Social Value Drives Earned Media

A longer, fully sourced version of this piece also appears on the Construction & Built Environment Marketing Network.

In July 2025, a Muck Rack study found that more than 95 percent of the links AI models cited when answering a question came from non-paid sources. By May 2026, that had climbed to around 99 percent, with paid content barely registering at under half a percent of everything AI reads and repeats back to us. The data isn't UK specific, but ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini don't run one set of rules for Britain and another for everywhere else.

That's not a small trend. That's the ground moving quickly under every business still pouring budget into telling people how good it is, instead of doing the work that gets someone else to say it for them.

Paid media is the coverage you buy. Owned media is the coverage you control, your website, your LinkedIn page, your newsletter. Earned media is the coverage someone else decides you deserve, a journalist, a trade title, an industry judge, a client repeating your story to their board without you in the room, or now, an AI model choosing to cite you because someone else already vouched for you. None of that is a new rule. It's the old rule about trust, applied to a new audience. People never fully believed a company's own claims about itself. Now the machines summarising the internet on our behalf don't either.

Ask most construction or property businesses how they get press coverage and you'll hear some version of the same answer. A win announcement. A new appointment. Maybe a project completion with a nice render. All perfectly fine. All also completely forgettable to a journalist who sees fifty of them a week.

Meanwhile, somewhere in that same business, a site manager donates leftover materials from a job to a local school's forest school and it never goes further than a thank you note pinned in the staff room. A site team switches to buying timber from a local yard instead of the usual national account, because the logistics work better, and it happens to keep money in the town they're building in and cut the carbon footprint too. A project manager spends her own time mentoring a college student on placement, the kind of thing that shows up nowhere except in how that student talks about the industry now.

That second list is earned media waiting to happen. These are good people doing good things that should, and do, happen without fanfare, but they're also the clearest evidence a business has of its own values and its most valuable asset, its people. Told properly, those stories travel on their own.

Take a builders' merchant positioning itself as "Hardas Supplies, we supply the best building materials direct to site." Traditional marketing has a well worn playbook for a business like that: find complementary businesses serving the same customer, cross promote, build a customer avatar, chase awareness through every channel that reaches them. None of that is wrong, it's solid marketing 101. But strip it back and ask what it actually says about the company beyond its own claim, and the honest answer is not much. "Best building materials" is Hardas's opinion of Hardas. Nobody else has to believe it, and increasingly, nobody does, human or AI.

Your customers want to feel good about who they buy from. Pair that with a decent customer experience and you've got a winner. What they want is a story, not a sales pitch, and you can build one at any size once you start thinking about the how rather than the whether.

If social value sits at the beginning of that thinking rather than being bolted on afterwards, it pays for itself. It's rarely the quickest route, and if I'm honest, it's rarely the easiest either. But it's the one that keeps working long after the campaign budget's been spent, because "we support our local community" is a sentence that could belong to any business, in any sector, in any decade, while "we took on a 17 year old who'd been out of work for a year and he's now running his own team" is a story. It has a person, a before and after, and a reason someone would want to read it.

The gap between those two is usually just that nobody told the person who could tell the story that the story existed. A bid team makes a commitment. Operations delivers it. Marketing finds out months later, if at all, usually as an aside in a meeting. By then the moment's gone, and what could have been a feature is a line in next year's sustainability report. Social value teams, where they exist, are trained to evidence impact against a framework. Marketing teams are trained to spot a story in the moment. Put those two skills in the same room at the right time and the release writes itself. Keep them apart, which is what happens by default in most businesses, and you've got a spreadsheet nobody outside compliance ever opens.

Public sector procurement already carries the regulation around doing good, PPN 002 and measurement frameworks like the National TOMs and the Impact Evaluation Standard see to that. What's changed in the last twelve months is the private sector starting to ask the same questions of businesses that have never had to answer to a tender scorecard before.

The businesses that get written about, and increasingly the ones AI models choose to surface, aren't necessarily doing more social value than everyone else. They're the ones where someone happened to be in the room while the story was still warm, and thought to tell it properly instead of writing another sentence that starts with "we support."

Sources

Muck Rack Study: Generative AI Relies Heavily on Earned Media and Journalism (July 2025)

How AI citations have changed in the last 6 months (May 2026 update)