One challenge for PR in pitching stories to the media is the lack of response. At times, it can feel like pitching into the void.

Sometimes, you send what you think is a well-researched, relevant and timely pitch – and nothing happens. Other times, you can whip up a short order pitch on a whim and it winds up driving solid coverage.

To be sure, even for seasoned pros, the former happens more often than the latter, data shows. While the volume of pitches can vary by their beat or industry, most reporters are short on time and under pressure of a deadline.

There are more PR pros pitching, or SEOs and digital marketers moonlighting as PR pros, than reporters in a news seat. They simply can’t respond to every pitch, even if they think it’s a good one. That’s just the nature of media relations.

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PR isn’t completely blind either

We aren’t completely blind to what’s going on here. There are a number of surveys that poll reporters and ask them about their pitching preferences.

Many of these, but not all, are conducted by PR software providers that maintain a database of reporters as part of their product. Regular readers know I like to pour over the surveys of journalists and highlight interesting findings.

In this post, I’ve gone back through the reports I’ve covered – and checked out a few more – to aggregate PR pitching statistics.

About half of reporters never respond to PR pitches

Here’s what the data shows about reporter response rates:

2026 Muck Rack survey of ~900 reporters:

• • 54% of journalists say they seldom or never respond to PR pitches;
  • 25% respond about half the time;
  • 15% usually respond; and
  • Just 6% always respond.

The 2026 survey findings were more or less consistent with the same survey conducted two years prior.

2024 Muck Rack survey of ~1,100 reporters:

• • 49% seldom or never respond;
  • 24% respond about “half the time”; and
  • 26% respond to PR pitches always or usually.

A 2024 study by Propel substantiates these surveys somewhat. Importantly, the Propel data is not survey data, but behavioral data. In the first quarter of 2024, the company analyzed 400,000 pitches sent to 4,000 reporters through the Propel platform.

2024 Propel study of 400,000 pitches:

• • Reporters open about half (46%) of the story pitches they receive; and
  • Reporters respond to 3.43% of the story pitches they receive.

The risks of following up on PR pitches

To put the Propel data in context, a 3% response rate means you’ll hear back from a reporter on three out of every 100 pitches. That leaves PR wondering about questions such as:

• Did the pitch land in the inbox?
• Did they see the pitch?
• Did they understand the pitch?
• Did they think the pitch was relevant?
• Why or why not?

Such questions lead to the next logical progression: should PR follow up on pitches?

Yes, generally you should consider following up, but carefully. It’s a delicate balance between making sure they saw the news you are pitching – and annoying a reporter.

Annoyance carries risks that can lead to permanent damage:

• A 2024 survey of 3,000 journalists by Cision found 48% of journalists will block a PR person for repeated aggressive follow-ups.

• A 2019 survey of 500 writers, editors, and publishers, by the marketing agency Fractl, found “53% have blacklisted at least one person this month due to bad pitches. 30% have blacklisted three or more.”

Should media relations follow up on PR pitches?

As I “grew up” in PR, I was very loath to follow up with reporters. The legends of getting blocked was always on my mind.

Further, I tend to be a machine when it comes to managing email (pro tip: turn off email previews; this feature destroys your productivity), and I suspect reporters are, too. They are dependent on email to do their job.

My original approach was to, sparingly, write a new pitch with a fresh angle. Yet over time, I changed my mind about this based on survey data:

• 2026 Muck Rack survey findings. The 2026 survey cited above found that 50% of reporters say one follow-up is ideal; 51% say follow-ups should happen between a few days after the initial pitch and up to a week later.

• 2025 Cison survey (N = 3,000). A 2025 survey had slightly different findings. Overall, the global survey found 62% of reporters say just one follow-up is appropriate. When just looking at U.S.-based reporters, the number goes up slightly: 69% said one follow-up is okay, 6% are good with several follow-ups and 24% said never follow up.

• 2024 Cision survey. The 2024 version of Cision’s survey was in the same ballpark: 64% of reporters said it’s fine to follow-up once; 8% said it’s okay to follow-up multiple times and 27% said PR should never follow up.

