Public Relations (PR) has a longstanding PR issue.
Most marketers understand its value intuitively, but boards and the C-suite often struggle. This is because PR has always had a measurement problem.
PR rarely produces the clean attribution you see with channels like paid search or email marketing. Having a comment featured in an article seldom results in a flood of enquiries you can directly attribute to the media. Results can take months or years to reveal themselves.
Historically, PR professionals have relied on circulation, share of voice, backlinks, and brand mentions to highlight the impact of their craft. These are valuable in their own right, but they don’t often tell the full story. They fall down when marketing budgets come under scrutiny, something most marketers have experienced many times over.
AI isn’t a miraculous development that solves the measurement problem entirely, but it’s helping to change the conversation.
Before I entered corporate communications, I knew the perception issue firsthand. I was a journalist with a penchant for investigations and for telling tough stories. I was always speaking to PR professionals, either because they wanted me to write about their client or, oftentimes, because they didn’t want me to write anything at all.
I felt like they always wanted something from me, but we would never give them analytical data should one of their clients make it onto our publication. They still, no doubt, would consider this exposure a win and report the coverage back to their clients.
So, when I left journalism for marketing, I came into agency life with a slight negative lens towards PR. I was always the healthily dissenting voice about its impact and validity when comparing it to other marketing activities. This prompted healthy change amongst our team as everyone worked harder to communicate PR’s value to stakeholders.
Today, I’m loud and proud about all the PR successes we achieve and the impact they will have as part of the larger marketing vehicle.
The main driver in that significant perception switch? AI.
AI is changing PR
Most people would have expected AI to impact PR, like it’s impacting many other industries and practices, but few would have expected the change to come in its current form.
Much of the conversation early on focused on how AI can help seamlessly churn out content pieces after content pieces, or automate workflows. In marketing and PR, the more interesting shift is happening elsewhere.
AI is indeed having an impact on Public Relations—especially for those seeking to unlock better understanding in C-suites.
PR is all about building credibility through the validation of independent parties. You can talk about how great and insightful you are as much as you like on your website, but everybody does that. When you appear in respected publications and become a recognised industry voice, it earns you one of the most valuable social currencies: trust.
I’m not suggesting that LLMs and AI search platforms are changing trust. They have given another method of observing it, though.
You can verify this in the way businesses are starting to track metrics like:
- AI Share of Voice
- AI sentiment
- Brand visibility in AI search
- Citation frequency
- AI referrals related to viewpoints only expressed in media articles
These are not perfect metrics that wholly quantify PR or easily convince boardrooms to increase the budget, but they provide something new. Instead of having to effectively trust that media coverage is building credibility and influencing public perception, companies now have a new, helpful lens to view their online authority and expertise.
PR hasn’t changed, nor have the benefits of engaging in it, but now you can see your digital footprint (outside of your own website and social accounts) growing and strengthening in near-real-time.
The path forward
The marketing community tends to skew towards extreme:
- “AI can do everything, no marketing team needed”
- “I will not use AI in any way, ever”
The introduction of AI search as a PR-adjacent practice does not need to prompt either reaction from PR and marketing teams. Professionals do not need to become AI specialists, nor does every media placement guarantee improved AI visibility.
PR programmes have historically been at their best when the focus is on building reputation rather than just chasing coverage for its own sake. This remains.
This exact practice now contributes to another business objective that’s becoming increasingly important: becoming easier to discover as AI reshapes how people find information.
The businesses that benefit the most from this development won’t be those that try to game or overly optimise for AI platforms. It’ll be those who consistently demonstrate expertise through original content and research, expert commentary, and contributions to broader industry conversations.
To put it simply, good PR practice is still good PR practice. The right activities are still effective—perhaps even more than before. Marketing teams can now better observe the downstream effects of these activities and better demonstrate the value to company decision-makers.
PR has always been valuable because trust has always mattered. AI discoverability provides another perspective to measure trust and reputation.
A simple framing exercise can help guide PR professionals through the foreseeable future.
It’s no longer enough to ask, “How many articles did we secure?”
The better question is: “Did those articles strengthen the authority and trust that both people—and increasingly AI systems—associate with our organisation?”
Risk management, public perception and competitive visibility are what boards care about. Real P&L-affecting outcomes rather than specific media coverage placements.
AI hasn’t changed what good PR looks like, but it is changing how organisations can see its impact. And for a discipline that has spent multiple decades trying to prove its value in the boardroom, this may turn out to be one of AI’s most meaningful contributions to the industry.
