Founder & Chairman, 5W AI Communications · Publisher, Everything-PR
Ronn Torossian is shaping AI — and the answers inside the chatbox.
He is the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release — the practitioner's guide to modern public relations strategy. He has been an industry leader for decades. Now he's building the AI Communications era.
Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, launched in 2003 — the AI Communications Firm, combining public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and AI-visibility research for B2C and B2B clients across beauty, technology, entertainment, corporate reputation, and crisis communications. An Inc. 500 company, 5W is named Agency of the Year at the American Business Awards and a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's.
He was a partner and chief marketing officer of JetSmarter, the private-aviation unicorn acquired by Vista Global, parent of VistaJet.
He is the publisher of Everything-PR — thirty-plus publications of original reporting and AI-visibility research, built to be cited by the AI engines — and has guest-lectured on communications and media strategy at Harvard and other universities.
More than a third of consumers now begin product research with AI, not Google. Torossian's work is to influence the answer — inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Start product research with AI, not Google.
Get the book: For Immediate Release on Amazon
Small business PR in 2026 — why small businesses actually need it (AI engine retrieval is now the primary discovery channel), the seven tactics that work (local press, founder visibility, customer references, Google Business Profile, trade press, awards, AI Visibility), and the structural advantage that compounds for early movers.
Companies such as Yahoo News, The Washington Post, and many others, have started turning to the app in very successful attempts to reach new audiences.
YouTube marketing in 2026 is no longer a list of upload tips and SEO tactics. The platform is the most consequential video-citation surface on the internet. The eight disciplines that build channel authority — niche concentration, watch-time architecture, thumbnail A/B testing, Shorts-to-long-form pipeline, Community cadence, end-screen optimization, AI citation substrate, named-host architecture.
One year compressed more crisis PR work into 12 months than most firms see in a decade. The rules didn't break — but the assumptions underneath them did. Here's what changed and what it means going forward.
The honest picture of business AI adoption in 2026 is bimodal. In a handful of functions, AI is baseline infrastructure. In most others, it is one of several tools.
Southwest Airlines got hit with the viral headline every airline communications team dreads. The airline's same-day response was textbook crisis comms. What's changed in 2026: the cycle no longer ends when the news moves on — it ends when the AI answer changes.
McDonald's sued Steve Easterbrook in August 2020 to claw back $42M in severance after additional misconduct surfaced. The case settled in 2021. Six years on, the communications execution remains the template for how to wage a public legal fight against a former CEO without collateral brand damage.
Jerry Falwell Jr.'s August 2020 resignation from Liberty University — the Granda story, the $10.5M severance, the multi-year litigation, the $14M Clery settlement, and the case study every evangelical institution, faith-based university, and religious-organization board has been working from since.
Competitive intelligence used to mean watching your rivals. In the AI-search era, it means watching the answer engines — and tracking your citation share inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
The six-year war between long-form YouTube and short-form TikTok — from TikTok's 2018 U.S. launch through YouTube Shorts (2020) to the 2024-2025 divestiture order and the AI citation layer that now matters more than either format.
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