New research shows AI engines build their answers on credible, independent sources. For universities, that is an invitation to tell their stories better. 

By William “Skip” Hidlay

Consider the new world of AI-curated search: A high school junior types a prompt into ChatGPT as the student starts researching where to apply for college.

Which universities are best for marine biology, and why? Which provide research opportunities for freshmen? Who are the most distinguished marine biologists on their faculty?

The answers arrive in seconds. The AI platform names a handful of universities, providing a summary of what makes each one stand out, what research opportunities they provide to students, and a list of what AI identified as their top faculty members in marine biology.

The student may never visit a single university website. Whatever the student learns about university marine biology programs in that moment comes from what the AI platform chose to include in its summary of search results.

AI-curated search results represent the new front door for every university and academic health center. An estimated 68% of Google searches in the United States ended without a click in the first four months of 2026, according to a SparkToro study.

Increasingly, whatever answers AI provides is where the search ends.

So, what do AI engines read and how do they decide what to summarize about your university, your health system, and your brand? New research offers an encouraging answer.

What AI Reads

For its May 2026 “What Is AI Reading?” report, the media relations and strategy firm Muck Rack analyzed more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini across 17 industries. It found that 84% of citations came from what it categorizes as earned media.  Paid and advertorial content accounted for 0.3% of AI summaries. News releases made up about 1%.

Interestingly, under the earned media category, journalism and traditional news coverage alone accounted for 27% of cited links, and more than half of that coverage had been published within the previous 12 months. That pattern has held across three editions of the study since July 2025, with earned media ranging from 82% to 89%.

These results validate the continued need for maintaining strong media relations teams and continuing to pitch stories about groundbreaking new research and other news about your university and academic health center to traditional media outlets.

But I think the most important finding from the Muck Rack data is subtler for university brand, communications, and marketing leaders.

Muck Rack counts an organization’s own content, what I like to call “brand storytelling” and “owned media” content, as earned media when an AI engine cites it to answer someone else’s question.  The Muck Rack study found that “corporate blogs and content” accounted for 24% of citations, nearly matching the proportion of earned media AI summaries from journalism publications. When AI answers a question about the organization itself and cites content from its website, Muck Rack counts this as owned media, which made up another 13.7% of the broader earned media category.

In other words, an expert-written article or a fact-based, journalistic-style feature story on a university’s own website can earn its way into AI answers on nearly the same terms as traditional news coverage. What gets the story read and cited by AI are facts, a named expert, and real-life experiences, without a marketing sales pitch.

What People Trust

What’s also interesting is that, when it comes to information about health and wellness, AI engines are essentially mirroring human behavior in what they choose to highlight. People learn from doctors, other clinicians, and health care providers as well as from other people who’ve had similar health challenges and experiences.

In April 2026, the Pew Research Center published a survey of 5,111 U.S. adults on where Americans get health information. Health care providers remain the most common source, at 85%. But 66% said they also learn from other people going through similar experiences, and about half say they struggle to know which information is accurate.

Health is a revealing case, but the pattern holds for any high-stakes decision, including where to go to college: People want expertise, want to hear from someone who has been there, and aren’t entirely sure what to believe.

For university leaders, the point here is that AI-curated search rewards what audiences already trust: credible experts telling real, fact-based stories, without a marketing sales pitch.

Proof From a Brand Storytelling Newsroom

I saw this play out four years ago, before Generative AI platforms burst onto the scene, when I served as chief communications and marketing officer at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. To help build the university health system’s brand as a destination for innovative research and advanced clinical care, we developed and launched a web storytelling platform and content engine in 2022 called Ohio State Health & Discovery.

Every health story we produced carried a named clinical expert’s byline or told an in-depth profile or feature about one. We chose topics by finding questions people were asking Google that had few credible, readable answers.

Our goal was to build, over time, a deep ecosystem of brand stories and content that would surface in Google searches. What we didn’t realize is that this also would set us up for future success in the new era of AI-curated search.

One example of how our approach worked: People wanted to know whether mouthwash kills the mouth’s healthy bacteria, and search results returned mostly dense academic papers. An expert from Ohio State’s College of Dentistry answered the question in plain language, and we kept updating the story as new questions emerged. It drew more than 121,000 views through March 2026, about 110,000 of them from organic search.

As AI grew in importance as a gatekeeper of search results, Health & Discovery content appeared in more than 13,500 Google AI Overviews in 2025, and sessions from AI search engines grew 207% from the year before. None of these results came from paid placements. Our stories earned AI citations the way Muck Rack’s data suggests: through expertise, specificity, facts, and brand stories only we could tell.

What Universities Can Do Now

Universities hold an advantage most brands would envy: deep benches of genuine experts and a steady supply of human stories from students, faculty, alumni and, at academic medical centers, patients.

Here are three moves you can make now to put that advantage to work:

Put names on the work. Give bylines to faculty and staff experts and state their credentials consistently wherever they appear. When using communications staff and freelance writers to write news and feature stories, establish their authority and credibility with author bios that provide their experience and credentials.

Answer the questions people actually ask. Find the high-volume questions in your fields that lack credible, readable answers, and let your experts answer them.

Keep earning coverage. Recency matters to AI engines, so a steady cadence of credible brand journalism news and feature stories beats one big hit a year.

The temptation in the AI era is to produce more content, faster, using AI itself to write the content. The evidence points the other way. Generic, AI-produced content gets summarized away by the AI engines with citing the source.

Authentic human-centered stories, told by people who know what they are talking about, are what AI reads and cites. And what human audiences believe.

The more the machines summarize, the more the human story matters and breaks through the clutter.

Editor’s Note: We are delighted to welcome Skip Hidlay as PRG’s newest senior associate. Most recently Skip served as chief communications and marketing officer for the University of Chicago Medicine from 2016-2020 and for The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center from 2020-2026. He has more than 30 years of experience in senior leadership roles across healthcare and news media. He leverages data-driven content marketing, brand storytelling, and multi-channel media strategies to build brands, drive growth and create engagement. In addition, Skip is helping us and our clients think more deeply about technology developments and the applications and implications of AI.