an incredibly influential medium for political discourse, with parliamentarians and key stakeholders regularly appearing as guests or engaging as listeners. To give you complete oversight of the conversations shaping public opinion, Vuelio now actively monitors high-profile and niche political podcasts within our platform suite. This includes news-making programs such as The Rest is Politics, The News Agents, Newscast, and Electoral Dysfunction.

4. A carefully curated Contacts Database

At the heart of the platform is a verified Political Database containing over 55,000 detailed profiles. Maintained by our policy team, it includes:

Parliamentary Contacts (7,000+): Detailed profiles for elected officials across all UK Parliaments, Assemblies, and the EU. Profiles include contact details, political/educational backgrounds, committee memberships, staff details, and Special Advisers.

Civil Service (30,000+): A broad set of civil servant officer contacts from central government, local government, regulators, and arms-length bodies.

Local Government (19,000+): Elected councillors, council leadership, and key council officer roles.
The system also allows you to add private stakeholder contacts with custom categorisations while remaining completely GDPR compliant.

5. Specialised policy expertise

We understand that software is only as powerful as the human intelligence backing it. Vuelio provides access to an in-house team of policy researchers with deep sector specialisms.

As part of the service, you can opt to receive exclusive scheduled publications tailored to your needs:

Horizon Scanning Planners: Including the Parliamentary Planner (covering APPGs) on Thursdays, followed by the Devolved Planner and Sector-Specific Horizon Scans on Fridays.

Daily Briefings: Westminster Daily, Devolved Daily, and Today’s Political Headlines delivered every morning.

Set Piece & Weekly Updates: Full analysis and stakeholder reactions to events like the King’s Speech or the Budget, alongside researcher summaries and transcripts of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) every Wednesday.

6. Stakeholder Management & Engagement Tracking

Our fully integrated Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) system allows teams to track, log, and analyse outreach efforts collectively. No two stakeholders are identical, which is why our system provides customized stakeholder mapping, custom user-defined fields, and a clear Red/Amber/Green status system to evaluate relationships.

Built-in distribution tools allow you to send branded, personalised emails directly from the platform using asset libraries. You can then evaluate individual engagement using time and date-stamped interaction statistics, making it easy to see who opened your correspondence and instantly generate targeted follow-up lists.

Ready to transform your Public Affairs strategy?

The policy environment is too fast and interconnected to navigate with siloed data. Vuelio combines cutting-edge multi-channel monitoring, a massive verified contact database, and dedicated human expertise into a single source of truth.

Explore the next generation of public affairs technology. Trial our services to experience how integrated intelligence can elevate your influence.

Media interview with Reach plc’s Executive Editor of the local democracy reporting service Rob Parsons

June 24, 2026/0 Comments/in PR Pulse, Politics, PR, Media, Public Affairs Political Monitoring, Public Sector, Political Services, Political Database, Press and Bloggers Blog Posts /by Andrew Strutt

Political journalists, especially at a local level, are facing an increasing amount of challenges – from being denied entry to council meetings, to facing abuse online. Someone that has seen how the media industry has changed over the years is Rob Parsons, Reach plc‘s Executive Editor of the local democracy reporting service.

Rob started out as a reporter on The Sentinel in Stoke and moved into covering local politics back in 2017 as political editor at The Yorkshire Post. Since September 2025, he has been overseeing the local democracy reporting service at Reach plc and is responsible for promoting the work of the 83 journalists that work on the scheme.

We caught up with Rob to reflect on how the changing political landscape is affecting the work of local journalists, the importance of both podcasts and newsletters as a way to connect with audiences and what PRs and comms professionals should be aware of when trying to engage the media and get coverage.

How is the political landscape changing with the emergence of new media formats and social platforms, and how does this impact your work?

I’d say a major change in the past two decades is the decline in trust in big institutions (and in politicians more widely) as well as the huge increase in tribalism, much of which has been sped up by the rise in social media. A growing proportion of voters – though certainly not all – now get their news solely from partisan sources and aren’t exposed to anything that challenges their beliefs, making it harder to establish an uncontested truth about big issues that everyone can agree on.

So much more of political journalism now happens in the online world rather than face-to-face, whether it’s through WhatsApp becoming the primary tool of communication between journalists and their sources or politicians using platforms like X to cynically weaponise news stories for their own advantage. Sadly, a lot more journalists now face hostility for trying to do their job, particularly women, which is why Reach plc has recruited the industry’s first ever Online Safety Editor, Rebecca Whittington, to help guide and support our journalists to navigate the online world.

But despite all that, there remain lots of political journalists at local level doing what they’ve always done – diligently reporting on issues in their communities and trying their best to scrutinise the leaders who make important decisions.

That’s why I think the Local Democracy Reporting Service – which I help oversee in my role as executive editor at Reach Plc – provides such a vital service in holding to account elected politicians on councils and mayoral authorities up and down the country. The scheme is funded by the BBC, though individual LDRs are managed in local commercial newsrooms – many run by Reach plc like the Manchester Evening News – and its reporters approach their work with the aim of providing balanced, impartial coverage of the issues that matter locally.

Political podcasts are now incredibly influential – why do you think that is?

I’d say a large part of it comes down to trust, as per the previous answer. Despite rising concerns about news avoidance, there’s still a huge number of people looking to make sense of what’s happening in the world or domestically in a way they can trust.

Podcasts like The Rest Is Politics and The News Agents are trusted by listeners as they would a smart friend, bypassing the skepticism often applied to newspaper columnists or TV anchors.

