AI hasn’t made public relations less important. It has raised the stakes.
The conversation often suggests AI is coming for the profession, that media relations is dying and anyone can write a press release with a prompt.
The reality is very different.
AI can generate words but it can’t manufacture trust, credibility, relationships or reputation.
After more than 25 years in journalism and communications, I’ve watched PR evolve from managing messages to building and managing trust, visibility and reputation. PR used to be about getting the right story in front of the right people. That work has not gone anywhere. What has been added is a second layer: making sure your organization is visible, credible and accurately represented when someone asks an AI system about you.
Here are 10 ways PR has changed and what those changes mean for the organizations we work with.
1. AI Visibility Has Joined Media Visibility
It is no longer enough to ask whether you earned media coverage. The question is whether your organization appears when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity about your industry.
That question now carries commercial weight. In a McKinsey survey of nearly 2,000 US consumers, 44% named AI-powered search as their primary and preferred source of insight for purchase decisions, compared with 31% for traditional search. Gartner found that 45% of B2B buyers used generative AI during a recent purchase, consulting an average of seven sources along the way.
Here’s what communications leaders need to understand: McKinsey found that a company’s own website accounts for just 5% to 10% of the sources AI uses when answering questions about it.
2. Modern PR Must Adapt to a New Era of Search
The click is disappearing. The answer is arriving first.
Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 real Google searches from 900 consenting American adults. When an AI summary appeared at the top of the results, users clicked through to a website 8% of the time. Without a summary, they clicked 15% of the time. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary itself.
It’s one of the most credible studies on the topic and importantly, it wasn’t produced by a company trying to sell you something.
The practical implication for communications is that content now has to be findable and usable by systems that summarize rather than send traffic. Clear structure. Direct answers to real questions. Claims that can be attributed and quoted.
You’ll hear terms like generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (EO), and an entire industry has grown around the acronyms. But underneath the jargon, much of what actually works is good clear, credible and consistent communication, designed for how people and AI now find information.
3. Earned Media Now Has a Second Audience
A media story no longer reaches only the journalist's audience. It becomes part of the material AI systems read when forming an understanding of your organization.
The evidence behind this is some of the strongest in this entire article. Muck Rack analyzed more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini across 17 industries and found earned media accounted for 84% of citations. Paid and advertorial content accounted for 0.3%. An independent academic study from the University of Connecticut, presented at the International Public Relations Research Conference, found 89% of cited links came from earned media.
Different researchers, different methods, same answer.
But there’s something important to keep in mind. There’s roughly a 2% overlap between the outlets PR teams typically pitch and the outlets AI systems actually cite. More coverage is not the goal. The right coverage is.
4. Reputation Is Becoming an AI-Generated Experience
Someone asks whether your company is reputable, or who the leading organizations in your sector are. Increasingly, a machine answers.
We are early in understanding this. An American radio host sued OpenAI after ChatGPT stated he had embezzled from a nonprofit, an allegation with no basis. A political commentator sued Google over AI-generated claims of a criminal record that did not exist. An Australian mayor threatened action after being told the system described him as a convicted briber.
The early defamation cases have largely failed, because courts are applying rules written for publishers to systems that do not fit the definition.
So the reality for organizations is uncomfortable: the reputational damage can be real, the legal protections are limited, and the strongest defence is to make sure accurate, credible information about you is already out there, in the places AI systems are actually reading.
5. Content Production Got Faster, and Strategy Got Harder
AI can research, draft, summarize, repurpose and personalize at a speed that was not available three years ago. This is a real shift, and it’s here to stay.
Muck Rack's 2026 survey of 564 PR professionals found 76% now use generative AI in their work, up from 28% in 2023. Adoption has effectively plateaued, which tells you the tools are no longer a differentiator. Everyone has them.
The same survey found 95% of practitioners edit what the tools produce.
That number tells the story. The hard part was never putting words together. It was knowing what is worth saying, what is true, and what it means to say it publicly on behalf of your organization.
6. Human Judgment Is Worth More, Not Less
When everyone can produce polished copy, polished copy is no longer a competitive advantage.
