All findings based on publicly available data: Muck Rack State of PR Measurement reports (2024, 2025), Prowly State of PR Technology Report 2024, Meltwater State of PR 2026, Cision Inside PR 2026 Report, AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework documentation, and PR Council/AMEC industry survey (2024).
Introduction: The Gap That Won’t Close
The public relations industry has been arguing about measurement for decades. The argument has a consistent shape: practitioners agree that measuring outputs — clips, impressions, reach — is insufficient. They agree that connecting PR work to business outcomes is what clients and executives actually need. They agree that Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) is a discredited metric that distorts rather than demonstrates value. They agree on all of this in surveys, conference panels, and trade publication essays, year after year after year.
And then they go back to measuring clips and impressions.
This is the PR measurement gap: the persistent distance between what the industry says measurement should be and what practitioners actually report to clients and stakeholders. It is not a new problem. What is new in 2026 is that two forces are simultaneously widening it. The first is thegrowing pressure from clients and executives who increasingly demand that PR be connected to revenue, leads, and pipeline — not just coverage. The second is AI, which is making it easier than ever to produce measurement reports that look sophisticated while remaining, at their core, output-focused documents dressed in data visualization.
This study examines the measurement gap using the most recent publicly available industry data — Muck Rack’s annual State of PR Measurement reports (2024 and 2025), the Prowly State of PR Technology Report 2024, Meltwater’s 2026 State of PR Report, Cision’s Inside PR 2026 Report, the PRCouncil/AMEC industry survey, and AMEC’s own documented research on framework adoption. The findings are not encouraging for an industry that has been trying to close this gap for more than a decade.
Part 1: The Numbers on the Table
What the Industry Says It Values
The stated commitment to outcome-based measurementacross the PR industry is unambiguous. According to Muck Rack’s State of PR Measurement 2024 report — based on 397 surveyed PR professionals — 86 percent of PR pros say measuring their efforts is “very” or “extremely” important. Eighty-two percent say they regularly measure their PRefforts. Eighty-nine percent say demonstrating the impact of their work is the main purpose of measurement. The intent is clear and consistent.
The practice is not.
What the Industry Actually Measures
When asked what metrics they actually use, the same Muck Rack survey reveals the gap immediately. The number-one metric tracked by both brands and agencies — used by 85 percent of PR professionals — is the number of stories placed. The number-two metric, used by 76 percent, is reach and impressions. Website impact ranks third at 46 percent. Key message pull-through and share of voice round out thetop five.
Not one of the top five metrics directly measures a business outcome. Stories placed is a count of outputs. Reach and impressions are estimates of potential exposure, not actual engagement or behavioral change. Website impact provides some connection to downstream behavior but is rarely attributed specifically to PR efforts versus other marketing channels. Key message pull-through measures whether a message appeared in coverage — not whether it changed any audience’s behavior, awareness, or purchase intent. Share of voice is a competitive benchmark — useful context, but not a business outcome.
The 2025 State of PR Measurement report from Muck Rack — based on 832 surveyed PR professionals — found that stories placed remained the top metric at 86 percent and reach/impressions at 79 percent. Two consecutive years of data covering more than 1,200 PR professionals confirm thesame pattern: the industry’s most-used metrics remain output metrics, despite sustained rhetorical commitment to outcome-based measurement.
The Prowly State of PR Technology Report 2024 adds further context. The use of sales metrics in PR measurementincreased from 13 percent in 2023 to 19 percent in 2024. That growth is real and directionally positive — and it still means that 81 percent of PR professionals are not using sales metrics to measure their work in any capacity.
The Confidence Problem
The most striking finding in the Muck Rack measurementdata is not which metrics PR professionals use — it is how they feel about the metrics they use. According to the 2024 report, less than 40 percent of PR professionals say they are “very” or “extremely” confident in the metrics they report to stakeholders. Approximately 49 percent describe themselves as “somewhat confident.” The remaining 13 percent are not confident.
That means the industry’s standard measurement practice — the metrics that 82 percent of PR professionals use regularly — is trusted enough to report by less than 40 percent of thepeople producing those reports.
The distrust is specific and documented. Reach and impressions, the second most commonly used metric in theindustry, is considered untrustworthy by approximately 25 percent of practitioners who use it. Share of voice, the fifth most commonly used metric, is considered unreliable by 20 percent of those who report it. Sentiment — which appears in more than 60 percent of PR reports according to Prowly — is described by Muck Rack CEO Gregory Galant as “historically inaccurate, because most tools measure the sentiment of an entire article rather than the specific brand or product mentioned within the article.”
