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Drew Neisser is the founder of CMO Huddles and a globally recognized authority on B2B marketing. He’s an AdAge columnist, LinkedIn TopVoice, leading CMO coach, podcast host & friend of penguins everywhere.
Public relations has spent years losing budget to channels that promise cleaner attribution. AI discovery changes the calculation: earned coverage now helps determine which brands appear credible when buyers ask machines for answers. This guide explains why coverage is harder to win, how to choose the right PR partner, and what companies must contribute internally.
For much of the past decade, PR has been the awkward guest at the marketing budget table. Paid digital arrived with dashboards, attribution models, and the comforting illusion that every dollar could be traced neatly to a click. Owned content gave brands control over what they published and when they published it. Earned media remained harder to predict, harder to measure, and therefore harder to defend.
The budget evidence reflects that pressure. In 2016, the USC Annenberg Global Communications Report found that corporate communications departments were spending 31.9% of their media budgets on earned media and expected that share to fall to 26.6% by 2020 as owned and shared channels gained ground. A decade later, Gartner reports that paid media consumes 31.4% of the average marketing budget, with CMOs funding some of that investment through agency cuts.
These studies are not a perfect apples-to-apples trend line, but the direction is unmistakable. Measurable channels gained influence while agency and communications spending faced constant scrutiny.
Then AI changed the discovery equation.
When a prospect asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to identify the strongest providers in a category, compare competing approaches, or explain an unfamiliar market, the response is assembled from sources the model considers useful and credible. Your website may contribute, but your company is no longer the only narrator of its expertise.
That makes third-party validation valuable all over again.
Muck Rack analyzed more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini across 17 industries. It found that earned media accounted for approximately 84% of citations, journalism represented 27%, and paid or advertorial content contributed just 0.3%.
That finding deserves a prominent place in the next CMO budget discussion. During our recent Leader Huddle, one CMO shared, "We created a story around a new term, placed it in several technology publications, and now it's showing up in Claude as being tied to our brand." The company also supported the story with owned content, although the CMO had not isolated which source contributed most to the AI visibility.
PR has traditionally been asked to build awareness, protect reputation, and generate coverage. It may now influence whether a brand appears in an AI-generated answer during the buyer's research process. A thoughtful article in a respected trade publication can reach its original readers, appear in search, generate social discussion, and provide evidence that AI systems may use later.
One piece of credible coverage can have a remarkably long digital afterlife.
There are caveats. Citation patterns differ by platform, industry, query, and model update. Muck Rack's analysis also uses a broad definition of earned media, and no study can promise that a particular placement will cause a brand to appear in an AI answer. Still, its research has found earned media's share remaining between 82% and 89% across three studies since July 2025.
CMOs should treat this as a strong directional signal rather than a magic formula. PR cannot guarantee AI visibility, but ignoring the sources shaping AI responses is increasingly difficult to justify.
PR may be growing more strategically important just as earning meaningful coverage becomes brutally difficult.
Muck Rack's 2025 State of PR report found that 72% of PR professionals cited low journalist response rates as a barrier to coverage, while 62% reported shrinking media lists in the beats they target. Only 2% said earning coverage had not become harder.
The remaining journalists are buried under pitches, many of which now arrive with the polished sameness of mass-produced AI copy. Muck Rack's 2026 journalism research found that 88% of journalists immediately disregard pitches irrelevant to their beat, 71% reject overly promotional pitches, and 50% are put off by messages that resemble mass email.
Meanwhile, Cision found that 53% of journalists oppose PR professionals using AI-generated pitches to some degree. Journalists are using AI themselves, but they can recognize when a machine has scraped their bio and manufactured a compliment before delivering an irrelevant product announcement.
When everyone can manufacture relevance, genuine relevance becomes scarce.
There is another side to this story. Cision's survey of nearly 2,000 journalists found that 66% rely on PR-provided materials for story ideas. Reporters still need credible data, expert sources, embargoed information, access to executives, and stories that matter to their audiences.
The inbox is not the problem. What arrives in it is.
When publications employed larger staffs and reporters had more time, a reasonably relevant pitch might find its way to the right desk. Today, familiarity and trust carry more weight. A journalist is more likely to open an email from someone who understands the beat, respects deadlines, avoids wasting time, and has previously delivered useful sources.
This raises the value of a PR firm with real media relationships. As another Huddler put it, "Since AI can't create relationships, a PR agency is more important now than it has ever been." He described how a trusted agency contact could call a trade publication with a timely industry story and concluded, "That can't be replicated by AI."
"Real" is the operative word. A database containing thousands of reporter names is not a relationship, and neither is a software-generated claim that a reporter is a perfect match because they used a particular keyword six months ago.
CMOs evaluating a PR firm should ask practical questions:
A good firm brings judgment, relationships, persistence, and an external understanding of what the market finds interesting. It should also help the CMO avoid spending political capital on stories that were never stories in the first place.
The best PR firm in the world cannot manufacture a steady stream of meaningful coverage from an organization that has nothing to say and no time to help. As one CMO observed during the Huddle, "The one thing people underestimate about PR is how much work it takes on your side." Another described building a five-person internal communications team because the company was generating timely story ideas faster than its agencies could act on them.
