How Harry and Meghan are losing secret new battle with King Charles
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are trailing King Charles III and the monarchy in a new competition for favorable coverage by artificial intelligence, according to a PR firm that specializes in AI.
New York agency 5W asked Claude, Anthropic’s AI platform, 18 questions about the royals on June 16 and assessed the answers for tone (positive, negative or neutral), number of citations and other metrics.
The results gave the palace camp—including King Charles, Prince William and Princess Kate—a score of 70 out of 100, compared with 51 for Harry and Meghan. King Charles was named most frequently, followed by William and then Harry.
Ronn Torossian, founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, told Newsweek: “The royals are among the most-covered family on Earth. They’ve also become the most asked-about family on Earth, but the asking has moved from Google to ChatGPT, Claude and other LLMs [large language models]. From the search box to the answer box.”
A source with knowledge of the Sussexes approach, who was offered anonymity so they could speak freely, told Newsweek: “The Duke and Duchess of Sussex take a very cautious approach to AI. The technology is developing constantly and like so many, we are just trying to keep up.
“It’s an unregulated space that is still not doing enough as it relates to safeguards around privacy and children. But, of course, we are always looking at ways that it can be useful, used responsibly.”
Newsweek approached Buckingham Palace for comment.
Why It Matters
Harry and Meghan’s rift with the royals has been a defining element of their post-palace lives. They have frequently used traditional media to try to tell their side of the story but at times with a negative impact on their reputations.
AI is changing how people research and access information about the world, creating different opportunities to seek control of the narrative in a space less dominated by mainstream media outlets, including those Harry and Meghan have long argued are biased against them. If 5W’s analysis is accurate, they are not yet leading on this front.
The Results
Researchers at 5W used a system they call the Citation Share Index to assess the responses to each of 18 queries, grouped into six aspects of royal life. They found the palace camp won in five out of six fields. The full questions and verbatim responses can be found here.
They also assessed tone (positive, negative or neutral) and found the palace royals had higher scores for neutrality, while Harry and Meghan had higher scores for negativity. The Sussexes recorded a higher share of positive answers than the palace, however.
“In old-school PR, you measured share of voice,” Torossian said. “You counted column inches, you hired a clipping service. The new measure is what the machine says when somebody asks. What the machine says about Harry and Meghan is that there’s a fight going on—and the sources the AI trusts aren’t favorable to them.”
The agency also counted the number of references to each individual royal’s name, and on that measure, Harry ranked in 13 mentions, behind William’s 14 and Charles’ 15.
Factors in the Different Standings
Torossian said the difference is only partly down to how the two sides are discussed in the media, social media and on blogs and online videos, with the royals having a number of structural advantages, including the domain authority of the monarchy’s official website.
“The Palace is winning the AI race because it sits on infrastructure the AI engines were built to trust: royal.uk, the .gov.uk family of sites, the Court Circular [the royal diary] as a dated primary source—every appearance, every engagement, every working royal duty logged and machine-readable,” he said.
He cited the palace’s “Wikipedia depth” and inclusion in BBC archives as well as the archived wire copy of press agency like Reuters and Hansard, the official record of statements in Parliament.
The monarchy’s status as a part of the British state also gives rise to opportunities to show up in the official records and websites of governments overseas.
Charles’ speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in April, when he received multiple standing ovations, is a prime example.
“If you’re speaking in front of Congress with President Trump next to you, of course it [has an impact],” Torossian said. “The same way that probably the most important link in the world is if you have a story posted on whitehouse.gov.”
News outlets placed significant weight on the importance of Harry and Meghan’s Netflix deal in the years since it has been signed because of the signficant sums involved, but in the long-term reputational battle, Torossian felt it would struggle to measure up to the power and position of the monarchy.
“Harry and Meghan are fighting that with archewell.com, a Netflix deal and a memoir,” he said. “It is an asymmetric battle on infrastructure they don’t own—and they’re losing the structural layer.”
How Both Sides Could Improve Their Standing
Torossian said wisdom from the old world of PR may be out of date since the LLMs that power AI may not reliably access paywalled content online, reducing the influence of higher value news brands.
By contrast, he said: “Reddit and Wikipedia account for about 35 percent to 40 percent of how LLMs are coming up with a decision,” with content drawn from those sources repurposed with authority and perceived neutrality in AI-generated responses.
“Harry and Megan can very much tilt the scales, frankly,” Torossian said. “Absolutely they can convince search engines that their truth is the absolute truth.
“They can show why this specific reporter is wrong on that specific issue, if they are trustworthy for search engines, which they will be, because if I know that this is an official site of Meghan Markle, I am absolutely going to listen to the official statement, site, video, whatever that is of Meghan Markle.”
One potential impact on PR strategy may prove to be the decision on how regularly and through what method to go on the record in relation to media allegations and scandals.
AI platforms give weight to on-the-record statements, including posted on official websites, while clarity and consistency are key.
“LLMs value very clear information, repeated in the same places,” Torossian said. “So you should say the same thing on YouTube that you’re saying on Twitter, that you’re saying to a newspaper, that you’re saying to the trades. And yes, that can have a big influence in terms of how LLMs are influenced.”
The findings are not all negative for Harry and Meghan and could present an opportunity for them to wrest some control back from the British newspapers the couple have long accused of bias.
Torossian said audience for mainstream media outlets “has been down, down, down” in recent years, a trend he said “will only continue. So we think that people are asking ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini for its opinion about things.”
It comes alongside a shift among U.K. newspapers away from free content to subscription revenue and paywalls, which AIs cannot get through.
The Daily Mail, for example, now puts more of its royal commentary behind its paywall, including columnists and pieces by its diary editor, Richard Eden, all of whom frequently write about the Sussexes. LLMs cannot reliably access that content unless it has been republished or summarized elsewhere. The couple have sued the publisher of Mail titles four times, and in one case accused the newspaper group of a campaign to show Meghan in a damaging light.
That shift in the bussiness model of mainstream media brands may reduce the influence their stories have over AI answers, compared to Harry and Meghan’s narrative, put out through official statements on their website.
“We are sitting on top of a once-in-a-generation marketing inflection point,” Torossian said. “The last one was Google in 1998. The one before that was cable. ChatGPT alone is processing north of two billion queries a day and growing at a rate Google never matched. Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s own AI Overviews are scaling on the same curve.”
