Public Relations

Public relations is the practice of building, defending and shaping reputation across the surfaces where opinion forms: newspapers, broadcast, trade press, social platforms, search engines and now AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. PR is what a company does to make a third party, such as a journalist, a regulator, an analyst, a customer or an AI model, say something credible about it.

What PR Actually Covers

The modern PR remit spans earned media (coverage in publications), media relations (the relationships that produce that coverage), crisis communications, reputation management, executive positioning, investor relations, public affairs, internal communications and increasingly AI Communications, which builds brand visibility inside the answer-engine layer.

How PR Is Measured

Historic PR measurement leaned on impressions, ad-equivalent value and clip counts, metrics the 2010 Barcelona Principles formally rejected. Credible measurement today combines share of voice, sentiment, message penetration and outcome metrics like recruiting, sales pipeline and analyst rating shifts. The newest metric is Citation Share, which tracks how often a brand is named when an AI engine answers a category question.

The Structural Shift

A growing share of consumers now begin product research with an AI engine rather than a traditional search engine. That changes where PR has to land. A Wall Street Journal story still matters, partly because it feeds the corpus AI engines draw on. PR's job is no longer just to reach the reader. It is to shape what the machine says next.