If your brand is getting coverage but it no longer seems to move the needle, you’re not imagining it. A press release that once landed in a few newspapers now competes with creator videos, founder posts, review threads and AI-generated answers, often before a journalist has even read it. And when customers ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews about your category, what they hear about your brand depends on what credible sources across the web are saying.
That’s why public relations is changing faster now than at any point in recent decades. Here’s what’s shifting, what still matters, and what it means for how your business is seen.
From Press Releases to Conversations
The biggest shift is that PR is no longer a broadcast. It’s a conversation happening in real time, in public, on dozens of platforms at once.
- Brands are publishers now. Company Instagram pages, LinkedIn posts from founders and YouTube explainers reach audiences directly, without waiting for media coverage.
- Creators are the new media. A trusted creator with a loyal niche audience can sometimes shift opinion faster than a front-page story. Muck Rack’s 2025 research found one in three journalists now publish independently, through blogs, newsletters and social channels. Influencer and creator relations is now a core PR skill, not a side project.
- Audiences talk back. Every announcement gets comments, stitches, memes and reviews. PR teams have to listen and respond, not just publish.
- Employees are spokespeople. What staff post about their workplace shapes reputation as much as any official statement.
The press release still exists, but it’s now one asset in a wider content kit: short videos, carousels, quote cards, founder posts and creator briefs.
In practice: founder-led PR. Picture a D2C founder who posts an honest LinkedIn breakdown of why her brand raised prices. The post sparks debate in the comments, a trade reporter quotes it in a story on input costs, and that story ranks for searches about the category. One authentic post has become owned content, earned coverage and search visibility at once. The PR team’s job was to spot the moment, sharpen the message and connect it to the right journalists.
AI Is Becoming the PR Team’s Co-Pilot
AI hasn’t replaced PR professionals, but it has taken over much of the repetitive work that used to fill their days.
- Media monitoring: AI tools scan news, social media, forums and podcasts around the clock, flagging brand mentions and shifts in sentiment within minutes.
- Drafting: First drafts of press releases, pitch emails, FAQs and social captions can be produced quickly, leaving the human to sharpen the angle and tone.
- Smarter media lists: Instead of mass-mailing hundreds of journalists, AI helps identify the reporters and creators who actually cover a topic, and what they’ve written recently.
- Audience insight: Social listening shows what people care about, which phrases they use and which issues are heating up, so campaigns are built on data rather than guesswork.
- Personalisation at scale: One core story can be adapted for different regions, languages and platforms far faster than before.
The catch: generic, AI-sounding content tends to get ignored. In Muck Rack’s journalist surveys, irrelevance is the top reason a pitch gets rejected (73%), and 72% of independent creator-journalists say most pitches they receive aren’t relevant, so the edge now comes from original insight, real data and a genuine human voice.
Earned Media Now Shapes What AI Says About You
When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews, “What’s the best skincare brand for sensitive skin?”, the answer is built from what credible sources across the web say. That makes PR more important to visibility, not less.
- Coverage shapes the information AI draws on. AI assistants answer from a mix of training data, live web search and licensed or indexed sources, depending on the system. Credible third-party coverage, expert commentary and reviews make up a large part of what those systems can find about a brand.
- It’s an ecosystem, not a single article. AI visibility depends on everything surrounding a brand: authoritative media coverage, the brand’s own website, reviews, expert mentions, structured information and how well the brand ranks in search.
- Consistency matters. If your brand story, founder bio and key facts differ across sites, AI answers are more likely to be muddled or wrong.
- PR and SEO are converging. Teams are increasingly talking about AI visibility and emerging approaches such as generative engine optimisation (GEO), alongside traditional SEO. The terminology is still settling, but the principle is clear: a strong quote in a respected outlet builds credibility with readers and strengthens the sources AI systems can draw on.
In short, earned media is no longer just about who reads the article today. It also influences how AI tools may describe your brand to people searching tomorrow.
The research points the same way. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer report on brands states that what appears in AI results depends on “reputation, relevance, credibility, and clarity”, and that “it’s fueled by earned” media. An academic study that introduced GEO (presented at KDD 2024) found its methods could boost visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%, with results varying by domain. Google, for its part, says there are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews: standard SEO best practice and helpful, reliable content still apply. The takeaway is less a new trick than a higher premium on credibility.
In practice: AI visibility. A skincare brand is quoted by dermatologists in two health publications, reviewed in a respected beauty title and listed consistently across its own site, retailer pages and directories. When a shopper asks an AI assistant for gentle cleansers, the system has several credible, consistent sources to draw on, so the brand stands a better chance of being mentioned accurately. No single article did that. The overall information ecosystem did.
Crisis Communication at Internet Speed
A complaint posted at midnight can be trending by breakfast. Crisis PR now runs on hours, sometimes minutes, rather than days.
- The first response window is tiny. Silence is often read as evasion, so brands need pre-approved holding statements and clear escalation paths.
- Deepfakes and misinformation are real threats. AI can generate a fake CEO video, a doctored screenshot or a fabricated news story in minutes. PR teams now need ways to verify, debunk and respond fast.
- Tone matters as much as facts. A legally correct but cold statement can make things worse online. Empathy, accountability and plain language travel further.
Brands are better positioned to handle a crisis when they prepare before anything goes wrong: monitoring in place, spokespeople trained and a playbook ready to go.
