How AI is forcing journalists and PR to work smarter, not louder

If you ask journalists and PR professionals what they fear most from AI, typically they’ll say variations of the same narrative: AI will make content so easy to create that their roles will have little to offer. Virtually any AI model today can write passable articles and pitches (and lots more), so it feels like the value of the human touch is questionable at best.

It is true that AI is automating big parts of knowledge work, and exactly how that plays out in media and adjacent industries is still being determined. At the same time, AI is transforming information discovery. Billions of people now get information from AI experiences—either chatbots or synthetic summaries like Google’s AI overviews—instead of traditional search results.

Clearly, how AI answer engines find and present information (how they filter, prioritize, and interpret the things they find on the web) will play a central role in how media and public relations work going forward. More importantly, it will determine how the two sides work together. And I mean “together” in the most neutral way. Sometimes journalism and PR are complementary and sometimes they are in conflict, but in either case, AI will be the new interface where this plays out.

What I’m talking about of course is GEO (generative engine optimization), or more precisely the incentives it creates. AI answers are often said to be the new “front door” of the internet, since they’re extremely popular (ChatGPT alone has almost a billion users) and that popularity is growing. Google’s AI Mode for search, which subs out the “10 blue links” for an AI conversation, is now prominent on both the Google homepage and the Chrome omnibox. Some are predicting it will become the default this year or the next.

That would (will?) be devastating for publishers (a subject for another column), and it would also instantly cement the AI summary as the new informational portal for . . . well, everyone. But it also suggests the future that journalists and PR pros fear, an arena where the primary weapons are automation and slop, is incorrect. Or at least incomplete.

Narrative is the new SEO

It all comes down to how generative engines prioritize information. Both sides want their narratives to become the basis of AI answers—PR for clients, media for itself—in the hope of cementing their authority. Good news for the media side: Studies show that AI portals prioritize journalistic content far above commercial content (such as a corporate blog or site).

That’s also good news for PR, since a large part of their job is interfacing with the media. If you think of the goals and messaging of a PR campaign as one circle, and the stories that a journalist wants to tell as another circle, where those two circles overlap is the highest chance for both sides to influence AI answers.

That’s because of a fundamental difference between AI engines and search engines: AI is looking for patterns instead of keywords. The more it sees similar narratives across sites, domains, and social media, the more confidence it will have in the summary it’s creating. Domain authority—the strength of any specific URL—still matters, but topical authority matters more.

What that means in practice: If an AI engine sees that a site or person has continually covered the same topic, and from many different angles, and is cited often elsewhere, it will boost the authority signal. And that can matter just as much if not more than more generalized coverage from a major (Tier 1, to use PR lingo) publication.

That has two key consequences for the publicist-journalist relationship. First, specialized journalists who are narrowly focused on a beat have increased value. That applies to publications, too, which makes trade/B2B pubs newly relevant. Second, while journalist relationships are crucial in media relations, it’s still just one part of a larger content strategy. There are other ways to build authority in the eyes of AI engines, including corporate blogs, social, and more. Yes, content from journalists takes priority, but all the rest will reinforce the narrative the answer engine sees.

Beyond the byline

On the flip side, journalists need to play this game, too. While their content is first in line for GEO, if it lacks uniqueness it won’t stand out from competitors. If it’s too general or incomplete, AI engines will likely prioritize other content that’s more specific and comprehensive. If it doesn’t answer the common questions people ask AI, AI will move on to content that does.

All this is to say that in an AI world, it’s far better for a journalist to have a clear coverage area instead of being a generalist. But that’s just step one. In the same way that PR needs to build a narrative with a larger content strategy that involves other platforms and formats, journalists should too. 

Most journalists write articles for a living, but to better get the attention of AI engines, it’s advisable to spread those stories across formats and platforms. Whether it’s creating a personal website or newsletter, attending events, or publishing in new formats like short-form video or podcasts, the goal is to elevate the visibility of the stories you’re telling—the stories people are asking about in ChatGPT, Google, and Perplexity. Building your brand around them is a bonus.

The irony about all this is that AI, at first, promised to lighten the “content marketing” duties like writing social media copy and SEO headlines, which virtually no journalist wanted to do. But it turns out that to successfully leverage GEO, those duties get amplified: You need to continually think about the ways your stories can be presented and remixed to ensure AI engines take notice.

The upside is that it’s all inherently human. Generative engines look for patterns, but they also prioritize uniqueness within those patterns. And uniqueness is what humans are best at. For journalists, it’s the scoops and unearthed facts that make compelling stories. For PR, it’s the person-to-person relationships that remain the most reliable way to find connections to those stories. As AI reshapes how stories are found and told, the edge still belongs to those who know how to tell them best.

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