The State of Generative Engine Optimization: 2026 Data Sheet

Notable brands in this year’s report include Bill Nye, Cardi B, Dude Perfect, Jordan B. Peterson, Naughty Fork, and Nikkie de Jager. Valentine’s Day tweets outpaced other Home Decor hashtags on Twitter by a mile for Home Decor brands this year. From #furniture to #decor to #InteriorDesigner, followers could expect home-themed hashtags from their favorite brands. Home Decor brands kept it in the family with their top-performing hashtags on Instagram this year.

As an art form, its inherent vice is its seasonality — it shifts quickly, and before you know it, it has moved on to the next thing,” says Sam Bassett, former head of fashion film at Showstudio. For fashion brands, film offers a uniquely immersive and enduring form of storytelling. When it comes to jewellery brands, Cannes is one of the most significant marketing events of the year. Influencer marketing platform Lefty analysed over 3,000 Instagram influencers with more than 10,000 followers each, calculating the equivalent ad spend — known as earned media value (EMV) — of their Cannes-related content. But which brands managed to cut through on social media?

E.l.f. Beauty has taken a disciplined approach in pursuing strategic extensions that leverage the company’s strengths and has continued to thoughtfully diversify its business. “Just three years into this journey, our partnership with e.l.f. Beauty marks an incredible opportunity to elevate and accelerate our ability to reach more of our community with even more innovative products and widen our distribution globally. Her influence, paired with the brand’s innovative marketing strategy and team, fueled rhode to be the No. 1 skin care brand in Earned Media Value in 2024, representing 367% year over year EMV growth. The brand has seen incredible growth, more than doubling its consumer base over the past year and driving a total of $212 million in net sales in the 12 months ended March 31, 2025. Bieber set out to create a brand centered around her skin care philosophy of “one of everything really good.” rhode’s multitasking and efficacious products, made with innovative ingredients for visible results, seek “to glaze your skin with goodness.” Rhode is a beautiful brand that we believe is ready for rocketship growth.”

Why Earned Media Matters for B2B Marketers

When you create that authentic connection through earned media, they may be more likely to return again and again – and recommend you to others. Think Kate Middleton wearing her Burberry coat, which helped boost sales of the garment, or Taylor Swift name-dropping Olive Garden in a song. Customers trust earned media because it comes from third-party sources rather than directly from your brand – much like a recommendation from a friend. From your local restaurant using guerrilla marketing to State Street Global Advisors’ sponsorship of the “Fearless Girl” statue on Wall Street, earned media benefits businesses large and small, in every industry.

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Anybody with a smartphone knows you couldn’t say “trend” without Taylor Swift on social this year, so it’s no surprise Taylor-themed hashtags were trending for Sports Teams. Photo posts helped Sports Teams earn nearly 5x the median engagement rate on Facebook, putting these brands comfortably in first place. Notable brands in this year’s report include The Philadelphia Flyers, Louisville FC, Manchester City FC, The New York Mets, the Baltimore Ravens, and the Seattle Storm.

This powerhouse alliance between e.l.f. earned media Beauty and rhode is built on both brands' shared focus on disruption and product innovation, setting the stage for transformative global expansion. Customized reports and dashboards make for easy analysis and our Google Analytics integration helps marketers understand the impact of earned media on web traffic and conversions. Some of the most trusted, popular brands in the world use the Critical Mention platform to monitor earned media coverage. Leverage customizable reporting to share crucial KPIs with clients and sentiment analysis to help your clients understand the context of coverage.

• As these journalists will likely get plenty of responses from other people, how do you stand out and make sure your answer gets selected?
• Therefore, having a good network of journalists is not just beneficial, but essential to the success of your earned media strategy.
• Owned and earned media can work together because they’re both technically free for your business.
• While other platforms aggressively pursue live sports, Netflix has taken a more selective approach, investing in live programming where it adds value.
• It’s the spontaneous mentions, reviews and overall buzz created by your audience.

A video doesn't just go viral by accident — most of the time, there is a lot of careful planning involved to kick start the video's exposure with paid media, and at some point the paid media stops once earned media picks up. This makes the traffic you get from people who click on this result earned media attention. And when you write a blog post for your company blog about your latest product release, that's not earned media, either — that's owned media, since you own that blog post. When a company pays a publication to write a glowing article about them, for example, that's not an example of paying for earned media — that's just paid media. These publications and broadcasts are where brands used to get all their earned media.

Your willingness to show people you care enough about them, about their experience, and about your own business to respond to their posts can elicit positive emotions about your brand, and those positive emotions are share-worthy. Ask your followers questions about their daily lives or about their experiences with your brand. Set up filters in your social monitoring tools to help monitor conversations about your brand, and jump in when you can add something to the conversations. Also, make it easy for people to actually share your content by placing social share buttons where appropriate. Get people to want to share your content with one another by …

Tweet frequency decreased by about 15% this year across all industries as brands pulled back their efforts in response to the channel’s volatility. If you check these boxes, your customers will naturally share your content on social media, leave positive reviews, and tell their audience about you. If there is a thread that connects all earned media and its strategies together, it would be word-of-mouth. For that reason, in our book, SEO is a form of “earned media.”

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Because customers find earned media more trustworthy, they’re willing to give it a second look, even if it’s from a brand they might not normally consider. In today’s digital landscape, the benefits of earned media have multiplied, and it’s easier than ever to leverage it, if you know where to start. Check out our Live Benchmark landscapes, where we feature live social media metrics from a sample of companies from each industry represented in this study. To us, engagement rate per post is the metric because it controls for post volume and audience size and helps marketers understand how they’re doing in relation to their competitors. No surprise that it’s all about the visuals for Travel brands on Twitter, with video and photo tweets performing about twice as well as link and status tweets.