Somewhere in the world, as you read this, a press release is being written, approved and sent without a single human sentence in it. Someone fed a brief to a model, the model handed back a headline, a usable quote and three paragraphs of boilerplate, and a PR person pushed it out to a few hundred reporters. That isn’t a hypothetical, and it stopped being unusual a while ago. It’s just how a good chunk of the industry carries out its media relations work.
Used with appropriate care and thoughtfulness, AI in PR earns its keep: it’s good at research, the synthesis, the first sift through more material than any of us could read in a week, and it hands time and headroom back to teams that often don’t have enough of either. Point it in the right direction and the work gets sharper and the money goes further. The problem has never been the technology.
The problem sits, ultimately, a layer underneath. It isn’t that PR started using AI, it’s what many in the industry have chosen to point it at, and what that choice is quietly doing to the one thing we actually sell. Which, when you strip everything else away, is judgment and trust.
Automating the whole production line, the pitching, the releases, the content, has done a lot more than make us faster, and it certainly hasn’t done much for media relations, or for what journalists make of us. We’ve flooded the people we depend on with generic, synthetic outreach, worn through the trust the whole arrangement runs on, and, by accident, started a race to the bottom on quality that nobody in the profession would stand up in earnest and defend.
The journalist relationship is breaking down
PR has always run on a relationship that was never quite equal but, on a good day, was mutual. We had something the reporter wanted, namely access, whether to a story, a spokesperson or a set of numbers, and they had something we wanted, which is the one thing a brand can’t manufacture for itself: a third party choosing to publish.
The whole exchange rested on the reporter’s belief that the thing in their inbox had come from someone who’d read their work and paused, even for a second, to ask whether it was relevant to them.
Worryingly, that belief is wearing thin. Muck Rack’s 2025 survey of more than 1,500 journalists found PR still doing its job at the top of the funnel, with 86% saying at least some of their reporting started with a pitch.
Read a little further, though, and it gets less flattering. Nearly half of those journalists are now being pitched by people contacting twenty or more reporters on the same campaign, more than a third say their relationships with PR contacts are limited at best, and while seven in ten claim they personalise “to some extent,” most admit that comes down to changing a line or two.
AI has made it effortless to spin up a hundred near-identical versions of the same generic approach, and reporters can tell. They know the difference between a note written for them and a note written for anyone who happens to share their job title.
When content stops being trusted
The same thing is happening to everything else being put out by the industry, whether that’s the AI-generated press releases, the bylines a model wrote start to finish, the thought leadership with no thought in it and no leader behind it, or the social copy built from the same dozen prompts doing the rounds of every agency in town.
Audiences can increasingly spot it too, even when they couldn’t tell you precisely what it is that they’ve clocked. The point of earned media was always that someone other than the brand had vouched for it, and synthetic content quietly eats away at that, because the more obviously automated a whole category of communication becomes, the less any single piece of it is worth.
A press release was never a stimulating read, and never claimed to be, but it used to carry an implicit promise that a human being stood behind its content. Take that promise out at scale and you’re left with something shaped like communication that behaves like noise, in front of an audience that learns, pretty quickly, to scroll straight past.
Any agency automating its content can make a perfectly sensible case for it, that it’s cheaper, quicker, frees up a junior for other things. But the bill rarely lands on the firm that pocketed the saving, rather affecting the credibility of the whole category, which nobody owns and everybody relies upon.
The GEO dimension, where AI changes the calculation for earned media
Here’s where it gets awkward for anyone busy automating their work. As people move their questions out of search engines and into answer engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google’s AI Overviews, the rules of visibility are being rewritten.
Generative engine optimisation, the business of getting your brand named and quoted inside an AI-generated answer, is turning out to favour earned media over almost everything else. The models reach for third-party, authoritative sources, real journalism, analyst notes, expert commentary, and largely ignore brand-owned pages and social posts.
By early 2026 the answer engines were already taking a real and fast-growing slice of the questions people used to put into Google, and the brands turning up inside those answers are, overwhelmingly, the ones with genuine coverage in credible outlets.
The irony is impossible to ignore. Just as earned media becomes the raw material that decides whether a brand even exists in an AI-mediated world, the industry whose entire job is to earn it is busy torching its own relationships with the journalists who produce it. There’s no automating your way into the trusted-source layer.
The competitive argument for staying human
None of this is an argument against the technology, and it’s certainly not nostalgia for the fax machine and the Rolodex – although perhaps the long journalist lunch deserves a fair amount of rose-tinted nostalgia.
It’s an argument about where the advantage actually sits now. When everyone’s working from the same models and the same prompts, the output stops being a differentiator and turns into a commodity, and if your pitch and your release and your byline are indistinguishable from the three agencies down the road, you’ve boxed yourself into a corner where the only thing left to compete on is price.
As AI answer engines reward brands with real earned coverage, the agencies that protect journalist trust now will be the ones that show up later. Get in touch to build a PR strategy that holds up in both worlds.
About the author
Simarin Tandon | Junior Digital Account Director
Having worked with brands across the Beauty & Wellness, FMCG, FinTech, and Home & Lifestyle sectors, Simarin focuses on driving acquisition and growth, whilst managing the Digital team at brandnation.
A curious marketer, Simarin’s finger is always on the pulse when it comes to performance and digital updates across both paid and organic platforms.