What remains valuable is human judgment: knowing what is truly newsworthy, what a spokesperson should never say, when to respond and when to stay silent. Also, whether a claim will stand up when a reporter starts asking questions.
There’s a governance issue here that is far more important and far more overlooked than most organizations realize, especially in the sectors we work with most closely. A study by Imagine Canada found that 80% of Canadian nonprofits now use AI, while only 10% have a formal policy governing it. Nearly two-thirds of those using AI have no policy or governance in place to manage AI in their organization.
That gap is where reputational problems begin. The risk isn’t the technology itself, it’s using it without clear accountability for what it produces, publishes and puts into the world.
7. Authenticity Has Become a Competitive Advantage
Audiences are getting better at spotting AI-generated content and once they recognize it, they trust it differently.
Ahrefs examined 900,000 newly published English-language pages and found 74% contained AI-generated material. Merriam-Webster named "slop" its word of the year for 2025.
The internet is littered with well-written content that is easy to produce, easy to forget and often impossible to trace back to a real person or point of view.
And that’s good news for organizations willing to do the harder work.
Original research no one else has that includes leaders willing to take a clear position, share a first-hand experience or specific data with a credible source identified.
This is especially valuable in the digital era. AI can produce endless generic content, but it can’t replicate what only you can credibly share. This includes your experience, expertise, perspective and point of view.
8. Crisis Communications Has Changed: Faster, More Public, More Risky
Three different risks are now happening at once, and each one requires its own plan.
The first is AI-generated fake content used against your organization. In one high-profile case, engineering firm Arup lost about $25 million after an employee joined a video call where everyone else, including the CFO, was an AI-generated fake.
Attempts to impersonate the CEOs of WPP and Ferrari were stopped, but only because someone asked a question the fake executive couldn’t answer. Gartner found 62% of surveyed organizations experienced a deepfake attack in a twelve-month period.
The second is AI systems generating false statements about you, with no editor to call.
The third is speed. Stories can now spread and reach their peak within a day or two, faster than most organizations can get through their own approval process.
Most crisis plans I review were built for a world of named journalists, identifiable outlets and editors you could reach. That world has changed. Crisis plans need to change with it, before the next crisis exposes the gaps.
9. Modern PR Needs a Bigger Scorecard
Traditional PR measurement looked at coverage, reach, impressions, sentiment and share of voice. All of these still matter, but they no longer tell the whole story.
The new measures are how often your organization appears in AI answers, whether those answers are accurate, and which sources AI cites when talking about you.
We’ve started calling this “share of authority” and it's the proportion of credible sources in your field that contain accurate information about your organization. It’s our term, not an industry standard, but what it measures is very real.
10. Modern PR Has Moved From Communications to Business Strategy
Reputation, authority and visibility now directly affect whether an organization is found, understood and trusted. That has moved communications from a supporting role to a much more central part of the business.
Korn Ferry found that 47% of communications executives at Fortune 500 companies now report directly to the CEO, up from 37% a decade ago. More than half, 51%, also sit on the executive committee.
Gartner expects this shift to go even further, predicting that the rise of AI as a replacement for traditional search could double PR and earned-media budgets by 2027. The reason is simple: this work depends on strong communications, not just marketing or search skills.
I’d take this future-forward outlook as a prediction. But the trend is clear, and we’re already seeing it with the organizations we work with.
What This Adds Up To
AI hasn’t made PR less important. It has made the job bigger.
Communications professionals now have to think about three audiences at once: people, who decide whether to trust you; media, who decide whether to cover you; and AI, which increasingly decides whether you get seen at all.
The organizations that understand how those three intersect will have a real advantage over the ones still treating the third as somebody else's problem.
At Solv Communications, we believe modern PR is no longer just about getting attention. It’s about earning trust, building authority and making sure your organization is visible, whether the audience is your next customer, a journalist or an AI system.
The rules have changed. Your communications strategy needs to change with them.
If your organization wants to be trusted, found and understood in the AI era, let’s talk. Solv Communications can help you build a reputation that works in the real world and in the systems shaping what people see next.
