During the past years we have often had to defend corporate communications and PR budgets …
… because it was oh so much easier to show data from digital marketing campaigns.
… or because management did not see the relevance of trade media across certain markets.
… or because they simply did not understand the role of corporate comms.
Recently, however, headlines and surveys seem to indicate that we can expect a renaissance for communications and PR, which have long been viewed as the poor cousin of marketing.
- Gartner expects PR and earned media budgets to double by 2027 due to AI-driven discovery.
- The Wall Street Journal speaks of the “Revenge of the Publicists” and their return to the C-suite.
- And The Sunday Times ran an article headlined “PR’s new ‘dark arts’ kill off corporate scandals before they break”.
Three very different perspectives leading to a common conclusion.
AI-driven discovery: will your brand or solution be found?
The easiest proof points to present to decision-makers are confirmed by Gartner’s Top Predictions to Inform 2026 Comms Strategies report.
It clearly shows why brands need earned media for AI visibility and why this is becoming increasingly important. More and more potential customers no longer type their questions into a search window; they ask their go-to AI engines. And those aren’t fans of paid content.
For all fans of numbers, here are some from the Gartner report:
- ChatGPT traffic up 608% year on year, Perplexity up 262%, Google down 1% (first half of 2024 compared with first half of 2025).
- More than 95% of links cited by AI answer engines are nonpaid (earned, shared, organic owned). Gartner cites a vendor study here. Muck Rack published the same figure in its “What Is AI Reading?” study in July 2025, and its May 2026 edition puts the share at about 99%.
- When AI searches imply recency, 49% of citations are news.
Return to the C-level?
So, is this enough to help PR return to the C-suite, or do we need to look into the “dark arts” claim?
Used correctly, corporate communications and PR should help avoid actions that could lead to scandals, rather than letting them disappear by employing dark arts. Well-publicised communications failures, such as the Mercedes A-Class moose test, show how a failure to communicate in a negative situation can lead to a crisis. One that could have been contained earlier with a targeted communication initiative (which the automotive brand conducted later, alongside the technical fix).
But overall, the close relation of PR to corporate reputation seems to trigger a shift that re-establishes PR as a core corporate function rather than a back-office activity. In other words: trust is what counts now.
Instead of PR and communications being viewed as less important functions, heads of communications and PR now seem to be moving back to C-level positions. In Korn Ferry’s 2025 survey of 78 Fortune 500 companies, 47% of chief communications officers report directly to the CEO, up from 40% in 2023.
Forward-looking corporations are giving CCOs a broader remit, in some cases combining the CMO and CCO roles, rediscovering how important corporate communications and PR are for visibility, reputation and trust, and share of voice.
The visibility shift
Earned media matters more for companies now because the way people discover things has changed. When someone wants to find or evaluate an industry expert, a brand or a product, they increasingly ask an AI tool such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google’s AI Overviews or Claude rather than scrolling through search results. These systems surface and cite sources they treat as credible: news outlets, established review sites, industry publications, well-trafficked communities. A brand that exists only on its own website and ad spend is largely invisible to these systems.
Creating trust
Earned media also carries a trust signal that owned and paid channels can’t. AI-generated content is saturating every category right now, claims are inflated, and buyers are sceptical of self-promotion. An independent review, a journalist’s analysis or an unpaid mention from a respected practitioner does work that no amount of self-published content can replicate.
Securing share of voice
Competitors are working on the same channels. If your category’s coverage on the sites and feeds that AI systems pull from is dominated by two or three rivals, your company effectively doesn’t exist in the answers users are getting, regardless of how good it is. Earned media is how you stay in the conversation that’s now happening without you in the room.
This means PR, earned media, community presence and getting your services or solutions into the hands of independent reviewers do more than build the brand: they generate leads, in a way they didn’t five years ago!