By Matthew Thomas, PR Account Director at Engage PR (part of The Ingenuity Group)
There is a particular kind of conversation that happens in agency budget meetings that makes PR pros pull their hair out. PR gets nodded at respectfully, called important, then quietly shuffled into the “awareness” corner while ‘the suits’ discuss the serious commercial benefits of channels that look easier to measure.
Try to breathe, go to your happy PR place. Mine is usually no amends from a client thought piece, but each to their own.
These sorts of discussions have been happening for years. Plenty of smart agency leaders still talk about earned media as if its main job is to get an agency talked about, not chosen.
The thing is, us PRs should be looking a tad smug as this is starting to be a very costly misunderstanding.
The awareness bucket was always a bit too convenient
As AI search tools and LLMs become part of how brands compare agencies and build shortlists, earned media is finally getting its flowers.
Muck Rack’s analysis of more than one million AI-cited links found that 95% came from non-paid sources and 89% from earned media. For recent or time-sensitive queries, journalistic content accounted for 49% of citations.
Shocking, right?
Wrong.
The best PRs have known for years that third-party credibility does the nifty commercial work. This is where the old fame versus fortune debate needs a facelift. In simple terms, fame PR is the work that makes an agency visible, recognised and remembered. Fortune PR is the work that helps turn that visibility into commercial value by putting the agency in front of the right prospects in a relevant publication.
I’m not for a second saying that fame is obsolete. Far from it. Agencies still need broad visibility. They still need to be known. But AI search shifts the dial closer to a fortune-led strategy because the value of earned media now sits much more clearly in its ability to help an agency appear credible, relevant and current when buyers go looking for the niche-est of answers to the niche-est of problems.
When someone asks an AI tool who the leading agencies are in a category, who seems credible, or who keeps appearing in respected publications, they are building confidence and narrowing options. Earned media has always influenced that process.
The commercial bit was there all along
That is why the fortune side of PR deserves more attention. I know I’m biased, but being seen is simply not enough. Whether that is a trade feature that sharpens category authority, a data-led piece of thought leadership that gives journalists something concrete to reference, or a steady pattern of useful, timely coverage that keeps an agency present in the market, the principle is the same.
This is also why a commercially minded PR strategy is imperative. More coverage is not automatically better coverage, and unless it is helping an agency become easier to find in moments of active evaluation, leaders are missing a crucial trick.
I couldn’t get through this without mentioning GEO. I know everyone just let out a collective groan at yet another article about it, but stick with me.
GEO has been useful in the way it has forced people to pay attention to what makes an agency show up inside AI-generated answers. Strip away the jargon, and what sits behind it is not especially mysterious. Agencies are more likely to surface when there is a strong trail of credible, relevant, third-party material around them.
However, please don’t get it twisted. This shouldn’t be viewed as a new discipline invented by AI.
Give PRs some credit!
We are just doing our job properly, with commercial intent behind it.
Turns out disappearing for six months is not a brilliant visibility strategy
Recency makes this even more important. One of the strongest indicators coming through the AI citation data is that fresh, journalistic content carries real weight, especially around current topics. Staying in the conversation has always mattered.
The difference now is that ongoing earned activity does not just help with human recall, but also strengthens an agency’s chances of being surfaced by AI tools. If an agency appears in bursts, then goes quiet for six months, that silence can become deafening.
Some recent forecasts reflect that shift. Gartner has predicted that PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027 as public LLM adoption changes how people search and how businesses need to earn visibility. Whether or not every agency follows that path exactly, the direction of travel is hard to ignore.
If AI systems are leaning on credible external sources to inform what they surface, agencies investing in those sources of credibility are likely to be in a stronger position than those relying on self-description alone.
For agency leaders still treating PR as a soft layer that sits somewhere above the ‘real business stuff’, this should be the wake-up call. Earned media has a lot to offer agency perception as well as pipeline.
Fame-led PR is, and always will be, brilliant for visibility. Fortune-led PR is what helps that visibility meet commercial opportunity.
