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| Zareen Fidlon |
The ground is shifting beneath PR’s feet.
It’s not just the volume of coverage that’s changing, it’s the way content is discovered, digested and redistributed. Over the last five years, the communications industry has faced major disruptions, including shrinking newsrooms, rising distrust in media and a shift in audience behavior away from traditional news sources.
Meanwhile, search engines, smart assistants and social platforms increasingly serve up answers instead of links. With the arrival of GenAI summaries, the journey from headline to homepage has been rerouted. PR is no longer about crafting the right story, it’s about ensuring the story is seen, surfaced and accurately represented by systems most people don’t control.
Case in point: PAN’s 2025 Brand Experience Report shows a 41 percent decline in traditional media mentions over the past year. At the same time, competition across non-traditional PR channels grew, with an 80 percent increase in authors across social media.
Traditional search has ceded ground to zero-click behavior
Gone are the days of someone perusing a brand’s website and clicking through to multiple pages. Instead, people often get what they need from AI summaries. In fact, PAN’s report also shows Google’s AI Overviews increased by 102 percent between January and March 2025. (We also saw a corresponding 23 percent decline in traffic for the mid-sized B2B brands we analyzed.)
Putting all of this more simply: The tactics you used to boost brand mentions in the past five years—the past three years, even—may not work anymore. Today, visibility must come from many sources, and PR professionals must adjust.
Brands are still producing stories and securing coverage. But the value of those placements is changing. Readers are no longer engaging the way they used to, and discovery is happening upstream of the click.
This is where PR’s role expands beyond traditional awareness. For years, marketing teams have split “brand” and “demand” into separate strategies, one to build reputation, the other to drive leads. But in an AI-shaped media landscape, those walls no longer make sense.
Every earned placement, podcast interview, or social conversation has the potential to accelerate demand when it’s connected to the right keywords, linked to the right landing experiences, and reinforced by campaigns downstream. Conversely, demand generation efforts gain more stopping power when they’re backed by the authority and trust PR builds.
In other words: brand fuels demand, and demand strengthens brand. The challenge is to design PR programs that intentionally do both.
AI surfaces are filtering your story
Thirty-eight percent of people say they mostly or completely trust AI-generated answers. Thirty-eight percent also admit they’ve skipped visiting a website because the AI summary already gave them what they needed.
This is the new filter.
Discovery is happening within platforms, not beyond them. They’re not just distribution channels; they’re choosing which voices and perspectives get surfaced. For PR, that means learning to work with AI systems, not around them. Branded content still plays a role, but it’s often surfaced without a clear path back to the original source. Search engines are resolving queries at a glance, and social algorithms continue to suppress outbound links.
Visibility hasn’t disappeared. It’s been rerouted through systems that prioritize speed and containment over depth.
This raises a critical question. If AI is now the interpreter between your brand and your audience, how do you ensure that it's adequately conveying your message? We’ve already seen examples across industries where AI-generated summaries simplified, skewed or misrepresented source content.
With no editor on the other side of the algorithm, the responsibility now falls on communications professionals to structure content with clarity, use precise language and ensure credible sourcing. Trust in AI may be rising, but trust in your brand still depends on how, and whether, that story is told correctly.
What’s required now: PR must expand its definition of value
This isn’t about using AI to write faster or churn out more releases. The real value is in using AI to map where and how your story is showing up, which questions it’s answering, and where competitors are filling the gaps. It’s about spotting narrative white space early and shaping thought leadership that’s more likely to be pulled into these summaries.
But it requires human judgment. AI can highlight patterns and possibilities, but brand voice, context and credibility come from people. Tools will change. Principles, authenticity, trust and clarity should not.
Mentions matter, but they’re part of a larger visibility system. PR must now work across surfaces, formats, and entry points.
Here are five areas worth prioritizing:
- Focus on high-trust, niche channels. Podcasts, Slack groups, Reddit threads and newsletters are where buying conversations are taking place. These are not fringe spaces. They’re primary forums for peer validation.
- Make content legible to AI. Structure copy around questions and answers. Use clear headers and source links. Help search systems and AI tools understand your content and reference it accurately.
- Connect PR with downstream teams. Treat PR as an input to demand generation and SEO. Ensure coverage is mapped to the right keywords and is available for repurposing across campaigns.
- Monitor conversations outside your metrics. Dark social, private messages, and closed communities often shape perception more than public posts. Talk to your advocates and customers. Learn where they’re sharing stories about you.
- Lead with ideas, not just headlines. The most effective thought leadership now earns visibility through originality and clarity. Publish clear points of view, supported by data or experience. AI and media both respond to content that feels real and sourced.
Brands that prioritize clarity, utility and trust are seeing stronger results. In the financial sector, firms that publish well-structured FAQs and explainers have seen increased inclusion in AI summaries. In healthcare, trusted voices with strong citation structures are outperforming brands with more polished, but less accessible content.
So…where does PR go from here?
Traditional placements still offer value, but they no longer do the work alone. AI Overviews, social algorithms, and dark social dynamics have created new barriers between brands and audiences.
To stay effective, PR must adapt to this shift. That doesn’t mean working harder. It means working with more precision—listening to where audiences are paying attention and placing ideas where they’ll be picked up.
Social strategy must reflect the current environment.
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Zareen Fidlon is SVP of integrated marketing at PAN.
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