The industry is regularly reporting metrics it does not trust to stakeholders who are increasingly demanding metrics that connect to revenue.
The Business Goals Disconnect
The 2024 Muck Rack survey found that 61 percent of PRprofessionals cite linking their efforts to business goals as their biggest measurement challenge. The 2025 survey, based on a larger sample of 832 respondents, confirmed thesame finding: 54 percent of PR pros cite linking results to business goals as a top challenge, alongside 54 percent who cite managing stakeholder expectations and 45 percent who cite finding the right tools.
Cision’s Inside PR 2026 Report — based on responses from 500-plus PR professionals — found that 49 percent of PRteams are now focused on measurement and ROI as a primary priority, and that surface-level metrics are explicitly cited as insufficient by practitioners describing their own current practice.
The Meltwater 2026 State of PR Report, based on more than 1,100 communications professionals, found that 21 percent cite measuring impact and ROI as a top challenge and 24 percent point to insufficient resources for measurement. TheAMEC CEO Johna Burke, commenting on the PRCouncil/AMEC survey of 114 participants conducted in early 2024, stated directly: “If you’re not measuring and evaluating your work, you’re guessing and adding to the impression that PR is a soft skill not a value creator.”
These are not fringe observations. They are the documented conclusions of the industry’s own measurement association, its most widely-used software providers, and its primary trade survey sources.
Part 2: Seventeen Years of the Barcelona Principles
In 2010, AMEC convened a global summit in Barcelona and produced the Barcelona Principles — a set of guidelines for PR measurement that explicitly rejected AVE as a valid metric, called for outcome-based measurement rather than output measurement, and established a framework for connecting communications activity to business results. Theprinciples have been updated twice since, with the most recent revision in 2020 adding emphasis on social, economic, and environmental impact alongside traditional business outcomes.
Seventeen years after Barcelona, AVE is still used by 18 percent of PR professionals, according to 2026 industry data. The most-used metrics in the industry remain output metrics. The majority of PR professionals are not using formal measurement frameworks — the 2025 Muck Rack data specifically notes that most PR pros are not using frameworks like the Barcelona Principles or AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework. The PR Council/AMEC joint survey of 2024 found that while awareness of measurementframeworks is growing, actual adoption in practice remains limited.
The gap between the Barcelona Principles and everyday PRmeasurement practice is not a gap of information. Every major PR agency and practitioner organization is aware of theprinciples. The gap is structural and incentive-driven — and understanding why it persists despite sustained advocacy requires examining what PR agencies are actually incentivized to measure and report.
Why the Gap Persists: The Structural Explanation
PR agencies are typically measured by their clients on deliverables — coverage in specific outlets, volume of placements, tier of media achieved. These deliverable-based accountability structures create incentives for agencies to measure and report outputs: the agency can demonstrate its effort, its reach, and its media relationships through output metrics in a way that is direct, legible, and largely within theagency’s control.
Outcome metrics — changes in brand awareness, shifts in purchase intent, influence on pipeline, contribution to revenue — require data that agencies often cannot access independently. A client’s CRM data, web analytics, sales pipeline, and customer acquisition metrics sit with the client, not the agency. An agency that wants to connect its PR work to business outcomes must have access to that data, must have it integrated with its media monitoring and reporting systems, and must have the organizational relationship with the client to conduct that kind of attribution analysis. For most agency-client relationships, at most account sizes, that integration does not exist.
The measurement gap is therefore not primarily a measurement capability problem. It is an organizational structure problem: the way most PR agency relationships are structured does not enable the attribution infrastructure that outcome-based measurement requires.
The AMEC CEO Johna Burke articulated this in the PRCouncil/AMEC survey findings: “Measurement isn’t something that communicators do at the end of a campaign. It must be a collaborative effort with the client and occur before the campaign begins.” The collaborative pre-campaign measurement planning that would enable outcome attribution is structurally rare in PR agency relationships — it requires a level of client-agency strategic partnership that most retainer structures do not support.