And they’re available in a way that allows listeners to enjoy them at a time or setting that suits them, for example while on a run or while doing the dishes. That’s when I listen to most of my podcasts! And because they feature contributors who’ve spent their careers at the front line of UK politics they offer the allure of pulling back the curtain on how power actually works, free from the constraints of having to toe a party line or adhere to the strict broadcast impartiality rules that govern the BBC or Sky News.

One interesting side-note is that many of the most successful podcasts can reach an audience who don’t have the time or attention to listen to a whole episode, through judicious use of social media clips to highlight the most engaging sections. Funny or insightful clips from a particular podcast can do huge business on social media, which is great for boosting the name recognition of a product and hopefully encourage listeners to try the podcast on a more regular basis.

During your career, you’ve covered general news reporting, crime reporting and of course political reporting – how does the latter differ and what should PRs be aware of when reaching out?

I consider myself a bit unfortunate that I became a crime reporter in 2013, not long after the Leveson Inquiry into the ethics of the media, which resulted in police officers being much less willing to speak to journalists. I’d heard stories of detectives sharing exclusives with reporters at the pub, but because of the new climate where officers were reluctant to engage with the media without a press officer present, that happened a lot less often than I’d hoped! Generally police press offices try to keep as tight a lid on the flow of information as possible, though I was still able to develop my own sources for stories during my four years as Crime Correspondent for The Yorkshire Post.

Unfortunately, the breakdown of healthy relations between the media and police resulted in instances of damaging rumours and speculation emerging on particularly big stories, like the Nicola Bulley disappearance in Lancashire where an absence of information from the police created a vacuum exploited by bad faith actors and armchair detectives.

The political world, by contrast, is much more gossipy and any political journalist worth their salt will have a phone full of useful contacts who can tell them what’s going on. The challenge for a political journalist is trying to identify the most trustworthy sources and get a sense of why elected politicians would be motivated to tell you a particular piece of information.

It’s also much harder for press offices to control the way stories are told in the political world, which I think is why politicians often use social media to directly present their side of the story to the public and avoid scrutiny.

Previously you worked as Northern Agenda editor overseeing the daily newsletter, how important are newsletters in journalism as a way to reach audiences?

The great advantage of newsletters is similar to that of podcasts, they’re a trusted source of information and analysis that readers rely on to make sense of what’s going on in the world. It’s not always easy to earn a place in someone’s inbox with so many other emails vying for your attention, but if a newsletter can achieve trusted status because of the quality of the journalism it provides, it can build a loyal relationship between the reader and the journalist.

Reach has invested heavily in newsletters in recent years, including titles like The Northern Agenda, as a way of bypassing the volatility of platforms like Google or Facebook which in recent years have chosen to deprioritise news on their algorithms.

When editing The Northern Agenda, I put a particular effort into trying to make the newsletter personal – e.g. having the sender as ‘Rob Parsons’ and trying to make the writing very much in my own style – as there’s a lot of evidence that readers respond better to a product that is from a person they know and trust, rather than a brand.

There have been issues recently with journalists getting access to local councillors, how much of an impact does this have on LDRs doing their jobs and what changes can be made to fix this?

This issue isn’t entirely new. Back in 2022, Reach’s titles in Bristol rallied the wider journalistic community behind them when former Bristol Mayor, Marvin Rees, excluded two Reach-employed LDRs, Alex Seabrook and Adam Postans, from his fortnightly mayoral press briefings. The LDRs had challenged the mayor over the potential hypocrisy of flying 4,900 miles to Vancouver to deliver a 14-minute TED talk on climate change.

But a major challenge for local political reporters in 2026 is adapting to the new political reality where the old two or three-party system has now been replaced by a much more unpredictable and volatile climate, as the Green Party and Reform UK make massive gains. The emergence of Reform UK as a major political force has meant our LDRs are now increasingly dealing with councillors and council leaders with little experience of dealing with the media and who are hostile towards us, often refusing to engage or trying to delegitimise our reporting.

That trend became very evident in Nottinghamshire, where the Reform-run county council effectively banned the Nottingham Post and its Local Democracy Reporters from receiving press releases, attending events, and speaking with the council leader before later bowing to pressure and reversing the move. But it’s something we’re seeing examples of in a lot of town halls and will likely only increase as Reform gain a greater foothold on other authorities in upcoming local elections.

The approach of the Nottingham Post and its editor Natalie Fahy to the ban exemplified how best to respond in situations like this, robustly and vocally standing up for our right to report on public authorities without fear or favour while at the same time taking every possible step to build a working relationship with elected political leaders. I was reassured by the widespread support the Nottingham Post got from the wider media industry and also politicians from across the political spectrum, who recognise the important part an independent media play in our democratic process.

Get in touch with journalists covering UK politics via the Vuelio Media Database, and find out more about Vuelio’s solutions for Public Affairs here.

The King of the North Eyes Number 10: Andy Burnham briefing

June 22, 2026/0 Comments/in Politics, Public Affairs Political Services, Political Database, Political Monitoring Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

Following Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement that he will resign as Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister, MP for Makerfield Andy Burnham has confirmed he will put himself forward as a leadership candidate.

For Burnham’s background, his policy positions, as well as the potential figures of influence in a Burnham administration, download the briefing from the Vuelio Political team by completing the form below.

From Westminster to Manchester, and Back Again

Once a quintessential Westminster insider, serving in the Cabinets of both Blair and Brown, Burnham famously left Parliament in 2017 to build a regional powerhouse as the Mayor of Greater Manchester.

His high-profile battles with Whitehall over pandemic funding and his launch of the publicly controlled Bee Network transport system solidified his reputation as the ‘King of the North’. Now, having recently returned to the Commons as the MP for Makerfield, he is pitching himself as the radical remedy to a Westminster in turmoil.

