Digital PR glossary

Earned media

Earned media is publicity a brand gains through other people's choices rather than payment: news coverage, reviews, mentions, social shares, awards and recommendations. It is one of the four channels in the PESO model, alongside paid, shared and owned media, and carries weight because a third party, not the brand, is vouching for it.

Reviewed by Gareth Hoyle, Managing Director
Last reviewed 31 October 2026

Where does earned media fit in the PESO model?

Gini Dietrich of Spin Sucks introduced the PESO model in 2014 to group communications into paid, earned, shared and owned media. Paid covers advertising and sponsored content. Owned is the brand's website, emails and content. Shared is social media. Spin Sucks defines earned media as third-party credibility: coverage, reviews, mentions, backlinks and awards.

The channels feed each other. Owned research becomes earned coverage, which is then shared and can be amplified with paid promotion.

Why earned media matters for search and AI

Earned coverage is where most editorial links come from. Google's spam policies treat paid links that pass ranking credit as link spam unless they are marked nofollow or sponsored, so links that count for SEO have to be earned.

Earned mentions also shape AI answers. Ahrefs' 2025 study of 75,000 brands found that branded web mentions correlated more strongly with brand visibility in Google AI Overviews than backlinks did.

How to measure earned media

The Barcelona Principles, first agreed at an AMEC summit in 2010 and updated in 2015 and July 2020, state that advertising value equivalents (AVEs) are not the value of communication, and that measurement should cover outputs, outcomes and potential impact. For digital PR, that means relevant coverage, links from new domains, referral traffic, branded search and AI mentions rather than an estimated advertising value.

Example

A garden centre chain pays for a magazine advert (paid), publishes a planting calendar on its site (owned) and posts it on Instagram (shared). When a national newspaper's gardening columnist recommends the calendar and links to it, that is earned media.