What to Know Before Hiring a PR Firm in the Age of AI

There’s a moment I keep seeing play out at almost every company that’s been doing PR for a few years. Someone pulls up a press hit they’re proud of, a real publication, a real story. Then I ask them to open Claude or ChatGPT and search for the problem their company solves. Their brand doesn’t show up. A competitor does. Sometimes a competitor that’s never been in a single notable publication.

That’s the thing nobody warned them about. Visibility used to be about getting written up. Now it’s about getting woven in to the sources, citations and patterns that AI systems trust when they decide what to surface. Those are two very different games, and most PR firms are still playing the first one.

If you’re evaluating agencies right now, here’s what actually separates firms that can operate in this environment from firms that are pretending to.

Placements are an input, not an outcome

The coverage-as-success model made sense when readers actually followed stories from publication to company. That handoff broke down long before AI entered the picture. What matters now is whether coverage creates a footprint, whether it gets cited, linked to, and pulled into the broader web of sources that AI systems draw from when constructing answers.

Don’t ask how many placements a firm has generated or what the combined reach was. Ask what those placements led to. Did other publications reference them? Did they attract inbound links? Do they still surface in searches on the topic months later? A firm that can answer those questions with specifics has a fundamentally different understanding of what PR is building toward. Most can’t, because most haven’t been asked to think that way.

If they’re not thinking about search architecture, they’re operating in the dark

Earned media and search used to be adjacent disciplines. Now they’re the same problem. The sources that shape AI-generated answers are heavily weighted toward high-authority third-party content, exactly what PR is supposed to produce. But producing it isn’t enough if there’s no strategy for where it lands, how it gets linked and what it’s meant to reinforce.

A serious firm should be able to tell you which publications carry actual weight in your category, not just which ones have large audiences. They should understand that a placement in a niche but heavily cited industry source can outperform a national feature in terms of lasting search influence. And they should be connecting media activity to specific pages and topics on your site that you’re trying to build authority around. If that conversation hasn’t come up, you’re working with a team optimizing for appearances rather than outcomes.

Test how they think about AI visibility and be skeptical of easy answers

Before you hire anyone, test how AI handles the category you compete in, not your brand name. Search for the problem your buyers have, the solution type you offer, the decision they’re trying to make. See which companies and sources get cited. That’s the landscape you’re trying to break into.

Then ask any firm you’re evaluating to walk you through the specific sources that shape AI results in your category and how they’d get you into them. That’s a harder question than it sounds. It requires them to understand how source authority works, which publications and content types AI systems actually draw from and where the gaps are in your current footprint.

A firm that can answer it concretely is thinking about the right things. Be skeptical of any demo where they search for a category solution in front of you and their client appears — ChatGPT personalizes results based on what it knows about the user, so that result may say nothing about what your buyers are actually seeing.

Original research isn’t a content play; it’s an infrastructure play

The most durable thing a PR program can produce is a dataset or report that other people need to cite. Not because it generates a press cycle, though it often does, but because it becomes load-bearing. It gets referenced in other articles, pulled into AI answers and linked to from sources that have nothing to do with the original campaign.

Reactive pitching and executive commentary put you in a supporting role in a narrative someone else controls. Original research makes you the primary source. Over time, that compounds in ways that no amount of placement volume can replicate. Ask any firm you’re considering: What have you helped clients own, not just appear in? PR surveys are one of the most reliable answers to that question.

The real question is whether they think like a business or an agency

PR firms are often rewarded for activity: pitches sent, stories placed, clips delivered. The best ones have learned to ignore that incentive structure and focus on what actually moves the business. That means being willing to tell you a story isn’t worth pursuing, that an announcement is too thin to build on or that the real opportunity is in a conversation your competitors are having without you.

That kind of thinking shows up in how a firm talks about its own work. Are they describing outputs or outcomes? Do they understand your revenue model well enough to connect visibility to it? Can they explain not just what they did for a client, but why it mattered? The firms that can answer those questions are building something real. The rest are producing a paper trail.

The companies that win don’t just hire a PR firm to tell their story. They hire firms that understand how authority gets built, where discovery actually happens and what it takes to show up in the answers their buyers are already getting, whether those answers come from a journalist, a search engine or an AI.

That’s the new bar. And it’s worth taking the time to find out whether the firm across the table from you can actually clear it.

There’s a moment I keep seeing play out at almost every company that’s been doing PR for a few years. Someone pulls up a press hit they’re proud of, a real publication, a real story. Then I ask them to open Claude or ChatGPT and search for the problem their company solves. Their brand doesn’t show up. A competitor does. Sometimes a competitor that’s never been in a single notable publication.

That’s the thing nobody warned them about. Visibility used to be about getting written up. Now it’s about getting woven in to the sources, citations and patterns that AI systems trust when they decide what to surface. Those are two very different games, and most PR firms are still playing the first one.

If you’re evaluating agencies right now, here’s what actually separates firms that can operate in this environment from firms that are pretending to.