The Core Pillars of ‘Manchesterism’

Often described by critics as a political chameleon, Burnham’s current vision, frequently dubbed ‘Manchesterism’, calls for a structural overhaul of the UK economy. He has openly criticised the deindustrialisation and privatisation of the last forty years, advocating instead for a ‘productive state’.

Key policy areas analysed in our full briefing include:

Taxation and the Economy: While Burnham has sought to reassure jittery gilt markets by committing to fiscal rules, his clean slate allows him to explore radical wealth taxes, equalising capital gains with income tax, and raising the top income tax rate to 50%.

Renationalisation: Prioritising water and energy, Burnham points to his Manchester transport reforms as the blueprint for national public ownership.

Housing First: Championing a permanent housing guarantee for the homeless without preconditions, alongside rent controls and a shift of infrastructure funds toward social housing.

Rewiring Westminster: A staunch advocate for electoral reform, Burnham is calling for the abolition of the House of Lords in favour of an elected Senate of Nations and Regions, alongside the introduction of proportional representation.

Stay Ahead of the Labour Leadership Race

As the battle for the future of the Labour Party begins, understanding the frontrunner’s policy shifts, union affiliations, and key personnel is vital for any public affairs strategy. Get your copy of the Vuelio Political Briefing on Andy Burnham by filling in the form below.

Health in Focus: The Health Bill and high hopes for James Murray

June 11, 2026/0 Comments/in PR Pulse, Politics, Public Affairs Political Services, Political Database Blog Posts /by Aidan Stansbury

With all eyes on Makerfield, and Andy Burnham’s projected (as per recent polling) election to Parliament, former Health Secretary Wes Streeting has been trying his hardest to get the spotlight back on him; a task he found easy from the backrooms of No. 10.

Over the last couple of weeks, he has floated, and also committed, to several new policies on the EU, capital gains tax, national insurance cuts, and bringing back Sure Start. He has also accompanied this with insight on the operation of No.10, including what he saw as a cover up of Israeli war crimes in the cabinet, and his belief that current Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a fundamentally unpolitical person who will be the ‘midwife’ to 1930s-style nationalism. It is no secret that Streeting has been a dissenting voice and on the move for some time, and, despite his poor backing among Labour members, the relentless No.10 briefings against him have seemed to spur him on to challenge for the top office in the near future.

On reflection on his time in post, Streeting said that he had put the NHS ‘on the road to recovery’. In closing, he uttered the words of Dame Deborah James, who said: ‘take risks; love deeply; have no regrets; and always, always have rebellious hope.’ The use of the words ‘take risks’ will likely raise eyebrows among critics of the Government, as Streeting was far from an insurgent and radical reformer to the health and social care space. Where he said he would calm woes with the BMA, he was seemingly left flustered, where he could have taken strong stances on prostate cancer or mental health, he seemingly faltered, and when it came to his most expansive programme, the NHS Modernisation Bill, he left on the day it was tabled to Parliament. Of course, there have been some improvements, and notable statistics to reel off in Reeves’ next economy speech, but Streeting failed to stay in post long enough to forge evidence of radical improvements.

Streeting has, in many ways, escaped the full weight of Opposition scrutiny, less through his own deft politics than through the vacuum around him. The Conservatives, haunted by their own record on the NHS, have shown little appetite for confrontation, while Reform UK lacks even a ‘shadow’ health minister to mount a challenge. Criticism has instead come from the left, centring on his private healthcare ties, his sign-off on the Palantir contract, and legislation that drew legal challenge for introducing political interference into the independent workings of NICE.

His tenure has been defined by caution dressed up as ambition. The plan he inherited and shaped leaned heavily on a generous Spending Review settlement, front-loaded with reviews and personal political posturing. With nearly every health commitment from Labour’s manifesto set in motion or delivered, Streeting has achieved reasonable results and modest outcomes, but this is not the ‘radical transformation’ that was promised under his tenure. Where matching his ambition and taking radical action was possible, Streeting chose process, elongated plans, long-winded reviews and ambiguous strategies, many of which he will not be in post to implement, let alone see through to their conclusion.

His replacement, James Murray, could be termed by outsiders as the quintessential career politician. A PPE graduate from Oxford, former adviser to a senior politician and a previous Whip. Before his recent promotion, he served as the most senior junior minister in Government, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Like Streeting, Murray has a personal history with the NHS, and used this to corner his first speech as Health Secretary, being diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis in the 2000s, a neurological condition for which he received successful treatment. One of Murray’s first actions as Health Secretary was to get around the table with the BMA Resident Doctors Committee (RDC) to converse over new strike details. Murray has previously been described as a surprisingly fierce negotiator behind closed doors when overseeing London’s affordable homes programme. Yet this saw no impact as the BMA were swift to announce strikes in the middle of June. In a sense of deja-vu, Murray took to the Department of Health and Social Care’s X account to call the strikes ‘unnecessary’, outlining that the Government was not in the position to move any more on pay. The RDC has accused the new health secretary of the same level of ‘intransigence and vagueness’ as Streeting, and it looks like Murray has started as he means to go on.

In his new post, Murray will likely bring a strong focus on public finances, given his background in the Treasury, as well as a strong relationship with Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Speaking to the Institute for Government in April, Murray was laser-focused on the benefits of AI to leverage productivity in the public sector, and described the public sector as culturally risk-averse in an age of innovation. He said he wants to move beyond simple time-saving AI tools and instead look at automating or removing entire processes, and critically, to think about it from the patient’s perspective. He also was explicit that conflating capital investment in the NHS and the transformation fund was a mistake, and that previous governments raiding capital budgets for short-term savings is precisely what created the maintenance backlogs the NHS now faces. Streeting had begun to make some early steps on AI and innovation, including through ambient voice technology, research and medical technology. With a cross-party and Whitehall diagnosis of an overly bureaucratic and a labyrinthine system, radical steps on AI should be welcome and pursued by Murray as they can be the catalyst to radically transform the NHS. Whereas, simply pouring more funding into outdated, sluggish, and inefficient legacy IT systems will yield only small and ephemeral rewards.

