Hiring a PR firm is a challenging investment. You're investing in judgment, trusted relationships, and strategic outcomes, often delivered by professionals whose expertise lies in shaping perception, influencing narratives, and making the extraordinary seem achievable. Most guides on this topic tell you to "check their portfolio" and "make sure they understand your goals."
We encourage every organization to review this guide before selecting a communications or reputation management partner, regardless of who they choose to work with.It covers what to look for, the red flags to watch for, and the questions that help distinguish firms with real-world experience, proven results, and solid operations from those that simply tell a compelling story. If you're specifically evaluating AI and search visibility capability, we've also published a ranked comparison of firms doing that work well, with methodology disclosed.
What to Look For
Can they market themselves?
Start here, because credibility is one of the hardest things to manufacture and one of the least frequently verified. A communications or reputation management firm should have a visible track record of professional recognition and industry presence. Research the firm online. Is its founder quoted by journalists, invited to speak at industry events, contributing thought leadership, or recognized within their field? Use tools such as ChatGPT or Perplexity to identify respected firms in the market and see whether the firm appears consistently among those recommendations.
A firm's own reputation, visibility, and professional standing often provide the clearest indication of its ability to deliver similar results for clients. The data behind this is covered in our AI visibility white paper, but the short version: Today’s buyers increasingly rely on third-party validation when evaluating companies. If a firm cannot demonstrate that kind of credibility and recognition for itself, it may struggle to generate it effectively for its clients.
Who founded it, and where did they come from?
Team background predicts capability better than the services page does. Former journalists pitch differently because they spent years on the receiving end of pitches; They understand what resonates with journalists, what earns attention, and what is unlikely to gain traction with the media. Former in-house communicators understand approvals, legal review, and how decisions actually get made inside organizations.
Career agency people often bring process discipline. None of these is automatically better, but the makeup should match your problem. If your challenge is earned media and the senior team has never worked in or with a newsroom, ask why.
Do they show their wins in public, with names attached?
Scroll their LinkedIn and their case studies. Firms doing real work post real outcomes: named clients, actual placements, numbers. Video testimonials from identifiable clients provide the strongest validation, followed by attributed written testimonials. Generic endorsements or logo displays without context tend to offer the least meaningful insight. Confidentiality is legitimate in crisis communication work, While some client engagements legitimately require confidentiality, a firm that is unable to share any examples, outcomes, or client references may leave prospective clients with limited evidence of its experience and results.
What does their homepage lead with?
This sounds superficial. It isn't. A homepage leading with awards and self-congratulation tells you where the firm's attention goes. A homepage leading with your problems, in language you'd actually use, tells you they've done the work of understanding client. You’re about to trust this firm to communicate on your behalf—their own public presence is the clearest preview of how they’ll represent you..
How long do clients stay?
Long-term client relationships are one of the clearest indicators of performance, because they reflect sustained trust rather than short-term persuasion. The ANA and 4As studied client-agency relationships in 2025 and found the average now runs about seven years, more than double the 3.2-year average reported in 2016, with independent firms posting longer tenures than holding-company shops.
So ask directly: what's your average client tenure, and who's your longest-standing client? If most of a firm’s client relationships are only a few years old despite a long operating history, it may indicate higher client turnover than is being acknowledged.
Check the team's stability, not just its seniority.
Agency turnover runs around 30 percent annually by ANA figures, which means many firms cycle through a functionally new workforce every three years. Each departure resets client knowledge and continuity on your account. LinkedIn can help you assess average tenure, and Glassdoor can offer insight into employee retention. High churn means the team that wins your business won't be the team running it eighteen months later.
Do they ever say no? Firms that turn down bad-fit work, or that niche deliberately, are usually better at the work they keep. A firm that claims equal excellence in consumer launches, B2B thought leadership, crisis communications, public affairs, and influencer marketing, at every budget, is describing a sales strategy rather than a capability.
Red Flags
Some warning signs are subtle. These are not. Each can be verified, and any one of them is reason to pause, ask harder questions, or reconsider moving forward.
Guaranteed placements. Earned media cannot be guaranteed, by definition. A journalist decides what gets covered, and no ethical firm controls that decision. So when a firm promises you Forbes or a set number of placements per month, you're almost always looking at pay-to-play: sponsored content, or worse, the contributor-network schemes that journalism spent years exposing.
BuzzFeed News documented an agency CEO who for years placed undisclosed client mentions through his own contributor columns in Forbes and Entrepreneur, and The Outline reported price lists where a Forbes mention ran around $1,200 and a Huffington Post mention $500. Both outlets purged articles and tightened contributor rules afterward.
