Hello and happy Friday! Quick question to start your weekend: when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude for the best plumber, electrician, or real estate agent in your city, does your business show up in the answer? Or does the AI hand lead to your competitor instead?

That question sits at the center of this week’s tip. Our founder, Chris Raulf,  recently sat down with Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, on the Boulder SEO Marketing Podcast-Style for this week’s Friday SEO Tip, and the conversation landed on something we have been telling clients for months. Earned media has quietly become one of the most reliable ways to get your business cited in AI search. Not backlinks. Not paid ads. Getting quoted as a real human expert.

Watch the full video above to learn more.

Brett has a unique vantage point on this. He runs the platforms that connect journalists with sources, so he sees which experts get picked and why. And the picture he painted is one every local business owner should hear, because the barrier that once kept small operators out of the news is finally coming down.

When Your Customers Ask AI Instead of Google

Here is the shift. For twenty-five years, someone looking for a Denver plumber typed “Denver plumber” into Google and picked from the results. That behavior is changing fast. More and more, people open ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini and ask for a recommendation in plain language. Give me the best plumbers near me. Who should I call for an emergency repair? The wording is casual, but the intent is the same: a high-value lead you have always wanted.

The interesting part is where those AI answers come from. When an assistant recommends a business, it is often pulling from earned media, the articles, expert quotes, and third-party mentions that live across the web. So if you want to be cited in the prompts that relate to your products and services, you need to be featured in the sources those models trust.

We see this play out in our own numbers. Up to half of the leads Chris personally talks to now say they found Boulder SEO Marketing through an AI assistant. He asks every one of them, and the answer keeps coming back the same: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini. This is not a someday trend. It is happening right now, and earned media is a big reason it works.

Why a Local Plumber Belongs in the News

The objection Brett hears constantly, and the one we hear too, goes like this: I am not a media person. Journalists do not want to hear from me. If you have ever thought that, I want to push back on it directly.

Brett’s team has worked with hundreds of thousands of users, and the lesson is simple. Everyone is an expert at something. That plumber has seen failure patterns most homeowners never will. That real estate team in Scottsdale knows its local market better than any national outlet. Journalists and publishers want exactly that kind of grounded, hyperlocal knowledge, and they want it the moment they are working on a story that needs it. If a reporter needs a Denver plumber for a piece, the plumber who is ready to help is the one who gets quoted.

The reason a local owner is a perfect candidate is not despite their small size. It is because of their real, lived experience. That is the one thing no amount of AI can manufacture, and we will come back to why that matters so much in a minute.

The Real Reason Owners Skip PR, and How AI Removes It

Let me be honest with you about the actual blocker. It is not confidence. It is time. Local owners are on a job site, not refreshing a browser three times a day, hoping a relevant opportunity floats by. The old way of monitoring media requests was genuinely exhausting. You would open an email digest, scan it, find nothing for you, and slowly lose hope.

This is where the tools have changed the math. Brett walked through how the workflows within Featured now function as an always-on PR assistant. The system monitors media opportunities around the clock, filters out everything that is not a fit, and surfaces the handful that actually match your expertise in near real time. So instead of scanning noise, that Denver plumber gets a notification that says a publication needs a Denver plumber, here is the request, you can respond.

Brett estimated that this reduces the time cost by up to ninety-five percent. That is the number that changes who can realistically play this game. When the monitoring is handled, the work that is left is small: review the opportunity, refine the draft, and press submit. He put the realistic budget at about fifteen minutes a day for an owner who is serious about visibility. Fifteen minutes. Set your workflows to match that window, and you have a credible media strategy without hiring a full agency.

Experience Is the One Thing AI Cannot Fake

Here is the part I care about most, because it connects to how we build authority for every client. The first E in E-E-A-T stands for Experience, and it is the signal AI cannot fabricate.