The issue of modernisation has been a key point of contention for the Health Bill, also known as the NHS Modernisation Bill, tabled to Parliament last month. The Single Patient Record set out in the Bill has been described by Murray as a policy that could ‘save lives’, cutting out administrative burdens for staff and improving patient experience in tandem. However, as previously seen in failing IT programmes, the challenge of implementing policy on complex IT systems has often been underestimated, as has the scale of investment required. This remains a key question for the Bill, and as outlined by the Health Foundation, its implementation must marry a few key concerns: a fragmented Electronic Patient Record system, low public trust alongside growing concerns over external providers of data platforms, and the specific benefits that the SPR will reveal, beyond the ambiguity of ‘saving lives’. It is vital the NHS moves away from consistent and laborious messaging over waiting lists, staff numbers and investment figures, towards a coalesced image of how modernisation in the NHS will actually improve patient experience, beyond numbers on a spreadsheet. The Single Patient Record can be a positive start to this.

The Nuffield Trust has raised caution to the ‘powerful arsenal’ of responsibilities and powers moved to the Secretary of State in the Bill, specifically where it relates to the directing of local health boards. While previously the Secretary of State could only previously direct ICBs relating to public health functions, now, and as set out by Clause 8 of the Bill, the Secretary of State will have the power to direct ICBs to ‘any health service function’. While the Bill seeks to move away from a fragmented and rigid system, it may do so by centralising power politically. Defining accountability is an important measure, but legislators of the Bill must be sure that the Secretary of State’s increasing involvement in the non-political running of the health service, whether that is functions of the soon-to-be defunct NHS England or powers to intervene in NICE’s assessment of medicines, does not lead to micro-management, overarching political intervention and unstable governance from the top. Fundamentally, there is a reason that the billion pound ordeal of NHS England was institutionalised in the first place: to mandate an objective view of healthcare, overseeing commissioning, services and operational independence. The Bill must not risk intervening in this through the backdoor, on the pretext of accountability and modernisation.

Another key contention point of the Bill is the scrapping of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body and Healthwatch, with the former merged into Care Quality Commission and the latter into the Department of Health and Social Care. These changes are prefaced by the Dash Review, which found a crowded and complex patient safety landscape, and will look to ‘streamline, simplify and consolidate functions’ where considerable duplication and overlap currently exist. This section of the Bill aims to achieve a more transparent system by ensuring those responsible for shaping services are directly responsible for gathering patient and user views, and clearly accountable for embedding them into strategic planning. These two decisions have been criticised by stakeholders for reducing transparency and accountability, and, again, moving more power centrally to Whitehall. Opposition has also been political, with the Liberal Democrats saying the move will strip patients of an independent voice, while the Conservatives have said the centralisation of powers will lead to a democratic deficit and discourage whistleblowers. The CQC has also warned against this change, outlining, in submitted committee evidence, that they have not identified a ‘valid operational solution’ that resolves the conflict of interest of protecting the ‘safe space’ between the functions of each quango.

James Murray will have a distinct job on his hands, as a loyalist, a strong ally of Reeves, and in turn Starmer, he may be more of a seasonal worker, if Burnham (or others) get their hands on No. 10. With investigations into maternity, social care, mental health and ADHD approaching publication in the near future, the Department of Health and Social Care needs stability to make reform happen to the NHS, and do so radically, to reveal the benefits of a truly modernised NHS.

World Cup info, weather-related experts, and gardening gurus: How to get UK press coverage in June 2026

June 11, 2026/0 Comments/in PR Pulse, PR Media Database, PR, Press and Bloggers, Journalist Enquiry Service Blog Posts /by Andrew Strutt

With a big summer of sport ahead and a packed political calendar across the globe, journalists and broadcasters will be busy and in need of case studies, expert comment, and more from the PR and comms sector. To help with your media outreach, here is insight on what they’ll need based on media requests from the ResponseSource Journalist Enquiry Service (now included in the Vuelio platform).

World Cup fever

The FIFA World Cup kicks off on Thursday and journalists have been trying to get ahead with their coverage as 1.5% of the requests in May featured the keyphrase ‘World Cup’. Around 1% of these also contained the keyword ‘football’ as the Women’s Cricket World Cup also begins this week on Friday.

Enquiries have been looking at various angles when it comes to World Cup coverage including England/Scotland fans prepping for the World Cup and flexi working companies, money saving tips for those planning to travel out there for it, and the rarest and most valuable World Cup football shirts. These requests have come from journalists at BBC News, The Sun, Insider Sport and Which? Money.

Going forward? With this being the longest World Cup in terms of schedule and amount of matches, journalists will be looking for plenty of insight throughout June and into July when the tournament eventually finishes. Locations to watch the matches, case studies of fan experiences and football experts are the most likely to be in demand and could get you featured in both broadcast media and national press.

Weather forecast looking popular

The common stereotype is that Brits are obsessed with talking about the weather and in May that was the case with journalists using the service. Just under 2% of the requests last month contained ‘weather’ in them. ‘Heatwave’ cropped up in 1% as well, as the sudden summer sunshine got everyone talking.

Publications including The i paper, Ideal Home, Daily Star, woman & home, and PA Media all sent weather-related requests last month. These included changes to make now to improve your sleep in warm weather, an expert to comment on the link between stormy weather and neurological conditions, and a nutritionist to give advice on the best and worst things to eat and drink during a heatwave.

