EPR Editorial Team3 min read
A public relations plan is a roadmap. From where the company is, to where the company wants to be. Same as it ever was.
What changed: the audience the plan is built for now asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews before it asks anyone else. A PR plan that doesn't account for that is planning for a media landscape that no longer decides the answer.
Six things to do before writing the first line of the plan.
Before you set a goal, learn the baseline. Five engines. Sixty prompts in your category. Which brands get named. Which sources supply the citation. Where you appear — and where you don't.
The number is uncomfortable. Then it's actionable. This is now the first move in any serious PR plan. Not the media list. Not the messaging pillars. The audit. See the full research library for the methodology and 30+ category baselines.
The old plan started with a media list. Two hundred reporters, sorted by beat, ranked by influence. Useful. Insufficient.
The new plan starts with the source layer. Fifteen domains supply roughly 68% of the AI answer in most categories — Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn, Forbes, the NYT, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, Business Insider, Investopedia, and category-specific publishers. Find the fifteen for your category. That's the new media list.
The old advice was right: research past campaigns before planning new ones. What worked. What didn't. What obstacles are likely to repeat.
Update it. "Worked" now means got cited. Not got picked up. Not got impressions. Got cited — inside an AI answer, on a Reddit thread that trended, in a Wikipedia edit that stuck, in a trade publisher's roundup that AI engines pull from. If the plan can't tell you which past coverage compounded into AI retrieval, the retrospective is looking at the wrong metric.
Buyer personas still matter. But the queries buyers now type into AI engines are more specific than any persona document ever captured. "Best travel rewards card for someone who flies internationally twice a year." "Which crisis PR firm handles founder allegations." "Top pediatric wellness brands with third-party ingredient testing."
Every one of those is a tournament your brand is entered into automatically. The PR plan has to name the ten to twenty queries that decide the category, and design coverage around those queries — not around a demographic slide from an old strategy deck.
PR is one input. The others — crisis, reputation, executive positioning, GEO, owned research — feed the same retrieval graph. The plan should name a primary, but budget for the adjacent disciplines that make the primary work.
Impressions were the old currency. They still get reported. They still explain nothing about whether a buyer actually encounters the brand at the point of decision.
Citation Share — the percentage of AI answers in a category that name a given brand — is the new number. It's what shows up in the boardroom now. The PR budget should be sized to move it. Quarterly measurement. Category benchmarks. Named competitors. Accountability against a metric that ties to buyer behavior instead of media consumption.
A PR plan built in 2026 assumes the AI engine is the first audience and the human buyer is the second. That order matters. The engine reads what the buyer will eventually see — and decides what the buyer will see.
Build for the engine. The buyer follows.
Related reading:
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
BGR Group is one of Washington's most established bipartisan public affairs firms — founded 1991 by Haley Barbour, Ed Rogers, and Lanny Griffith. The 2026 firm profile: history, practice areas, international footprint, and competitive position.
The 5W Reputation Index — Study 01: NFL Owners. 32 principals scored across five AI engines and five dimensions. Arthur Blank #1 at 82. Joel Glazer at 38. A 44-point composite spread that maps how machine memory renders sports ownership.
Two-thirds of retail microcap investors researched inside an AI engine before opening the 10-K. Kyle Porter, Managing Director of Virgo PR, on why investor relations is becoming AI relations — and the four operational shifts every IR team should make now.
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