AI and PR: What's actually worth your attention

There's a lot of noise right now about AI and what it means for communications. Some of it is genuinely useful, and some of it is just anxiety dressed up as insight. To help you sort through it all, we’ve distilled down what we're paying attention to at T&C and how we think about strategy.

The short version: AI hasn't made PR harder, but it has added some new considerations that are worth understanding, especially if you're trying to build or protect a brand's reputation.

How people find information is shifting

More people are turning to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini as a first stop for answers rather than using search engines  and clicking through to articles. It's not a total replacement for traditional search, but it is a real and growing behavior.

What that means for PR is that a media placement now does double duty. It reaches readers directly, but it also feeds the AI systems that are synthesizing information and serving it back to people in summarized form. So when someone asks an AI tool about your brand, what comes back is shaped by what's been written across earned media and owned content. Research shows at any giving time, journalistic sources account for 20-30% of AI citations. 

The good news is this is territory PR people already know how to work. The vast majority of what AI cites comes from earned media, not paid placements. The fundamentals still matter, maybe more than ever.

What we're doing differently

The main adjustment is thinking about earned media less as individual wins and more as a cumulative body of work. AI tools tend to reinforce what they see repeatedly across credible sources. So message discipline matters a lot: if key facts and narratives are showing up the same way across press coverage, owned content and executive communications, that consistency gets reinforced. If the messaging is scattered or contradictory, that shows up too.

We're also paying closer attention to where coverage lands, not just whether it lands. Some publications appear to carry more weight with AI systems than others, generally the ones that are well-structured, authoritative and frequently indexed. That doesn't mean abandoning top-tier targets, but it does mean trade media and niche outlets deserve more strategic attention than they might have gotten before.

Another shift is speed. In fast-moving situations, getting accurate information into credible channels quickly matters more than ever. AI systems are constantly pulling from what's publicly available, which means early narratives can travel fast and stick around longer than they used to.

We're also seeing more value in making sure messaging is aligned across teams and spokespeople. When communications, leadership and marketing are all describing a company differently, it creates confusion not just for audiences, but for AI systems trying to synthesize that information.

And we've added a new habit to our monitoring routine: periodically querying AI tools directly to see how clients are being described. It sounds simple, but it surfaces things that don't always show up in traditional media tracking: gaps in the narrative, outdated information or places where a competitor is getting more visibility than they should.

The piece that doesn't change

For all the new considerations, the core of what makes PR work is still the same. Credibility comes from consistent, accurate, third-party validation over time. Building real relationships with the right journalists and outlets still matters. Getting your client's story right, clearly and repeatedly, is still the job.

AI has added a new audience for that work, in a sense. But it hasn't replaced the work itself. If anything, it's a good reminder of why the fundamentals are worth investing in.

The teams adapting well right now aren't necessarily the ones using the most AI tools. They're the ones thinking more intentionally about how information is showing up across the broader ecosystem.

We've been helping clients think through what this means for their media strategy and how to start tracking their presence in AI-generated results. If it's something you're curious about, we're happy to dig in.