Going forward? While the British weather may not be predictable, we can predict more weather-related requests this month, based on the fact that just over 2% of requests in June last year focused on this. Enquiries tend to focus on experts, but these can often be associated with other topics such as health and gardening, rather than purely on weather conditions themselves.

Gardening gurus in demand

Gardening as a keyword always performs on the Journalist Enquiry Service throughout the year and last month was no different as it cropped up in 4% of the total. This also coincided with the Home & Garden category being the third most popular on the service, behind Health and Women’s Interest & Beauty.

Enquiries are mainly looking for experts, but these are still for a variety of topics and last month that included sustainable garden ideas, the best shrubs to give your garden a hotel look, rainwater harvesting, and how to protect gardens from plant thieves. Journalists at House Beautiful, Country Living, Amateur Gardening, The Daily Mirror, and The London Standard all sent an enquiry in May.

Going forward? In June 2025, gardening was even more popular as a keyword when it appeared in over 6% of the total requests. We expect to see a similar volume of requests for June this year. While experts are the most in demand from journalists, there will also be opportunities to get garden products featured too and hopefully get coverage in a consumer media title.

Other opportunities for PRs in June and beyond

Travel, like gardening, is another keyword that does well throughout the year but with the summer holidays in sight then June often sees it reach its peak. Last year, 6% of the total enquiries featured ‘travel’ in them. 3% also contained ‘holidays’ and ‘hotel’ also appeared in just over 3%. From expert comment on the top holiday destinations for 2026 to case studies of nightmare weekend getaways, there will be plenty of media opportunities for those in the travel sector to get featured.

While the schools don’t break up till mid-July, journalists will already be looking for back-to-school information from this month onwards. In June 2025, 2% of the enquiries that month featured ‘school’ as a keyword. These vary from looking for information on new clothes and stationary for the next school year to expert advice for parents who will be sending their kids off to primary school for the first time or moving onto secondary school. Have expert comment and information ready if you want to secure national press coverage.

Want to get the most out of the ResponseSource Journalist Enquiry Service? Find out how here.

Perfect pitch: Maximising media coverage with Vuelio’s connected platform

May 28, 2026/0 Comments/in PR, Communications, Media Media Database, PR, Press and Bloggers, Journalist Enquiry Service Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the ResponseSource Journalist Enquiry Service, which has been connecting PR & comms teams seeking media coverage with journalists and broadcasters in need of sources since its launch in 2001.

To meet the changing needs of the media community, the service is now integrated into Vuelio, providing the thousands of PR and comms teams using the platform daily with another way to reach the press.

Whether you’re looking for expert commentary, supporting statistics, products for review, or filming locations, our connected network helps you share relevant responses with influential media contacts.

Here are just some of the benefits of a fully-connected media suite:

Jump on opportunities, without losing the strategic view

Part of managing a busy press office is balancing the short-term urgency of media deadlines with the longer-term planning often required for a successful comms campaign. PR professionals spend hours building targeted media lists, studying forward features lists, and conceptualising campaigns for future roll-out. But breaking news doesn’t stop for strategic planning.

When short-turnaround editorial opportunities arise, disjointed workflows and platforms can mean missing windows of opportunity. By combining real-time journalist requests with a comprehensive Media Database in one place, communication teams can keep an eye on a stream of editorial asks directly from the workspace where they are already designing their outreach campaigns.

While you are proactively identifying long-lead opportunities or constructing media lists for a future launch, you are presented with an instant view of what reporters are investigating.

Because media professionals frequently operate under intense time constraints, often requiring commentary, case studies, or information within a matter of hours, having these urgent alerts integrated into your main platform ensures your entire team can respond quickly.

Fulfill a writer’s immediate request without losing momentum on your broader campaign strategy, or juggling multiple browser tabs and separate software programs. Secure high-value placements that might otherwise have slipped away.

The ability to connect relevant spokespeople with the right media

Securing impactful media coverage means providing the precise expertise a writer or broadcaster needs to complete their story.

The integration of the Journalist Enquiry Service within the Vuelio platform makes matching internal corporate talent or client spokespeople with these precise needs straightforward. Rather than researching which topics are currently front-of-mind for various media outlets, PR professionals receive verified requests that outline exactly what kind of expert opinion is required.

The platform’s filtering framework, spanning industry sectors including healthcare, finance, consumer technology, and retail, enables PRs to filter incoming requests down to the specific categories that matter most to their organisation or client base. Instead of scrambling to find an angle, immediately identify an exact match between a journalist’s requirement and your spokesperson’s specialised knowledge.

Deeper insight, for longer relationships

If you ask media professionals about their biggest frustrations when dealing with the public relations industry, the answer is almost unanimous: irrelevant, untargeted pitches. To stand out in the clutter of a packed inbox or voicemail, a pitch must be hyper-relevant. But achieving that level of personalisation and targeting requires deep contextual knowledge.

This is where an embedded Media Database is essential. When a request from the Journalist Enquiry Service arrives within the platform, it is linked to a wealth of intelligence regarding the individual who sent it, and the publications they work for. With a click, PR professionals can find a comprehensive profile of the journalist, offering detailed insights compiled by our in-house research team.

Patch, past coverage history, preferred communication methods, and even career history can be invaluable, particularly when a journalist’s initial enquiry is brief or ambiguous. By analysing their specific beat and recent articles, read between the lines of a vague request to understand the angle they are pursuing. Tailor your response to align with their editorial style and the demographic of their media outlet: providing a tailored, highly specific contribution significantly increases the likelihood of your content being picked up. More importantly, it demonstrates to the journalist that you respect their time and understand their audience, laying the vital foundation for a trusting, ongoing media relationship that extends far beyond a single news cycle.

