Digital PR glossary

PESO model

The PESO model is a communications framework that sorts media into four types: paid, earned, shared and owned. Gini Dietrich, founder of Spin Sucks, introduced it in 2014 to help PR and marketing teams plan advertising, media coverage, social media and their own content as one programme rather than four separate ones.

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

What are the four parts of the PESO model?

Each letter is a channel the brand has a different degree of control over, from full control of owned media to none over earned.

Paid: advertising, sponsored content, boosted social posts and paid influencer programmes
Earned: coverage, reviews, awards and mentions a third party chooses to give, which Spin Sucks now extends to AI citations
Shared: social media, where content travels and audiences respond
Owned: the website, blog, email, podcasts and video the brand controls

Who introduced the PESO model and when?

Gini Dietrich launched the model in 2014, the year she published Spin Sucks: Communication and Reputation Management in the Digital Age. She revised it in 2020 after finding it still listed channels that no longer existed, such as Google+ and Vine. The update moved it from a list of tactics towards a model of how activities in each channel work together.

How does PESO apply to search and AI visibility?

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

For SEO, earned media is where editorial links come from, because Google's spam policies treat paid links that pass ranking credit as link spam unless they are marked nofollow or sponsored. Owned pages are what search engines and AI assistants retrieve and cite. We use PESO as a check that every digital PR campaign has an owned page worth linking to before any pitching starts.

Example

A pet insurer publishes a page of vet treatment costs by region (owned). A national newspaper covers the figures and links to the page (earned). The insurer and the journalist post the story on LinkedIn and Instagram (shared), and the insurer runs paid social ads to the page in the regions with the highest costs (paid).