{"id":153120,"date":"2026-08-05T11:05:47","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T10:05:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=153120"},"modified":"2026-08-05T11:32:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T10:32:06","slug":"the-battle-for-ai-visibility-why-tier-2-titles-shouldnt-be-overlooked-by-pr-and-comms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/the-battle-for-ai-visibility-why-tier-2-titles-shouldnt-be-overlooked-by-pr-and-comms\/","title":{"rendered":"The battle for AI visibility: Why Tier 2 titles shouldn’t be overlooked by PR and comms"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> across platforms that didn’t exist a few years ago. And now, there’s a new stakeholder to consider in AI<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u2014 comparing owned claims against journalists, government databases, academic institutions, and industry bodies.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here is why Tier 2 titles deserve a bigger share of PR and comms attention in this new landscape\u2026<\/p>\n

LLMs reward quality and specificity, not just prestige<\/h2>\n

When an LLM assesses how credible a piece of coverage is, size of masthead isn’t the deciding factor.<\/p>\n

As Vuelio’s Executive Director of AI Strategy Ngaire Crawford summarised during a recent Vuelio roundtable<\/a> on managing reputation in the AI age:<\/p>\n

‘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.’<\/p>\n

\"Ngaire<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Trade and specialist press are becoming a go-to source for LLMs<\/h2>\n

This plays out clearly in sector-specific research. For Vuelio report ‘The role of AI, LLMs, and earned media in shaping reputation<\/a>‘, 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<\/a> and the Grocery Gazette<\/a>, not the national press.<\/p>\n

\"Earned<\/p>\n

Purposeful Relations’ Stuart Bruce, speaking during Vuelio’s ‘How AI is changing the way we communicate<\/a>‘ panel, saw the same pattern:<\/p>\n

‘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.’<\/p>\n

If your sector has trusted trade or specialist outlets, they should be core to your outreach and not an afterthought.<\/p>\n

Local media is getting an unexpected AI-driven boost<\/h2>\n

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<\/a>‘, SSE plc’s Ross Easton saw a silver lining for a subsector PR and comms professionals have often overlooked:<\/p>\n

‘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.’<\/p>\n

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.’<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Freshness and relevance signal reliability to AI models<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

‘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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 a signal that an organisation remains an active source of information, not one the model only knows through outdated mentions.<\/p>\n

Multiple touchpoints beat a single big splash<\/h2>\n

Perhaps most importantly, LLMs build confidence in a fact through corroboration.<\/p>\n

As Stuart Bruce put it during Vuelio webinar ‘AI as the new PR & comms stakeholder<\/a>‘:<\/p>\n

‘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.’<\/p>\n

\"Stuart<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

‘The trade union gave them half a dozen quotes. The university gave them one. It just wasn’t credible,’ Bruce notes.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This is what Vuelio’s Lumina AI View<\/a> was built to solve \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Find out more about Vuelio’s AI View<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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