Closer connections with the media, via a connected platform

The future of successful public relations relies on breaking down the barriers between different communication workflows as much as it does on connecting the myriad of platforms that make up the modern media landscape. Moving away from separated software systems and adopting a unified ecosystem allows communication professionals to work with greater speed, accuracy, and strategic insight.

By integrating the real-time opportunities of the Journalist Enquiry Service into the extensive data suite of the Vuelio Media Database, PR professionals are given a complete toolkit for modern media engagement. React to urgent newsroom demands without sacrificing long-term campaign planning, match expertise with active editorial needs, and utilise deep media intelligence to construct your pitches, and build connections.

Find out more about the Journalist Enquiry Service here.

Introducing Lumina AI View: AI Visibility Built for PR & Comms

May 21, 2026/0 Comments/in PR Pulse, PR, Communications, Media Lumina Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

There is a new frontier where public perception is shaped: Large Language Models. Right now, LLMs are answering critical questions about your organisation. What are they saying? And more importantly, which sources are shaping those answers?

To navigate this landscape, public relations professionals don’t need generic tools, but rather technology that speaks their language, and addresses the realities of a changed media and informational landscape.

That is why we’re unveiling Lumina AI View, the latest addition to our intelligent suite of AI tools from Vuelio. Trained specifically on the workflows and challenges of modern PR & communications, Lumina AI View helps you understand exactly what AI knows about you, and how it learned it.

A new standard for AI visibility

AI View tracks your citation strength and source quality alongside those of your competitors, giving you a clear view of where you hold authority and where you have gaps.

Lumina AI View maps your AI reputation from the ground up, allowing you to:

See which sources matter: When tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini discuss your organisation, which outlets do they cite? Track your source footprint over time and view the impact of key target media on how you’re discussed. We measure your citation strength and source quality alongside those of competitors, giving you a clear view of where you have authority and where you have gaps.
Gain industry-specific insight: Your competitors get cited from Financial Times and Bloomberg. You get cited on Reddit. Each brings opportunity – and risk. Discover how you measure up against industry standards, and target the sources that actually influence how AI represents you.
Catch narrative shifts early: AI responses change when new sources appear, sentiment shifts, or old controversies resurface. Get alerts when citation patterns change suddenly, before they impact the way you’re perceived by stakeholders.

Measure your progress: From media monitoring to full media intelligence

Lumina AI View is built on the principle that insights get stronger with repeated measurement. To help you maintain a clear view of your reputation, our proprietary scoring system provides regular updates that show you:

Evolving trends in how sources cite your organisation
Competitive standing and benchmark metrics
Where models differ in information presented, and sources cited

Whether you run it weekly, on-demand, or whenever you need a check-in, patterns will emerge, trends will become clear, and you will build a baseline that makes any sudden narrative changes both comprehensible and the prerequisite to action.

Lumina AI View is part of Lumina AI, a comprehensive suite of AI tools built specifically for communicators. Our Lumina suite evolves traditional media monitoring into narrative intelligence, enabling you to truly understand how perceptions form, evolve, and impact your reputation.

Get in touch to register your interest and see what Lumina AI View can do for you.

Is earned media the solution for comms in the age of AI Answers?

May 18, 2026/0 Comments/in PR Pulse, PR, Communications, Media Media Database, Media Monitoring, PR, Press and Bloggers, Lumina Blog Posts /by Phoebe-Jane Boyd

Artificial intelligence has evolved from an experimental tech-stack tool to become a vital part of the fabric of daily reality for public relations. Alongside pitching stories for human-made editorial calendars, comms practitioners are navigating a deeply fragmented media ecosystem where generative engines like Large Language Models (LLMs) fundamentally alter how information is created, distributed, and consumed.

For years, the PR industry measured success by the strength of a clipping or the positioning of a link on a Google Search results page. Today, the interface between brands and audiences has changed. The fast rise of agentic browsers and AI companions that summarise the web has boosted media intelligence from a supporting function to a mission-critical part of the comms infrastructure.

To survive in this new reality, communication teams must understand the new role of earned media; the primary fuel powering the AI answer engines that shape brand reputation.

How generative engines are rewriting the search playbook

The traditional digital marketing funnel is facing an existential crunch. According to Nic Newman’s ‘Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026‘ report for the Reuters Institute, publishers expect traffic from search engines to decline by 43% over the next three years. This sharp downturn follows recent dramatic declines in referrals from social media platforms. The culprit at the centre of this disruption? Google’s AI Overviews.

Now appearing at the top of roughly 10% of search results in the United States and rolling out globally, these AI summaries have driven a massive surge in zero-click searches — scenarios where users get their answers directly on the search page without ever clicking through to a corporate website or news source.

This shift is heavily driven by changing consumer behaviours. Data from a January 2026 study ‘Navigating the Shift: A Comparative Analysis of Web Search and Generative AI Response Generation‘ highlights that Google’s AI Overviews now reach 2 billion monthly users across 200 countries, with referral traffic from AI platforms growing by 357% year-over-year. Crucially, the way people search has evolved: 57.9% of searches triggering AI Overviews are now phrased as full questions, and queries of eight words or longer have a 57% probability of generating an AI-synthesised response rather than a traditional list of blue links.

These platforms do not return ranked document lists but synthesise answers, reason over retrieved evidence, and selectively cite sources they judge to be authoritative. And what these engines consider authoritative is, increasingly, earned media.

A 2025 Semrush AI Overviews Study revealed that while Google attempts a balanced sourcing approach (41% earned, 34% social, and 26% brand content), standalone AI engines lean overwhelmingly on earned content. Anthropic’s Claude concentrates most heavily on earned media at 65% (and a mere 1% on social), followed by OpenAI’s GPT-4o at 57% earned media.

