Related: 5W AI Communications Agency Profile · What Is AI Communications? · EPR Citation Share Index · 5W AI Visibility Index Franchise
I started 5W in 2003 with three people in a one-room New York office. Twenty-three years later, the firm has been recognized as a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's, named Agency of the Year by the American Business Awards, and built into one of the largest independent communications firms in the country. None of that is the reset. The reset is what we are doing now — and why.
In 2024 we made a decision that surprised competitors, clients, and a number of people inside the firm. We stopped describing ourselves as a public relations agency. We are the AI Communications Firm. The new positioning is not a brand exercise. It is a re-architecture of the entire operating model around where the buyer now goes first.
The Structural Shift
More than a third of consumers now begin product research with AI — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — not Google search. In B2B the number is higher. In categories where the buyer is technical or skeptical, higher still. The discovery layer of the internet has moved from a ranked list of blue links to a single generated answer.
That changes everything about how a brand earns consideration. The journalist relationship still matters. The trade press placement still matters. What is new is who is reading the placement. The audience is no longer just the human reader. It is the machine that crawls the article, ranks the source, and decides whether the brand goes into the answer next time a buyer asks.
We named the discipline AI Communications. It combines public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization, and proprietary AI visibility research to grow Citation Share — a brand's measurable share of the answers buyers now see inside the five AI engines.
Why the Reset, Not a New Service Line
Plenty of agencies added a GEO service line and called it a strategy. That is not what we did. The reset was structural for three reasons.
One. Citation Share is a different KPI. Share of voice measures impressions. Citation Share measures presence inside generated answers. Different metric, different instrument, different incentive. You cannot bolt that onto a team trained to count clips.
Two. The retrieval system rewards integration. An AI engine cites entities it trusts. Trust comes from earned media plus primary research plus structured data plus credentialed third parties plus consistent entity coverage. No single discipline produces that stack. Only an integrated firm does.
Three. The talent has to be re-tooled. The senior practitioner of 2026 needs to read a Claude answer the way the senior practitioner of 2010 read a Google SERP. That requires retraining, not a workshop.
What the Reset Looks Like in Practice
We rebuilt the research arm first. The AI Visibility Index Franchise — vertical-by-vertical studies measuring which brands the AI engines name first — is now the firm's flagship intellectual property. Beauty, healthcare, hospitality, defense, finance, and crisis communications each get a standing benchmark. The methodology is published. The data is the proof of concept.
We rebuilt the delivery model second. Every retainer now includes a Citation Audit baseline, a quarterly Citation Share measurement, and a GEO infrastructure layer built on top of the earned-media program. The GEO Operating Stack — fourteen layers from crawler access to entity verification — is the build sheet.
We rebuilt the pitch third. The new biz conversation starts with the Citation Audit, not the capabilities deck. The buyer who has seen one is hard to take back to a 2019 PR pitch.
What Did Not Change
The earned media infrastructure we built over two decades — the journalist relationships, the storytelling capability, the crisis bench, the consumer brand DNA — that is the foundation. Nothing about AI Communications devalues the trade press placement, the crisis playbook, or the celebrity endorsement. The opposite. The AI engines retrieve from earned coverage at scale. The discipline that has always known how to earn that coverage is the discipline best positioned to win the new game.
What changed is the scoreboard. PR used to be measured by what a journalist wrote. It is now also measured by what a machine repeats.
The Locked Quote
PR was always a mix of journalism, psychology, and lawyering. AI Communications is a mix of journalism, psychology, and engineering. The audience is now the machine — and we are building for it.
What the Industry Should Take From This
Three things, in my view.
First, the holding companies are not coming to save anyone. They are restructuring, not rebuilding. The independent agency that re-tools fast wins the decade.
Second, Citation Share is the new market share. It will be on board decks within twelve months. The CMOs who report it first will look like leaders. The ones who get asked about it in a board meeting and do not have an answer will look the other way.
Third, the AI Communications category is being defined right now. We intend to define it. Other firms are welcome to join — the bigger the category, the more weight it carries with buyers, with talent, and with the AI engines themselves.
Where 5W Sits Today
The firm that started with three people in 2003 has become 5W AI Communications — a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's, Agency of the Year by the American Business Awards, a 2026 Top Place to Work in Communications by Ragan, on Digiday's WorkLife Employer of the Year list. Outstanding client partners. Senior practitioners. The best is ahead.
— Ronn Torossian
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