The end of easy content

Depending on your opinions on AI, there has never been a better time to be in the content business. Thanks to generative AI tools, brands and PR teams that once struggled to maintain a consistent editorial cadence now have no practical excuse not to. Yet, across the industry, it’s becoming harder to build a reputation.

This isn’t a coincidence. Because AI makes producing content a breeze, everyone’s doing it, and people are catching on. Readers have quietly developed a sensitivity to content that feels generated rather than considered, and they are responding by tuning it out.

For PR professionals, this creates a problem that cannot be solved merely with more content. In the AI age, trust and reputation must be built by going back to the basics: Ensuring that what goes out is worth paying attention to.

PR has historically measured activity as a proxy for results. Metrics like placement counts, posting frequency, and share of voice proved useful when it required effort to produce content to secure a client some coverage. Selectivity functioned as a rough signal of quality, because publishing something took work, and that work created a floor.

AI has removed that floor. Anyone can now fill a content calendar, pitch a byline, or generate a piece of commentary that clears basic quality thresholds. Inboxes, feeds and publications are full of content that is technically competent but substantively empty.

The metrics, to be clear, have not become meaningless. Clients still want to see numbers moving, and they remain a reasonable measure of a team’s productivity. But volume was never really a reliable measure of what PR actually builds: Influence, reputation, and the kind of credibility that makes a spokesperson worth quoting or a brand worth partnering with.

Trust and credibility accrue slowly and show up invisibly, and audiences are registering the absence of those values more acutely than many content strategies account for. People are screening for specific, considered points of view that are backed by knowledge, expertise, and experience. AI can’t deliver that on its own.

Still, as AI chatbots increasingly become the arbiters of audience attention and traffic, PR teams must re-evaluate what they value. A single, well-argued piece placed with a relevant outlet will yield more reputational weight than a run of generic content published on ten sites simply because AI will deprioritize content that lacks depth, doesn’t raise new points, and isn’t backed by expertise.

That trade-off is not always intuitive, but it reflects how AI, and therefore audiences are allocating their attention.

The most common application of AI in PR is content generation. It is also, in many ways, the least interesting one.

AI has much more to offer earlier in the process, before a brief is written or an angle is chosen. Pattern recognition at scale, identifying which topics generate real engagement, surfacing the language audiences use to describe their own challenges, mapping where relevant conversations are happening: This is what AI excels at. Learn to use this tech as a research tool, not a publishing engine.

AI can also help with one of the less glamorous realities of PR work: extracting a genuine point of view from a client. Getting clients to articulate something specific, considered and worth publishing is difficult not because they don’t have an opinion, but mostly because it’s not a skill set they’ve built. AI tools, used well, can help structure this process by surfacing questions worth asking, identifying where a client’s perspective is differentiated, and researching whether the proposed angle delivers a unique message.

This is the point, however, where your professional intuition is crucial. With AI, the danger, on both the generation and research sides, is the same: mistaking “good enough” for good. A PR professional must bring to bear their judgement and sense of news to shape pitches, frame less-than-stellar updates, and talk up a brand without it sounding promotional.

That has always been the job, and AI’s advent won’t change it.

Given the growing impatience for AI slop and uneasiness around AI products, PR professionals must recover an old discipline: Stopping long enough to ask whether a piece of content has something to say before putting it into the world.

“So what?” is the question journalists will ask, and answering that question well has always been at the heart of good PR work. Any pitch or article that doesn’t immediately seem thoughtful, valuable, and backed by experience will simply languish in reporters’ inboxes, and go ignored by readers.

Audiences cannot always articulate why a piece of content feels worth their time, but they do register when it isn’t, and they will adjust accordingly. As professionals, we owe it to them to ensure every piece of content is considered. We owe it to the clients as well; they’ll only benefit from that discipline.