To highlight this trend further, Gartner’s ‘Top Predictions to Inform 2026 Comms Strategies‘ and Purposeful Relations’ ‘The Impact of Generative Relations and Communications‘ reports both validate that AI search engines heavily favour citing earned, shared, and organic owned content over paid channels. More than 95% of links cited within these platforms are non-paid mentions, with earned media accounting for 89% of those citations. Journalistic content alone accounts for 27% of citations, skyrocketing to 49% for queries requiring real-time, recent information.

Ultimately, LLMs rely on the credibility that traditional PR has spent decades cultivating. However, simply securing a mention is no longer enough. As Nicole Yost, Director of Communications and Corporate Affairs at the British Heart Foundation (BHF) pointed out during Vuelio’s recent in-person event ‘How AI is changing the way we communicate‘, the challenge has evolved. Managing communications for a major healthcare charity means navigating an environment where AI is used not just to draft messaging, but to predict trends and actively counter misinformation. Nicole observes:

‘Various studies have shown that AI is using earned media for its content. But how do you differentiate and cut through the noise, is the question. Earned media is having a moment. I was talking to some colleagues earlier, and they’re saying it’s everywhere, all over LinkedIn, it’s “PRs’ time” and all that. But, only if you can cut through the noise, be really trusted and credible, are you going to have an impact on your brand.’

Making your earned media count for LLMs

While the data paints a glowing picture for the resurgence of PR, communications teams must avoid treating these statistics as a one-size-fits-all victory. Context, nuance, and strategy matter more than raw volume.

Stuart Bruce, PR Futurist and Co-founder of Purposeful Relations — a management consultancy specialising in advising in-house comms teams, international bodies like the OECD, and charities on AI adoption — urges a grounded perspective.

Reflecting on the sudden flood of vendor reports, Stuart notes:

‘All these reports that have been coming out say that LLMs favour earned media in terms of where they get information from, and where they put their citations. That’s partially true.

‘Our white paper analysed the multitude of reports that have been published throughout the year (anybody that’s selling an LLM tool published a report to justify them to marketing). One said that 95% of LLM citations are from earned media. Another one said 43%. And yes, the importance of earned media is absolutely on the rise, but it’s really important to realise it’s not the only one, and it is very different between different sectors.’

To make earned media truly count within AI summaries, communications strategies must move past old-school broad message distribution. The focus must pivot toward building earned proof, shaping the credible, factual raw material that both human audiences and intelligent machine agents use to determine who is genuinely trustworthy.

A strategic roadmap for modern PR: Treating AI as a stakeholder

If LLMs are actively mediating how the public understands your organisation or your clients, you can no longer treat them as neutral tech tools; they are actually a brand-new audience. Stuart suggests a distinct shift in how teams approach Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), breaking it down into three flexible, strategic pillars tailored to organisational needs:

1. Build an AI Stakeholder Map

‘The first thing you need to do is to actually understand the space,’ Stuart advises. ‘We describe AI as a stakeholder, because we wouldn’t start trying to influence stakeholders until we fully understand them.

‘Do you have your stakeholder map? Trying to create that is actually really difficult when it comes to LLMs, because there are several of them, and then they’re all going to be saying different things.’

Comms teams must map which models their audiences use and audit how their brand currently surfaces across different engines.

2. Constant recency and the power of niche media

LLMs possess vast amounts of historical data within their static models, but when a user asks a time-sensitive question, the engine must look outward for real-time information. ‘So, if you want to influence what’s not in the model, they’re going to be looking for really up-to-date, recent information — you’re constantly feeding the beast and making sure that your information out there is recent,’ says Stuart.

This will markedly change media targeting strategy:

‘The second thing to consider is, what does that mean? Does that include your website? That might mean just refreshing a page, updating a page, but also things like labelling if a page has out-of-date information. AI needs to be taught that. It needs to understand relevance, and that’s basically where earned media comes in. It’s not necessarily going to be your tier-one titles. It could actually be small, niche titles. It could be trade press. It could be expert blogs. And that’s because LLMs know that’s a specialist source, this is going to be where to find reliable information.’

3. Establish multiple touchpoints for reputation

An isolated piece of coverage will no longer be effective on its own. AI models look for cross-referenced consistency across the web to validate a claim. Stuart provides a practical example:

‘You might have a spokesperson featured in the Daily Mail, but if that’s the only reference to them, AI is not necessarily going to consider them a credible spokesperson. If they were available on your website, if their LinkedIn profile constantly talks about the same thing, if they’ve spoken at conferences, if they’re in earned media, they instantly become a credible source. You’ve got to have those multiple touchpoints.’

Shifting trust: When audiences believe AI over brands

The urgency of this strategic pivot becomes clearer when considering how rapidly public trust is transitioning. During a recent Vuelio webinar ‘AI as the new PR & comms stakeholder‘, Dr Anne Gregory — Professor Emeritus of Corporate Communication at the University of Huddersfield and a leading international researcher who has directed the Global Capability Framework — highlighted how deeply this machine mediation influences public perception:

‘AI is much more than just an assistant; it is a powerful actor in the information ecosystem.

‘It mediates our engagement with organisations and individuals, and evidence is emerging that AI is often believed more than other traditional sources.’

This observation is backed by hard data. Purposeful Relations’ report, in partnership with 72Point, surveyed 5,000 UK adults to uncover modern attitudes toward media, news, and generative tech. The findings regarding trust were eye-opening: While scientists and technical experts predictably ranked highest at 80%, AI answers achieved a 44% trust rating.