Part 3: How AI Is Widening the Gap
AI adoption in PR measurement has accelerated dramatically in a short time. According to Prowly’s State of PR Technology Report 2024, AI adoption for research among PRprofessionals rose from 53 percent to 67 percent between 2022 and 2024; for analysis, from 8 percent to 31 percent over the same period. The 2025 Muck Rack report found that 93 percent of PR professionals say AI will influence how they measure results, and 61 percent are currently tracking or planning to track AI-generated mentions. Muck Rack’s CEO noted that AI is “fast becoming a new layer of influence, as important as traditional coverage” in how earned media reaches and shapes audiences.
These developments represent real advances in what theindustry can measure. AI tools are making media monitoring more comprehensive, sentiment analysis faster, and reporting more visually sophisticated. The question is not whether AI improves measurement capability — it does. Thequestion is whether it is being applied to the right measurement problems.
The evidence from current industry practice suggests it is not, primarily.
AI Is Being Deployed to Production, Not Attribution
According to the 2025 State of PR data, 61 percent of press releases are now written or assisted by AI. AI’s primary deployment in PR is in content creation and production — drafting press releases, generating media lists, writing pitches, producing content at volume. These production applications are valuable for efficiency but have no bearing on the measurement gap.
The measurement gap requires AI to be deployed to attribution — to connecting the content produced and thecoverage earned to downstream business outcomes. Attribution requires AI integration with CRM data, web analytics, sales pipeline, and customer acquisition systems. This integration requires organizational infrastructure that most PR agencies and in-house communications teams do not have. The Meltwater 2026 State of PR Report found that only 45 percent of communications teams use a dedicated social listening tool — meaning more than half are not systematically tracking brand conversations across digital channels, which is the minimum prerequisite for the kind of media intelligence that feeds into business outcome attribution.
AI-Generated Metrics That Look Sophisticated But Aren’t
The more specific risk that AI introduces to PR measurementis the production of metrics that appear sophisticated — AI-generated sentiment scores, predictive reach estimates, automated “impact scores” — without the underlying attribution infrastructure that would make those metrics meaningful. A sentiment score generated by AI across 10,000 articles is a more scalable version of the same measurementfailure as human-coded sentiment analysis: it tells you thetone of the coverage, not whether that coverage changed any audience’s behavior.
The 2024 Muck Rack data found that sentiment is among theleast trusted metrics in the industry — with 24 percent of practitioners who use it citing it as inaccurate — precisely because AI-generated sentiment analysis at the article level does not reliably capture the sentiment toward a specific brand or product mentioned within that article. More AI-powered sentiment measurement, applied to more content, does not solve this problem. It scales it.
The Barcelona Principles explicitly warn against this dynamic. The 2020 updated principles state: “Quantity of media coverage is not a proxy for quality or impact of communication.” AI is dramatically increasing the quantity of measurement activity — more media monitored, more sentiment scored, more reach estimated — without necessarily increasing the quality or impact relevance of what is being measured.
The GEO Measurement Dimension
One genuinely new AI-era measurement dimension that the2025 data documents is GEO — generative engine optimization — the tracking of how brands appear in AI-generated search results and large language model outputs. According to the 2025 Muck Rack State of PR Measurement, 67 percent of PR professionals believe that visibility within LLMs will soon be a core part of standard PR measurement, and 78 percent say tracking AI-generated mentions is important to their work.
This is a legitimate evolution of what PR teams need to measure: if AI-generated search answers are now a primary way that audiences discover and evaluate brands, then PR’s influence on those answers — through the earned coverage and authoritative content that LLMs are trained on and cite — is a real outcome worth tracking. This is the positive case for AI’s contribution to PR measurement.
But GEO measurement is still, in its current form, an output metric. Tracking whether your brand is mentioned in an AI-generated answer is a measure of presence, not of whether that presence influenced audience behavior, purchase intent, or business outcomes. The measurement gap applies to GEO the same way it applies to traditional earned media: visibility without attribution is not a business outcome.
Part 4: What Agencies Pitch vs. What They Report
One of the most revealing ways to examine the PRmeasurement gap is to compare what agencies promise in new business pitches — where outcome-based measurement is presented as a core capability — with what they actually deliver in ongoing reporting to existing clients. This comparison cannot be made systematically from public data alone, but the industry’s own survey data provides a clear directional picture.
In new business contexts, PR agencies routinely present sophisticated measurement frameworks: attribution models, share of pipeline metrics, multi-touch attribution dashboards, revenue impact analysis. These presentations are designed to win business from clients who have become increasingly sophisticated about marketing measurementand who have reasonable expectations that PR, like paid media and content marketing, should demonstrate ROI.