In practice: the deepfake that fooled a finance team. In early 2024, an employee at engineering firm Arup’s Hong Kong office joined a video call with what looked and sounded like the company’s CFO and colleagues. Every other person on the call was a deepfake. The employee made 15 transfers totalling about US$25.6 million before the fraud was discovered. Arup confirmed that “fake voices and images were used”, and stressed that its internal systems weren’t compromised and operations weren’t affected. For PR teams, the lesson is twofold: deepfakes are now a reputational risk, not just an IT one, and a clear, factual statement that separates what happened from what didn’t helps contain the story.
Measuring What Actually Matters
PR used to be judged by the thickness of the clippings file. Digital tools now let teams connect coverage to real business outcomes.
| Traditional PR measurement | Modern PR measurement |
| Number of press clippings | Share of voice versus competitors |
| Advertising value equivalent (AVE) | Website and referral traffic from coverage |
| Estimated circulation | Engagement, saves and shares |
| Number of placements | Sentiment shifts and branded search lift |
| One-off campaign reports | Ongoing dashboards, including AI visibility |
AVE deserves a special mention. It’s still used in places, but the industry’s own measurement standard, the Barcelona Principles, has stated since 2010 that “AVEs are not the value of communication”. Moving to outcome-based metrics gives PR a stronger seat at the table, because it can show impact in the same language as marketing and sales.
What AI Can’t Replace
For all the automation, the heart of PR is still trust, and trust is built by people.
- Relationships: A journalist takes your call because you’ve been honest and useful before, not because an algorithm matched you.
- Judgement: Knowing when to speak, when to stay quiet and how a message will land in a particular culture or moment is a human skill.
- Storytelling: AI can arrange words, but finding the emotional truth in a brand story, the angle that makes people care, still needs a person.
- Ethics and transparency: Audiences increasingly want to know when content is AI-generated. Being open about it and never using AI to mislead protects long-term reputation.
The best PR professionals will use AI for speed and scale and keep the thinking, empathy and relationship-building for themselves.
Skills the Next Generation of PR Pros Need
The job description has widened. Writing a sharp pitch still matters, but it’s now one skill among several.
- Content creation: Writing for every format, plus basic video editing and visual storytelling for social platforms.
- Creator and community management: Building genuine partnerships with influencers and online communities.
- Data literacy: Reading social listening reports, analytics dashboards and sentiment data, and turning them into decisions.
- AI fluency: Using AI tools well, prompting them clearly and always fact-checking what they produce.
- SEO and AI-search awareness: Understanding how coverage affects search rankings and AI-generated answers.
- Crisis readiness: Staying calm, fast and human under pressure.
What This Means for Businesses
For brand leaders, the shift calls for a few practical changes rather than a complete reinvention.
- Break down the silos. PR, SEO, social and content should plan together, because they now feed the same search results and AI answers.
- Keep your brand facts consistent. Make sure your website, founder bios, listings and press materials tell the same story.
- Build relationships before you need them. The journalists and creators who trust you in good times are the ones who’ll hear you out in a crisis.
- Create things worth citing. Original data, expert commentary and clear points of view earn coverage that generic announcements don’t.
- Prepare an AI-assisted, human-led crisis plan. Use monitoring tools to spot issues early, but keep approvals and tone in human hands.
- Measure outcomes, not output. Track share of voice, sentiment, traffic and branded search instead of clippings and AVEs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is PR still relevant in the age of AI? Yes, arguably more than before. AI assistants and AI search draw on credible third-party sources, so earned media and expert commentary now influence how brands are described in AI-generated answers as well as in the press.
Will AI replace PR professionals? Not in the parts of the job that matter most. AI speeds up monitoring, drafting and research, but relationships with journalists, judgement in a crisis and genuine storytelling still depend on people.
How is digital PR different from traditional PR? Traditional PR focused mainly on press coverage. Digital PR also works across social media, creators, search and online communities, and is measured with data such as traffic, engagement and share of voice.
How does PR affect how my brand appears in AI search? AI tools build answers from what they can find about a brand, including media coverage, reviews and the brand’s own site. Consistent, credible coverage gives them better material to draw on, though no one can guarantee a specific mention.
What is GEO, and does it matter for PR? GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is an emerging term for improving visibility in AI-generated answers. It overlaps heavily with SEO and PR, because both depend on credible, consistent information about your brand.
How should PR success be measured today? Look beyond clippings and AVEs. Useful measures include share of voice, sentiment, referral traffic, branded search and, increasingly, how your brand is represented in AI answers.
The Landscape Keeps Shifting, and That’s the Real Challenge
PR is no longer just about getting people to read a story. It’s about shaping the information environment from which people, and increasingly AI systems, form opinions about your brand. Every interview, founder post, review and expert quote adds to that environment.
What makes this hard to manage alone is that none of it stands still. Platforms change how they surface content, journalists move to newsletters and independent channels, and a crisis can start on a platform you weren’t even monitoring. A PR approach that worked last year can quietly lose impact, not because you did anything wrong, but because the landscape moved.
That’s the gap our team closes. We combine media relations, creator partnerships, digital PR and reputation monitoring, so your brand is seen accurately and consistently, in the press, on social media and in AI-generated answers.
Click Here to Speak to Our PR Experts →
Sources
- Muck Rack, State of Creator Journalism report (2025)
- Muck Rack, Data-driven tips to secure more earned media (State of Journalism findings, 2025)
- Edelman, 2025 Trust Barometer: Trust and Brands, top 10 findings
- Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024)
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website
- AMEC, Barcelona Principles 3.0
- CNN, Arup revealed as victim of $25 million deepfake scam (May 2024)