Companies can generate news through product launches, customer wins, acquisitions, partnerships, executive appointments, financial milestones, and category developments. When natural news is limited, they can make news through proprietary research, useful data analysis, provocative points of view, creative demonstrations, industry indexes, events, and carefully designed stunts. One CMO captured the opportunity neatly: "You don't need to have news to place a story. You need to have a story that's uniquely yours to tell."
Both paths require internal participation.
Executives need to make themselves available. Subject-matter experts must provide substantive ideas. Customers need to approve stories. Legal teams need to review claims quickly enough for the news cycle. Marketing teams need to produce research, visuals, supporting content, and landing pages. Someone must connect each earned-media opportunity to the company's broader narrative.
AI can accelerate research, analyze data, monitor relevant conversations, and help tailor outreach. It cannot create executive conviction, customer evidence, or a genuinely differentiated point of view from thin air.
You cannot outsource being interesting.
CMOs should plan PR as a combined investment in external expertise and internal capacity. Hiring an agency without assigning internal owners, executive access, and content resources often produces frustration on both sides. The agency waits for material while the client waits for headlines.
An effective earned-media program needs a repeatable operating rhythm. "You need a calendar of content and a calendar of pitches, but when the industry is moving this quickly, that calendar can become defunct after a month and a half," one Huddler noted. Her team maintains the planned calendar while using an internal Slack channel to generate and assess timely pitch ideas every day.
The calendar should be tied to the company's commercial and corporate milestones, but it cannot become a straitjacket. News rarely arrives according to the marketing calendar, so CMOs need planned pillars and room for opportunistic news-making.
What can the company see that others cannot? Aggregated product usage, customer behavior, market patterns, and operational benchmarks can become valuable research when handled responsibly. The best studies answer questions journalists, customers, and AI users are already asking.
Executives should own a small number of issues where they have genuine authority. Their perspectives must extend beyond promoting the product. A useful executive can explain what is changing, why it matters, and what leaders should do next.
Customer stories provide the proof that corporate claims usually lack. Strong PR programs develop a pipeline of customers willing to discuss measurable outcomes, lessons learned, and even the complications encountered along the way.
Breaking news creates short windows for expert response. Companies need pre-approved spokespeople, clear areas of expertise, and a rapid process for developing informed commentary. Taking five business days to approve three sentences is an effective strategy for never being quoted.
Research reports, public experiments, industry scorecards, executive salons, and relevant stunts can earn attention when they illuminate a meaningful issue. The creative idea must support the company's expertise; novelty without relevance produces a brief spike and little lasting authority.
PR measurement has long suffered from two extremes. One side counts clips and impressions without connecting them to anything the business values. The other expects every article to produce an immediately attributable pipeline event. One Huddler acknowledged the attribution gap while making the commercial case: "Our PR performance drives a lot of our business. It has helped create credibility and visibility for the brand." Her team tracks traditional and LLM share of voice, monitors roughly 25 priority prompts, and captures anecdotal evidence when prospects mention articles during sales conversations.
CMOs need a more complete scorecard that may include:
CMOs should resist forcing PR into a last-click framework built for performance advertising. They should be equally skeptical of reporting that stops at "potential impressions." The business case becomes stronger when PR objectives begin with a defined audience and business outcome, then connect activity to changes in awareness, authority, behavior, and commercial performance.
PR needs accountability. It also needs a measurement model suited to the way influence actually works.
Start by examining what AI systems say about your company, your executives, your category, and your competitors. Note which sources appear repeatedly and whether your brand is supported by credible third parties. This provides an initial view of the authority gap.
Next, audit the company's capacity to generate news. Identify upcoming milestones, untapped data, willing customers, credible experts, and issues where the company has something distinctive to contribute. If the cupboard is bare, the problem extends beyond media relations.
Then evaluate whether your current PR resources have the relationships and subject expertise required for today's compressed newsroom. A large media list and a high pitch count should not be mistaken for access.
Finally, build a scorecard that combines traditional PR outcomes with search visibility, AI citations, sales usage, and business impact. The goal is not to produce a perfect attribution model. It is to give leadership enough evidence to make a sound investment decision.
For years, PR struggled to compete with channels that offered cleaner dashboards. AI discovery is reminding marketers that credibility does not always arrive through a trackable link.
The machines are reading the news. CMOs should start making some.
No. AI platforms change frequently, and their responses depend on the model, query, available sources, and user context. PR can increase the supply of credible third-party evidence about a company, improving the conditions for visibility without guaranteeing a particular result.
Begin with an audit rather than an arbitrary transfer. Determine where buyers seek information, how competitors earn authority, and whether your company can sustain a credible news pipeline. A focused pilot tied to priority audiences and measurable outcomes can establish whether greater investment is warranted.
Expect media judgment, relevant relationships, strong storytelling, disciplined outreach, candid counsel, and meaningful measurement. The firm should understand your market well enough to identify stories reporters will value and push back when your proposed announcement is unlikely to earn attention.
At minimum, the company needs an accountable owner, executive access, responsive subject-matter experts, customer evidence, timely approvals, and resources for research and supporting content. PR performs poorly when every useful idea must fight through weeks of internal delay.
Track whether your brand and executives appear in relevant AI answers, which sources are cited, how that visibility compares with competitors, and whether earned articles recur across platforms. Combine these indicators with search, web, sales, reputation, and pipeline data rather than treating AI mentions as an isolated vanity metric.