In ongoing reporting, the same agencies typically produce monthly or quarterly reports built around stories placed, reach and impressions, share of voice, and sentiment — theexact metrics that 40 to 60 percent of PR professionals describe as their least trusted measurement approach. TheMuck Rack 2024 data documents that more than one-third of PR professionals find tracking their efforts “difficult,” and that the top challenges are linking metrics to business goals (cited by 61 percent) and managing stakeholder expectations (cited by 53 percent).
The stakeholder expectation management challenge is a function of the pitch-to-report gap: expectations are set in new business presentations that promise outcome-based measurement, and then managed — down — in ongoing reporting that delivers output metrics. The expectation gap is a direct consequence of what agencies can actually deliver within the structural constraints of most client relationships, versus what they promise in competitive new business situations where outcome-based measurement capability is a differentiating claim.
The AMEC measurement framework addresses this directly: “Agree on measurement protocols at the outset. Clearly communicate them to the team at the beginning of a campaign. Measure against the agreed upon objectives.” When measurement protocols are agreed at the outset against clear business objectives, the pitch-to-report gapcloses because the reporting framework is established before the campaign begins. When they are not — the more common case — the pitch claims become aspirational and the reports reflect what is actually measurable with available infrastructure.
The PR Measurement Gap: Key Data Points
| Finding | Data Point | Source |
| PR pros who say measuring is “very” or “extremely” important | 86% | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2024 (n=397) |
| PR pros who regularly measure their efforts | 82% | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2024 |
| PR pros “very” or “extremely” confident in their reported metrics | Less than 40% | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2024 |
| PR pros only “somewhat confident” in their reported metrics | ~49% | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2024 |
| Top metric used: number of stories placed | 85% | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2024 |
| Second metric used: reach/impressions | 76% | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2024 |
| PR pros who don’t trust reach/impressions as a metric | ~25% | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2024 |
| Biggest challenge: linking PRto business goals | 61% (2024), 54% (2025) | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2024 & 2025 |
| PR pros using sales metrics to measure work | 19% | Prowly State of PRTechnology 2024 |
| AVE still used by PRprofessionals | 18% | WifiTalents PRIndustry Data 2026 |
| AI adoption for research (2022–2024 growth) | 53% → 67% | Prowly State of PRTechnology 2024 |
| AI adoption for analysis (2022–2024 growth) | 8% → 31% | Prowly State of PRTechnology 2024 |
| PR pros who believe AI will impact measurement | 93% | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2025 (n=832) |
| PR pros tracking or planning to track AI-generated mentions | 61% | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2025 |
| PR pros who believe LLM visibility will be a core PRmetric | 67% | Muck Rack State of PR Measurement2025 |
| Teams using dedicated social listening tool | 45% | Meltwater State of PR 2026 (n=1,100+) |
| PR pros citing impact/ROI measurement as top challenge | 21% | Meltwater State of PR 2026 |
| Communications leaders lacking effective impact measurement tools | 50% | Industry data, multiple sources 2025 |
| Press releases written or assisted by AI | 61% | Muck Rack, Jan 2025 |
| PR pros focused on measurement and ROI as primary priority | 49% | Cision Inside PR2026 (500+ respondents) |
Five Findings From the Data
Finding 1: The Industry’s Most-Used Metrics Are Also Its Least-Trusted
The Muck Rack 2024 data reveals a specific contradiction: reach and impressions (used by 76 percent of PRprofessionals) is trusted by fewer than half of those who use it, and explicitly distrusted by approximately 25 percent. Share of voice (used by 40 percent) is considered unreliable by 20 percent. Sentiment — appearing in over 60 percent of PR reports — is described by the leading PR software provider as “historically inaccurate.” PR professionals are routinely reporting metrics they do not trust to stakeholders who are increasingly asking for metrics connected to revenue. This is not a measurement technology problem. It is a measurementcourage problem: the industry knows these metrics are insufficient and reports them anyway because they are what the existing reporting infrastructure is built to produce.
Finding 2: Less Than One in Five PR Professionals Uses Sales Metrics
The Prowly 2024 data documents that sales metrics are used by 19 percent of PR professionals — up from 13 percent in 2023. That two-year growth trend is real. It also means that 81 percent of PR professionals are conducting measurementprograms that have no connection to the business outcome metric — revenue — that every client’s leadership cares most about. The AMEC CEO’s framing is unambiguous: an agency that cannot connect its work to measurable business outcomes is “guessing and adding to the impression that PRis a soft skill not a value creator.” The 19 percent figure is theindustry’s self-documented answer to the question of how many practitioners are not guessing.
