The CEO firings of the past two years reveal a consistent pattern: a board loses patience, a "strategic review" leaks, a "mutual decision" is announced, and a new CEO blames the last. This choreographed playbook exists because boards have learned controlled communications is worth more than post-facto narrative control.
PR earns coverage. Advertising buys placements. Marketing coordinates both. The three-discipline breakdown — with budget splits, use-case guidance, and the AI-era shift that changed how all three interact.
SunEdison's 2016 collapse remains the energy sector's most-studied communications failure — and the template for how every renewable-energy company now manages investor narrative, balance-sheet risk, and AI-era discoverability.
AI engines retrieve passages, not pages. This article explains retrieval chunking architecture: the technical, learnable discipline that makes brand content extractable by AI engines. We cover definitional ledes, prompt-shaped headings, extractable tables, evidence-summary blocks, and FAQ structures, outlining how these elements improve AI retrieval and synthesis quality. The article also details common chunking failures and provides an implementation checklist for optimizing editorial pages.
Public relations in 2026 still does what it has always done — earn credibility through third parties. But the third parties that matter most now include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The companion AI-era piece to the canonical pillar. AI Communications, Citation Share, GEO, and how PR teams operate the new discipline.
A working reference vocabulary for communications and reputation practitioners — 15 terms from Earned Media to Corporate Narrative. Each entry covers definition, origin, distinction from adjacent terms, the practitioner example, and why the term still matters in 2026.
Twelve operational capabilities for AI Citation Share in 2026. Schema, llms.txt, credentialed Person profiles, Citation Share measurement, crisis pre-positioning. Most brands score below 12 of 36.
The article provides a playbook for correcting AI misinformation about your company. It outlines steps like verifying errors, finding sources, scoring source authority, issuing correct facts at higher authority, and re-testing. It also discusses ineffective methods like contacting AI companies directly or suing the model, emphasizing that building authoritative content is key to shaping AI outputs.
PR is a force multiplier, not a foundation. Right moments: funding rounds, competitive category entry, pre-IPO, category creation, post-PMF. Wrong moments: pre-PMF, nothing to say.
Effective AI training for a communications team is a cohort, not a webinar. A small group works through real client tasks over a defined period, reaches a genuine standard, and then sets that standard for the rest of the team.
