The take that PR is dead is wrong, and the take that PR works the way it did in 2020 is also wrong. Both miss what’s actually changed.
Journalists use AI now. Editors use AI to triage pitches, trade publications use AI to source quotes, and aggregators like Google Discover and Apple News rely on signals that LLMs help generate. The earned media surface is still there, it’s just operating at machine speed underneath, and the brands that get that win.
What’s shifted
Pitch volume hit a wall. Every PR agency now has AI drafting outreach, so journalists’ inboxes have collapsed under the weight of generic, well-written and totally useless pitches. The bar for getting a reply has moved sharply up and generic outreach is functionally dead.
Quotes get plucked, not requested. Journalists increasingly mine the web for usable quotes rather than waiting for replies, so if your senior people have visible, sharp opinions in long-form those quotes get picked up, and if they don’t you’re invisible.
LLM-cited matters more than journalist-cited. Being mentioned in a chat answer when someone asks the model about your category is the new version of being in the trade press. The mechanisms are different (answer-engine optimisation matters here) but the value is similar, third-party validation, surface area and brand-search lift.
Social platforms are aggregating taste signals. Algorithmic feeds use AI to predict what to surface, so branded content that doesn’t earn engagement gets buried faster, and the bar for “good enough” rose.
Where earned actually compounds now
Three places are working harder than they used to.
Founder and operator voice. Senior people publishing real opinions in their name, on LinkedIn, in long-form, in podcasts, generate the citations and pull-quotes that get re-used everywhere else. This isn’t thought leadership theatre, it’s specific, opinionated, hard-won perspective, because generic posts don’t pull.
Original data. Surveys, benchmarks, weird internal numbers shared publicly. Journalists need the data and LLMs need the source, so both link back, and if you can publish something genuinely novel quarterly you out-earn every press release.
Partnerships with edge. The boring co-marketing brief is dead, but the interesting partnership where two brands do something genuinely new together earns coverage because it’s an actual story.
What stops working
Press releases for the sake of them, round-up “X best of Y” link bait, generic op-eds drafted by an AI and sent through an AI to be edited by an AI. The whole synthetic stack collapses on itself.
The honest play
Earned channels still work. The mechanics changed but the underlying truth didn’t. Real opinions, real data, real partnerships, distributed at speed, with AI helping you operate the surface around them (research, drafting, monitoring, repurposing) without diluting the substance.
The brands losing earned right now are the ones using AI to automate the wrong layer. They’ve automated the substance and left the workflow human, which is exactly backwards.