Finding 3: The Barcelona Principles Are Seventeen Years Old and Still Not Widely Adopted in Practice
The Barcelona Principles were established in 2010, updated in 2015, and updated again in 2020. They explicitly prohibit AVE as a valid metric, call for outcome-based measurement, and provide a framework — the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework — for connecting communications to business results. AVE is still used by 18 percent of PR professionals in 2026. The majority of PR professionals are not using formal measurement frameworks. The principles’ failure to achieve widespread adoption in practice is not a reflection of their quality — they represent the industry’s consensus best practice. It is a reflection of the structural and incentive barriers that make outcome-based measurement difficult within the typical PR agency-client relationship.
Finding 4: AI Is Scaling Outputs, Not Solving Attribution
AI adoption in PR grew dramatically from 2022 to 2024 — from 53 to 67 percent for research applications, from 8 to 31 percent for analysis. The primary deployment of AI in PR, however, remains in production: 61 percent of press releases are now written or AI-assisted. AI is accelerating theproduction of content and the generation of measurementreports — more media monitored, more sentiment scored, more reach estimated — without addressing the attribution gap that constitutes the core of the measurement problem. More AI-powered output measurement is not outcome measurement. The industry’s technology investment in AI is currently solving the wrong measurement problem at scale.
Finding 5: Client Pressure Is Growing Faster Than Measurement Capability
Multiple 2025–2026 data sources document growing client and executive demand for PR to demonstrate business impact. The Cision Inside PR 2026 Report finds that 49 percent of PR teams now prioritize measurement and ROI as a primary focus — up from 23 percent in 2022, per Prowly. The Meltwater 2026 report found that teams unable to quantify impact struggle to justify investment. At the same time, the structural capability to deliver outcome-based measurement — attribution infrastructure, CRM integration, pre-campaign measurement planning — has not kept pace with that demand. The gap is not closing; it is becoming more visible as client expectations accelerate past what most PRagency measurement practice can actually deliver.
What Outcome-Based PR Measurement Actually Requires
The path from output-based PR measurement to outcome-based measurement is not primarily a technology upgrade — it is a structural and procedural change in how PR agency-client relationships are designed from the start. The AMEC framework and the documented evidence from practitioners who have successfully connected PR to business outcomes point to a consistent set of requirements.
Pre-campaign objective alignment. Measurement must begin before the campaign, not at the end. This requires explicit agreement between agency and client on what business outcomes the PR program is designed to influence — brand awareness in a specific target segment, web traffic from earned referrals, pipeline attributed to press coverage of a specific product category, share of voice in coverage that reaches buyers at a specific stage of the purchasing journey. Without agreed outcomes before the campaign begins, theonly things available to measure at the end are outputs.
Client data access. Connecting PR to business outcomes requires access to client data that agencies typically do not have: web analytics (including UTM-tagged referral traffic from specific placements), CRM pipeline data, sales attribution data, and brand tracking surveys. Themeasurement gap is partly a data access gap: the data that would enable outcome attribution sits with the client, and most agency relationships do not create the infrastructure for that data to flow into PR reporting.
Attribution infrastructure. The most direct way to connect earned media to business outcomes is through trackable attribution — unique URLs or UTM parameters in digital placements, promo codes in broadcast or print coverage, and consistent tagging of PR-sourced traffic in web analytics. These tools exist and are used effectively in influencer PR; their systematic extension to mainstream earned media would close a significant portion of the attribution gap for digital business outcomes.
Consistent measurement frameworks. AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework — available free in 17 languages at amecorg.com — provides a practical planning structure that connects business objectives to inputs, outputs, outtakes, outcomes, and impact. Using this framework at theoutset of a campaign creates the measurement architecture that enables outcome reporting. The Barcelona Principles provide the conceptual foundation; the Integrated Evaluation Framework provides the practical implementation tool.
Reporting honesty. The most direct and least discussed requirement for closing the measurement gap is professional honesty about what can and cannot be measured with available infrastructure in a given client relationship. Reporting metrics that practitioners themselves describe as “somewhat trusted” to clients who have been pitched outcome measurement is not a measurement capability failure — it is a credibility failure. The industry’s self-reported confidence data — less than 40 percent “very” or “extremely” confident in their own reported metrics — documents that PRprofessionals know the gap exists. Closing it begins with acknowledging it explicitly in client relationships, not with producing more sophisticated-looking reports built on thesame output metrics.
