Most PR Firms Are Sleepwalking Into the AI Era. Here’s What They’re Missing.

The way people find and evaluate companies is changing faster right now than at any point since the early days of Google. And most of the PR and communications industry is responding the way it always does to platform shifts: slowly, defensively and with a lot of repackaged old thinking dressed up in new language.

That’s a mistake — and it’s one that will be very hard to undo once the window closes.

Gartner has predicted that earned media spending will roughly double by next year, specifically because of the AI shift. The reason is straightforward: The way AI platforms surface and characterize companies is driven by credibility signals — press coverage, authoritative content, search presence. If you haven’t been building those things intentionally, an AI assistant asked about your category isn’t going to find you. It’s going to find your competitors who did the work.

This is a fundamental change in what PR is for. Not a tweak. Not a new channel to add to the deck. A restructuring of what it means to be findable and credible at the same time.

The problem with how most PR firms are built

Here’s the challenge: Most PR firms don’t actually have integrated competency across the disciplines that AI visibility requires. They have media relations people, maybe some content folks and possibly an SEO contractor they bring in when a client asks. These teams operate in separate lanes, optimize for separate metrics and hand work off to each other without a shared logic and shared mission connecting the dots.

That structure made sense when the goal was a media hit or a keyword ranking. It doesn’t make sense when the goal is shaping how an AI model understands and describes your company. That requires PR, content, SEO and AI trust signals to work as a unified system — not a bundle of services, but a coherent strategy where everyone understands why they’re doing what they’re doing.

I’ve spent the better part of two decades watching the communications landscape reset — from search to social to creators and now to AI summarizing and surfacing information in entirely new ways. Each shift reveals the same fault line: PR firms that build systems to proactively address these shifts, and those that simply scramble to adjust their tactics to the changing demands of clients.

The ones scrambling rarely catch up fully. They get close enough to keep existing clients, but they never lead. And in the AI era, the gap between leading and lagging is going to be wider than it’s ever been, because the firms that build AI visibility competency now will have years of credibility signals and process refinement that latecomers simply can’t buy their way into overnight.

What integration actually means

When I talk about integration, I don’t mean hiring an SEO person and calling it a full-service offering. I mean building a process where every team member — whether their background is in media relations, content or digital strategy — understands the same North Star: helping a client become credible and findable to the people they’re actually trying to reach, including AI platforms that are increasingly making that determination on behalf of users.

We call our version of this a Total Visibility System. The name is less important than the idea: shared principles, shared goals and real competency across disciplines rather than siloed specialists who optimize in isolation.

The practical implication is that a media placement isn’t just a media placement anymore. It’s a credibility signal that feeds into search authority, which influences how AI models characterize your brand, which affects how prospects find you before they ever talk to a salesperson. When your PR team doesn’t understand that, and your SEO team doesn’t talk to your content team, and nobody is thinking about AI visibility as a strategic goal, you’re leaving enormous value on the table.

The bias toward tactics over systems

Part of what makes this hard is that the communications industry has always had a bias toward tactics over systems. It’s easier to sell a client a media campaign or a content calendar than it is to explain how those things connect to each other and to a long-term authority-building strategy. Clients want wins they can show in a monthly report. Agencies build around delivering those wins.

But the brands that actually pull ahead over time aren’t the ones that score individual wins. They’re the ones that build real credibility consistently, year over year, in ways that compound. A single great press hit is forgotten in a week. A five-year track record of authoritative coverage, strong search presence and expert content is the kind of thing that shapes how an AI model — or a skeptical buyer, or a journalist — perceives your company before you ever get in the room.

What forward-thinking firms should be doing now

First, stop treating AI visibility as a future problem. It’s a current one. Waiting until every client is asking for help with their ChatGPT results is too late. You’ve already lost.

Second, audit your actual integration. Not your pitch deck integration, but your real operational integration. Do your media relations people understand how a placement contributes to search authority? Does your content team know what questions AI assistants are actually answering about your clients’ categories? Is anyone in your firm thinking about AI visibility as a strategic goal, or is it a topic that comes up in conference panels and then disappears?

Third, invest in building cross-disciplinary fluency on your team. The most valuable communicators of the next decade won’t be the ones who are excellent at PR or excellent at SEO or excellent at content. They’ll be the ones who understand how all of those things work together in a world where AI is the primary lens through which people evaluate credibility.

The shift is already happening. The only question is which side of it you want to be on.