Not sure if PR should be part of your mix? Reach out to us and we’ll help you decide.
This week at Speed we’ve had a lot of 2027 briefs land, and as the planning process gets underway it felt like a good moment to stop and consider the role PR plays in the channel mix.
Until a few years ago the answer was fairly settled. PR got reached for at the top of the funnel – building brand awareness, launching a product, driving consideration. Further down, at intent and conversion, it was discarded as not fit for purpose. That ground belonged to search and performance, and PR had no credible claim on it.
A year of learning about GEO has changed that. The questions that sit lowest in the funnel – which product, which supplier, which one is right for me – are increasingly answered by AI systems rather than by a page of links. And data has consistently proven that what those systems say is assembled from earned media. For the first time, PR has a serious case at the bottom of the funnel as well as the top.
Here are five reasons it should be part of the channel mix in 2027.
Now is the time to look at what your search budget is actually returning. Today the answer arrives above the links, the user reads it, and the click never happens. Multiple clients have told us that their SEO budget isn’t performing as it used to, and as a result there’s a real appetite to do things differently.
The answers that come from LLMs are assembled from what the wider web says and the data consistently shows a huge part of that is driven by PR. First is the reputation environment the model learns from: earned coverage, expert commentary, reviews, credible third-party reference, data from May of this year shows that earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations. The second is whether your own information is structured, consistent and discoverable enough to be found and cited at all.
Neither is purchasable. Paid media puts you in front of an audience but cannot make a model treat you as a credible source. Owned content is entirely within your control, which is precisely why it carries the least independent weight – a claim you make about yourself is corroborated by nobody. Earned coverage is one of the few inputs that functions as third-party evidence to a human reader and a machine reader at once.
This is the objection that kept PR out of serious budget conversations for two decades, and the industry has spent fifteen years fixing it.
We learned to talk about outcomes instead of outputs, about trust and behaviour instead of reach and impressions. The Barcelona Principles, refreshed every five years since 2010, gave the industry a shared language that CFOs would recognise -outputs, outtakes, outcomes, impact.
The integration of GEO into PR delivery has seen AMEC*, the global professional body for communications measurement, publish a new update designed to bring the same rigour to AI-led discovery that the industry spent fifteen years building everywhere else. PR measurement now offers metrics akin to those in digital and ATL- brand recall, perception analysis and attention.
PR can now genuinely speak the language of commerciality, with a range of metrics that stand up to scrutiny alongside digital and ATL.
No other channel in the mix moves at the speed of the news agenda. A paid campaign is locked weeks out, content has a production cycle while SEO works on a horizon measured in months. PR can put a credible point of view into the market in hours.
That matters more than it used to, because the window has shrunk. A story can surface, dominate the conversation and burn out inside a day. Journalists are working to tighter deadlines with inboxes full of AI-generated noise, so the space to add something worth publishing is narrower every year.
It is also the most budget-efficient coverage available. A breaking story or cultural moment already has an audience – you are contributing to a conversation that exists rather than manufacturing attention from scratch, which is why reactive work routinely outperforms its cost.
The catch is that speed is a capability you resource, not a promise you make. When Harry Kane lost his voice during England’s World Cup celebrations, our team spotted the opening for menthol confectioner Jakemans and had the ROAR Relief campaign live within hours, bespoke limited-edition packaging included. It delivered BBC television and radio coverage with an interview with the CEO, 27 online articles, three print features and 93% brand recall. From outside it looked effortless. It only worked because the spokespeople, messaging framework and approval routes were already agreed, and because monitoring flagged the moment early – our Pulse AI platform tracks more than 150,000 sources in real time for exactly this reason.
Reputation works for you even when you’re not in the room. It shapes whether a customer shortlists you, whether a journalist calls you for comment or whether a potential shareholder, regulator or talent hire gives you the benefit of the doubt.
It’s also far more exposed than it used to be. With AI-led discovery, a single negative story, an out-of-date description or an unanswered review can be repeated to thousands of people as a ‘known’ fact. There’s no link to click through and no chance to add context. What the web says about you is now the short-form answer.
PR is the discipline built to manage that as it builds up credible third-party evidence over time, so there’s something accurate to draw on when things go wrong. And when an issue does land, PR is the only channel that can respond at the speed of the news agenda, correcting the record in the places people and AI models both go to fact check.
This work doesn’t require the biggest crisis budgets to be effective. It’s about investing in reputation, accuracy and trust when credibility isn’t at stake so that you’re protected for when it might be.
In 2027, protecting reputation means monitoring what AI models say about you as closely as what the headlines say.
Reputation protects while brand grows – and PR feeds both.
Long-term brand building is the part of the marketing mix with the best-evidenced link to sustained growth, and the hardest to justify quarter by quarter. PR is one of the most effective ways to do it, because it buys something performance channels structurally cannot, credibility you didn’t pay for.
It builds the mental availability that makes every other channel cheaper to run, because a name people recognise converts at a rate a cold one doesn’t.
Fund it as infrastructure, not as a campaign line. The returns accrue over quarters, and the signals you build this year shapes how you’re described next year.
Stand up measurement before you need it. There’s no historical archive to interrogate in AI environments – your baseline exists only from the moment you start watching, which is a reason to start now rather than when the board asks the question.
And judge it as you would any long-horizon investment: on triangulated evidence connected to outcomes, not on a single number from a dashboard.
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*The AMEC GEO Principles and the companion Practitioner’s Guide to GEO Measurement are available from AMEC, the global professional body for media evaluation and communications measurement.
Not sure if PR should be part of your mix? Reach out to us and we’ll help you decide.