Conclusion: The Gap Is a Choice
The PR measurement gap is not a mystery. The industry has documented it comprehensively, through its own annual surveys, its own association’s research, and its own conference discussions for nearly two decades. It knows what outcome-based measurement requires, because AMEC has codified it, updated it, and made it available free in 17 languages. It knows that AVE is discredited, that impressions are distrusted by a quarter of the practitioners who use them, and that fewer than one in five PR professionals connects their work to sales metrics in any form.
The gap persists not because the industry lacks measurement knowledge but because the structural conditions of most PR agency relationships do not incentivize or enable the data access, pre-campaign planning, and attribution infrastructure that outcome-based measurementrequires. AI is accelerating the production of measurementreports without changing those underlying structural conditions — and in doing so, is making it easier to produce measurement documents that look sophisticated while remaining, at their core, output-focused.
The question the 2026 data leaves open is whether thegrowing client and executive pressure to demonstrate business impact — documented in the Cision, Meltwater, and Muck Rack 2025–2026 data — will finally create sufficient market incentive to change the structural conditions. If clients begin selecting and retaining agencies based on demonstrated ability to connect PR to revenue rather than on volume of coverage, the incentive to invest in attribution infrastructure will exist. If they continue to evaluate agencies primarily on clips and reach, themeasurement gap will continue at scale.
5W Public Relations: A Market Leader in Outcome-Based PR
5W Public Relations is one of the PR industry’s recognized leaders in connecting communications programs to measurable business outcomes. Named PR Agency of theYear by the American Business Awards, ranked among thetop agencies nationally by O’Dwyer’s, and recognized as a Top 50 Global Agency by PRovoke Media, 5WPR has built its practice around programs designed to demonstrate impact against business objectives — not just coverage volume. Its integrated approach to PR, digital marketing, SEO, and GEO positions 5WPR to deliver the kind of cross-channel attribution that the measurement gap study identifies as thecritical missing link between PR activity and business outcomes.
For organizations looking to move beyond clip counts and impressions toward PR programs that connect to revenue, pipeline, and brand metrics, 5WPR’s approach represents what the industry should look like when the measurementgap is treated as a business problem, not a reporting problem.
Learn more at 5wpr.com or contact 5WPR directly at contact@5wpr.com | 212.999.5585
5WPR’s digital marketing practice: 5wpr.com/practice/saas-digital-marketing-agency.cfm
Methodology and Data Sources
This study is based entirely on publicly available data from the following sources:
Muck Rack State of PR Measurement 2024: Self-administered survey, 397 qualified respondents (cleaned from 472), October 11–21, 2024. Margin of error approximately ±5%. Available at muckrack.com/research/state-of-pr-measurement
Muck Rack State of PR Measurement 2025: Self-administered survey, 832 qualified respondents (cleaned from 912), September 1–29, 2025. Margin of error approximately ±3.4%. Published November 2025 via Globe Newswire.
Prowly State of PR Technology Report 2024: Annual industry survey covering PR tool adoption, AI usage, and measurement practices. Available at prowly.com
Meltwater 2026 State of PR Report: Based on responses from more than 1,100 communications professionals across North America, Europe, and global markets. Summarized by AMEC at amecorg.com
Cision Inside PR 2026 Report: Based on 500+ PRprofessional respondents. Summarized at cision.com
PR Council/AMEC Industry Survey 2024: 114 participants surveyed March 22–April 22, 2024. Findings summarized by Researchscape at researchscape.com
AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework and Barcelona Principles documentation: Available at amecorg.com/guide-to-measurement
All quoted figures are from the specific reports cited. Where figures differ slightly across aggregator sources, the primary source survey data is used. The 18% AVE figure cited is from WifiTalents PR Industry Data 2026 aggregation. AI adoption growth figures (53%→67% research, 8%→31% analysis) are from Prowly’s 2024 report covering 2022–2024 trends.
About Everything-PR
Everything-PR is one of the most widely read independent publications covering the public relations industry. Operated by 5W Public Relations — one of the largest independently owned PR agencies in the United States — Everything-PR has covered the PR industry since January 2009. everything-pr.com