‘So 44% of people trust that LLM answer: they’re not necessarily going to go to your website,’ Stuart noted.

This creates a reputational hazard if your infrastructure is lagging. Dr Anne issued a stark warning for teams slow to adapt to this shift:

‘Even though we know these summaries are often incomplete and biased, we tend to believe them. If we don’t regard AI as an influential stakeholder, we could be putting ourselves in jeopardy.’

The new toolkit for AI visibility

To transition from traditional communicators into central corporate strategists who manage reputation in this new climate, PR professionals need tools built specifically for their workflows. They cannot rely on legacy search engine tools designed purely for digital marketing or paid media.

‘Vuelio is launching something soon, which will be another tool that will help you to understand that,’ revealed Stuart during our latest event.

‘The tools that are coming from the PR space are a lot more useful to PR people than some of the ones that are coming from the digital marketing and the search space. They understand the pressures, the trends, the type of information that we need to know.’

This targeted innovation underpins Vuelio, providing an AI Visibility solution that’s specifically geared towards PR & Comms.

Lumina AI View helps you understand what AI knows about you, and where it learned it from. By tracking the sources that models such as Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude cite when representing you, it reveals where you stand — and how to impact this.

The battleground for brand relevance has officially shifted. By ensuring your earned media strategy is continuous, highly credible, and verified across multiple digital touchpoints, you can ensure your organisation, and the clients you work with, are not just indexed by the algorithms, but trusted by them.

Find out more about Vuelio’s Lumina solutions here.

Media trends from May from the Journalist Enquiry Service

Summer in focus, wellness experts and Father’s Day gift ideas: How to get UK press coverage in May 2026

May 14, 2026/0 Comments/in PR Pulse, PR, Communications, Media Media Database, Media Analysis, PR, Press and Bloggers, Journalist Enquiry Service Blog Posts /by Andrew Strutt

In a busy and constantly changing news cycle, knowing what to pitch when can be difficult. The ResponseSource Journalist Enquiry Service (also now part of the Vuelio platform too) gets hundreds of journalists using it each month looking for experts, case studies and more. To help with your media outreach, here is what the media were searching for in April and how you can secure coverage in May and beyond.

Summer in sight

Journalists, especially those that work on consumer and trade magazines, often look to get their content well in advance of publication and that’s why one of the main keywords for April was ‘summer’. Nearly 7% of the total requests this month contained ‘summer’, despite the change of season still being a month or so away.

It’s a pretty broad topic and requests varied from looking for luxury UK summer spa packages, to advice on how Britons can keep their gardens from drying out, as well as healthy recipes and a medical expert to speak about hay fever and summer cold symptoms. Journalists have sent requests from outlets such as Ideal Home, Capital FM, The Caterer, Newsweek, HELLO! Fashion, and The Times.

Going forward? The amount of summer-related requests will only continue to rise in May and beyond and last year over 7% of all requests included ‘summer’ in them. The focus from journalists tends to be more on topics such as gardening, travel, fashion, beauty, and food & drink but there should be plenty of opportunities to hook onto a news story.

Health & wellness experts in demand

It’s currently Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK and journalists have already been keen to not only cover ‘mental health’ but also ‘wellness’ too. ‘Mental health’ cropped up in 1.5% of all requests in April and ‘wellness’ appeared in just over 2%.

Both of these topics are regularly sought out by journalists on the service and last month wellness requests included looking for an expert in advertising/marketing in the health/wellness medical space and wellness retreats that fit into the ‘quietcation’ holiday trend. While mental health enquiries included asks for information on mental health support for retail staffers and a psychologist or therapist to talk about loneliness.

Going forward? Personal health and wellness is normally in demand around this time of year, and in May 2025, ‘wellness’ appeared in 2.5% of the total requests. This remains a priority topic for journalists this year and they tend to focus on getting experts to share their tips and advice. Make sure yours are ready to provide comment and you could feature in Psychologies, PA Media, Men’s Health, Red magazine, or Conde Nast Traveller, as they all sent enquiries last month.

Gift guide items needed for Father’s Day

It’s still over a month until Father’s Day in the UK (21 June) but journalists have already been sending in plenty of requests around the celebration. 2% of all enquiries in April were for ‘Father’s Day’ and categories like Men’s Interest and Consumer Technology performed well as a result of this.

The majority of requests are for products to feature in a gift guide but there is some variety in here with journalists looking for everything from gadgets and tech, to grooming products and food and drink. There are also several enquiries seeking experiences including travel and family days out and wine/whisky experiences. Bella, Great British Food, Travel & Retreat, woman & home, and Dadsnet all sent requests last month.

Going forward? The number of enquiries around Father’s Day will only rise this month – in May 2025, it cropped up in nearly 3% of the total requests. This is a great opportunity to get products featured in consumer media titles or share information about experiences or days out.

Other opportunities for PRs in May and beyond

The FIFA World Cup is now less than a month away from starting but journalists have already been keen to cover this football extravaganza with just over 1% of enquiries in April featuring ‘world cup’. Enquiries so far have ranged from looking into the financial situation behind the ticket prices to wanting information about the best places to watch the tournament at. If you’ve got football experts or former players, there is a good chance of media coverage in the lead up to the World Cup.

It’s not quite festival season yet but again, the media have been looking to get ahead of this and last month around 1% of the enquiries contained the keyword ‘festival’ in them. This is likely to ramp up in May (in May 2025, ‘festival’ cropped up in 2% of the total enquiries) as the first few music festivals and events take place. Journalists tend to look for products to review as festival essentials and accessories so have these ready to send out and you could get featured in a national media title.

Want to get the most out of the ResponseSource Journalist Enquiry Service? Find out how here.