For years, I struggled to defend PR as a performance channel.
I began my career in communications. I understood the value of a compelling narrative, a credible spokesperson and the right media relationship. I knew that a strong piece of coverage could shape how a company was perceived.
But as I moved deeper into digital marketing, my perspective changed.
Digital brought a different standard of accountability. Every campaign was expected to generate traffic, conversions, opportunities and pipeline. Against those measures, PR often appeared frustratingly indirect.
A company could secure excellent media coverage, celebrate the resulting attention—and still struggle to demonstrate what it had contributed commercially.
That led me to a conclusion I repeated for years:
PR builds reputation. It does not generate demand on command.
I still believe that.
But AI is changing the commercial value of reputation itself.
Buyers are no longer only searching. They are asking.
A potential customer may no longer begin with a list of keywords and ten blue links.
They may ask:
“Which workforce management providers are strongest in Europe?”
“What are the best platforms for a multinational manufacturer?”
“Which vendors are known for enterprise implementation expertise?”
The AI system does not simply return a ranked collection of webpages. It constructs an answer, often by retrieving, comparing and synthesising information from multiple sources.
That changes what visibility means.
In traditional search, being found was frequently the primary objective.
In generative search, the brand must also be understood, associated with the right category and supported by enough credible evidence to be included in the answer.
Your website can explain who you are.
But it remains your website. It is a claim you make about yourself.
Independent media coverage, expert commentary, industry reports, interviews, reviews and analyst perspectives provide something different: external corroboration.
That is where PR acquires a new strategic role.
PR creates evidence beyond the corporate website
This does not mean that every press mention automatically becomes part of an AI model’s training data.
Many current AI search experiences retrieve information from the live web and provide links or citations to the sources used. Both ChatGPT search and Google’s AI search features explicitly connect generated answers with web sources.
The opportunity for PR is therefore more immediate—and more practical—than “training the model.”
PR can help create the external evidence that an AI system may discover when researching a company, category or market question.
A meaningful article can establish:
• What category the company belongs to
• Which problems it is qualified to solve
• Where it has demonstrated expertise
• Which customers or industries it serves
• What differentiates its position
• Whether its claims are repeated by credible third parties
One isolated mention will not manufacture authority. But a consistent body of relevant, recent and independently published evidence can make a brand easier to identify and explain.
PR is becoming part of the information architecture surrounding the brand.
The objective is no longer maximum coverage
This also changes how PR should be evaluated.
Twenty near-identical press-release placements may create impressive reach figures without adding much useful evidence.
One substantive interview in the right industry publication may contribute far more.
The important question is no longer simply:
“How many people saw the coverage?”
It is also:
“What did the coverage establish about us?”
Did it connect the company to a strategically important topic?
Did it contain a specific fact, example or point of view?
Did it reinforce the category in which the brand wants to be recognised?
Would the article help a journalist, buyer—or AI system—understand why the company belongs in a particular conversation?
This requires more than distributing corporate announcements. It requires creating material worth retrieving and citing:
Original research.
Named expertise.
Clear category language.
Customer evidence.
Distinctive arguments.
Consistent facts across credible sources.
PR and SEO are converging—but they are not the same
PR has long supported SEO through backlinks, brand mentions and authority.
Those benefits have not disappeared. Google says that the foundations of SEO remain relevant to its AI features.
But generative discovery adds another layer.
A backlink helps connect pages.
A well-placed, substantive mention helps connect meaning.
It associates a company with an industry, problem, capability, geography or point of view. When those associations appear consistently across independent sources, they create a clearer public record of what the brand represents.
That is much bigger than link building.
PR has not become a lead-generation machine
We should resist replacing one exaggerated promise with another.
PR will not suddenly produce perfectly attributable pipeline because buyers use generative AI. Nor can anyone guarantee that a particular publication will cause a brand to appear in an AI-generated answer.
The systems are dynamic, the retrieval mechanisms vary and citation patterns remain inconsistent.
But PR can now contribute to something that sits earlier—and increasingly invisibly—in the buying journey:
Whether the brand enters the answer at all.
That is a strategically significant outcome.
For years, PR helped companies influence what people thought about them.
Its emerging role is to ensure that machines can find enough credible, consistent evidence to explain them accurately.
PR is not merely a reputation layer anymore.
It is becoming evidence infrastructure.