Think about why this matters to a journalist. Anyone can generate a bland, AI-written pitch in seconds. That is the baseline now, and the baseline is not interesting. What a publisher actually wants is a real human being with genuine insight, someone whose name can be confidently attached to a quote. Brett made a sharp point here. Associating a real human with a piece of content is a signature that is very hard to fake, which is exactly why it carries weight with both readers and the crawlers that feed AI answers.

He compared it to the early days of search. Back in the mid-nineties, when Google was still the research project called BackRub, the breakthrough insight was that backlinks were a hard-to-manipulate signal. A verified human expert attached to real content is that kind of signal for the AI era. This is why expert quotes in credible articles are gaining traction in 2026, while generic AI filler is being ignored.

This is the whole idea behind our human-driven AI-assisted approach, our proprietary AI SEO and GEO methodology. AI is a fantastic way to beat the blank page and get a first draft moving. But the review step is not optional. A human has to read it, correct anything that is not true, and add the specific detail only they could know before it goes anywhere near a journalist. Skip that step, and you are not doing PR; you are spamming. Brett’s platforms even run AI detection on incoming pitches using a tool called Pangram, and he shared that roughly twenty-one percent of pitches are still fully AI-generated, while about thirty-five percent of journalists now opt out of AI pitches entirely. Read those two numbers together, and the takeaway is obvious. The human in the loop is your advantage, not your bottleneck.

Be Selective, Not a Spray-and-Pray Machine

The biggest mistake Brett flags is treating this like a numbers game. Spray and pray. Respond to everything, hope something sticks. It does not work, and it quietly damages your credibility with the journalists you most want to reach.

The firms with the highest success rates do the opposite. They only respond when their expert is genuinely the best person to answer that specific question. That discipline is what separates a source a reporter comes back to from a source they mute. So if you take one thing from this, let it be restraint. Fewer, sharper responses beat a flood of generic ones every time.

If you are wondering where to start, Brett offered three concrete steps. 

First, give the AI context about your experience. If you have written a book or built years of hard-won knowledge, feed that material into the system so that it understands where your expertise actually comes from. 

Second, set up a workflow that uses that context to automatically match you to the right opportunities, which removes almost all of the time cost. 

Third, and this is the one people skip, take action. Find a system you trust, let it get you to a strong first draft, then finish the job and press submit. The best matching engine in the world does nothing if you never respond.

How to Tell If Earned Media Is Actually Working

Getting quoted in Forbes is not a business outcome by itself. We care about leads and revenue, so you have to track whether any of this is producing them. Here is the honest reality: a busy local owner is not going to monitor AI prompts and citations on their own. That is where your agency, your assistant, or your own simple system has to carry the reporting load.

But the single most useful measurement is also the simplest and most qualitative. Ask every new lead how they found you. That one question tells you more than most dashboards. It is exactly how Chris knows that up to half of his conversations now trace back to AI assistants. When someone says they found you in ChatGPT after reading a piece you were quoted in, you have your answer. The earned media is doing its job, and you can confidently do more of it.

Brett is also optimistic about where local media is heading, and it is worth keeping on your radar. As AI helps newsrooms monitor city council meetings, local filings, and community stories, he expects news to get more hyperlocal, not less. More local publications mean more places for a local business to get cited, and more of that credibility will come from local experts. That is a real opportunity for any owner willing to show up as the knowledgeable voice in their market.

What to Do Next

If your business is invisible in AI search right now, earned media is one of the most direct fixes available, and it is finally practical for a local operator. Start by getting your real experience into a form a system can use, set up monitoring so the right opportunities come to you, and commit to that fifteen minutes a day. Stay selective, keep a human in the loop, and track how new leads found you.

If you would rather not build all of that yourself, that is exactly the kind of work we handle for clients every day. Our human-driven AI-assisted approach, our proprietary AI SEO and GEO methodology, is built to turn your expertise into the citations that get you found, in Google and in AI answers alike. If you want help putting this into motion, reach out and let’s talk about your business.

Have an amazing Friday and a great weekend.

Stay safe and healthy,

Cheers,

The Boulder SEO Marketing Team