It's time for PR to shape its own narrative

There are two versions of PR’s future, and I have watched the profession inch towards the wrong one. 

In the first, PR stays in the narrow lane it should have escaped years ago. Press releases. Coverage reports. Reactive statements. Organic social. Column inches, but with better dashboards. A lot of this layer is already being automated. AI can monitor mentions, summarise coverage and draft basic content faster than any human team. If PR stays there, it becomes a commodity. And commodities get squeezed. 

The second version is much more interesting. PR becomes more important in the age of AI, not less, because trust has changed shape. 

Buyers no longer move neatly from Google to your website to a sales conversation. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity to explain a market, shortlist suppliers, compare claims and prepare questions. Ofcom’s Online Nation report shows how quickly generative AI is entering mainstream discovery: ChatGPT had 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, almost five times the same period in 2024. That is not a side channel. It is becoming a research layer. 

At the same time, influence is fragmenting. Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 points to declining engagement with traditional news, low trust and an accelerating shift towards social and video platforms. Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer adds another useful clue: trusted voices on social media can open doors for organisations people would otherwise distrust. 

This is where PR has to raise its ambition. The question isn’t simply, “Can we get coverage?” It is, “When an AI system explains our market, what sources does it use, what proof does it cite, which voices does it trust, and how accurately does it describe us?” 

In one Agentcy test, we compared how AI models cited two pieces of content from the same brand: a short, earned media placement in a high-authority trade title and a long-form SEO-optimised article on the brand’s own site. The earned media placement was cited in a far wider variety of prompt answers. Third-party credibility is not an add-on to content strategy, it’s part of the infrastructure that determines whether a brand is surfaced, trusted and recommended. 

Good PR has always understood narrative, context and credibility. The difference now is that those skills need to be operationalised. Teams need to know which journalists, analysts, creators, customers and expert communities shape their category. They need to build public proof that is clear enough for AI systems to discover and credible enough for humans to believe. 

The fundamentals have not changed. The stakes have. That is precisely why this moment belongs to PR, if the profession is willing to claim it. It has spent decades shaping other organisations’ narratives. Now it needs to shape its own. The floor may have dropped out of the old model, but the ceiling on the new one is wide open.