Coverage you buy isn't earned media, it doesn't carry the credibility weight with readers or with AI systems, and if it's undisclosed, you've paid for a liability.
Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE), or any "advertising value" math. If a firm reports your results as "equivalent ad value," it is measuring with a tool the profession formally threw out. The Barcelona Principles, the global measurement standard established in 2010 and since updated, reject AVEs outright, and the UK's PRCA went further, saying the numbers measure nothing beyond the vanity of whoever reports them.
Closely related: reporting that consists entirely of impressions and reach. Those figures describe a theoretical audience, never outcomes. A serious firm talks about coverage quality, message pull-through, branded search lift, and business results.
The bait-and-switch pitch. Senior partners present, juniors execute. It's the most common complaint clients raise about agencies, and it's structural: pitching is how senior people justify their rates. The defence is simple and appears in the questions below. If a firm resists naming your day-to-day team before signing, that's your answer.
"As seen on" badge walls. Double check this always. Those ABC, NBC, and Fox logos often trace back to paid press-release syndication on local affiliate websites, which is distribution, not coverage. Paid satellite media tours sold as organic TV hits run the same play. The FTC has acted on deceptive uses of network logos. Click the badge, find the underlying piece, and check whether a journalist chose to write it.
Awards they bought and reviews they seeded. A meaningful chunk of the industry awards circuit is pay-to-enter revenue business where every entrant becomes a finalist. Worse is the firm comfortable manufacturing sentiment: astroturfing is illegal in Canada, and the Competition Bureau's $1.25 million penalty against Bell in 2015 for undisclosed employee app reviews was the first of its kind here. A firm that fakes signals for itself will fake them for you, right up until it becomes your crisis.
The overnight AI agency. The GEO gold rush has produced a wave of shops guaranteeing AI citations and ChatGPT placements. Nobody controls what an AI engine cites, the same way nobody controls a journalist, and the firms guaranteeing it are usually rebranded SEO sellers with no earned-media capability.
That matters because earned coverage is the heaviest input into AI citation behaviour, which means a GEO-only shop is missing the engine that drives the outcome it's selling. Done properly, this service helps organizations understand their AI presence, build authority, and monitor citation growth, without making unrealistic guarantees.
Contracts built to trap you. Fair termination is 30 to 60 days' written notice after any initial term. Watch for long lock-ins with punitive exit fees, evergreen auto-renewals with narrow cancellation windows, and contracts where the firm keeps your media lists, content, and platform accounts on the way out. A firm confident in its work doesn't need a contract that makes leaving expensive.
Questions to Ask
By the time you're in a room together, the deck has been polished and the references pre-screened. These questions are designed to get past both.
"Do you have a real client we can call and talk to?" Ask for client references and make the calls. The most valuable insights often come from hearing firsthand how the firm communicates, manages expectations, and handles challenges when things don't go as planned.
"Who exactly works on our account, and what share of their time is ours?" Names, not roles. Meet them before signing. Staffing is most of what your retainer buys, so this question is really "what am I paying for?"
"What clients have you lost in the past two years, and why?" Every firm has lost clients. The ones who answer honestly understand accountability; the ones who claim a spotless record are telling you how they'll handle your bad news.
"What would you do in our first 90 days?" Good answers are specific to you and include things they'd need to learn. Generic onboarding language means you're getting the template.
"When would you fire us as a client?" Strange question, revealing answer. Firms with standards can describe a bad client. Firms that would never fire anyone are volume businesses.
"How does earned media feed AI visibility, in your view?" This one is current. A firm fluent in where the industry is going can explain the connection between coverage and AI citations in plain language. A firm that's behind will either dismiss the question or drown it in acronyms. And per the section above, if the answer includes a guarantee, the interview is over.
One Canadian note worth adding. PR isn't a licensed profession here, but the Canadian Public Relations Society's APR designation and its Code of Professional Standards, which explicitly bars extravagant claims and misleading information, are credible signals worth asking about. So is geography: Canada's PR industry concentrates heavily in Toronto, and if your story lives in the Prairies, Atlantic Canada, or the North, a firm with real regional media relationships will often beat a national brand whose nearest contact is three time zones away.
The Short Version
Verify that the firm can do for itself what it's promising you. Weight client tenure and team stability over the pitch. Treat any guarantee as a disqualifier. And request referrals from existing clients.
Solv Communications is a Canadian PR, Reputation Management and AI Visibility firm. If you're evaluating firms right now and want to see how we'd answer every question in this article, get in touch.