What’s interesting is that if we go back through these reports, we can see a real shift right about the time the pandemic hit.

For example, Muck Rack’s survey findings every year have been similar – until we hit 2019. That version polled ~700 reporters and we can see a real shift of about 25%.

• In 2019, “73% of journalists are OK with receiving a follow-up to a pitch they didn’t initially respond to. Only 12% would prefer not to receive any type of follow-up.”

In other words, reporters were more open to follow-ups prior to the pandemic than they are today. I would venture that we will likely see a continued downward trend in this respect as AI-generated content enables lazy PR people to fling sloppy pitches around the web.

How do I handle follow-ups?

Generally, I’ll do one short follow-up 2-3 days later for reporters who haven’t responded. I always strive to connect what I’m pitching with what they’ve covered historically.

Anything beyond that, and I usually write an entirely new pitch, or wait until the next time I have something I think will be of interest to them.

I have also long since borrowed a play from email marketing and use analytics to track opens and clicks. That data informs me if, when and how best to follow up.

There is a caveat: email open and click-through rates are not always accurate. Privacy settings by device, preference and even on an enterprise scale can impact the readings. So, consider the analytics a guideline and not a fact.

Well, that doesn’t sound too promising, so what should PR do? As I wrote for the lead story in a September 2016 edition of Communication World by IABC, PR and content marketing need each other.  It’s worth your while to “report” on your industry through your own unique view of the world. If you do that for readers, they will reward you with an audience.

In other words, content marketing makes media relations better and media relations make content marketing better. It’s been headed in this direction for a long time.

Those who know, know what it can do. Those that don’t will continue to see blogs and content as secondary, if not quaint, tools.

While I don’t think media relations will go away in the foreseeable future, it’s often not enough to simply pitch stories anymore: you have to prove a story has legs, and that’s what content marketing does for PR.

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Not too long ago, there was one reporter whose attention I was trying to get.

The company I was pitching hadn’t done much PR, but it was a buzzy and well-defined space with a  lot of innovation.

I had sent a few well-timed and customized pitches that fit squarely into his historical coverage. No response.

Next I had a new product announcement that was genuinely novel. Again, crickets.

I followed up a few days later with a new angle. Nothing.

After a follow-up or two, I began to wonder if the company had done something prior to my involvement to get blacklisted. I finally wrote to ask him directly, albeit diplomatically.

A day later, he wrote me back:

“Not at all. I simply don’t have time to reply to every email or pitch, much less cover everything. You’ve put [company name] on my radar — keep the news flowing.” Thanks!”

This is just the reality of the current media landscape. Reporters are busy. We live in an information rich environment.  It takes time, patience, resolve and consistency to break through.

That’s a good set up for this survey of journalists. If you’ve been sending quality pitches and getting no response, this survey gives you a window into their world.

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A window into the journalist’s world

PR software vendor Muck Rack recently polled 897 reporters in their database for its State of Journalism Report. A little more than 80% of the respondents are based in the U.S.; 58% are employed full-time by a publication; nearly half (46%) hold the title of “reporter,” while another 25% hold the title of “editor.”

The report provides some insight into the challenges of journalism:

• Never have enough time for reporting. Just 18% say they “always” have time to complete their work to their own standard. Another 15% say they “rarely” or “never” do.

• Journalists’ roles have expanded. About one-third of respondents (29%) say their roles have expanded “significantly,” and another 33% said “somewhat.”

• Meaningful work for unmeaningful pay. 65% describe their work as a journalist as “meaningful,” more than half (56%) say their employment is stable, and 75% report their compensation as landing between $40k-$100k annually.

Those three findings provide a high-level perspective of what it’s like to walk a mile in the shoes of a reporter: They love their work but have more to do in less time, and are compensated relatively poorly.

That gives you a sense for their motivation, which you’ve got to bear in mind when pitching a story.

Journalists perspective on media relations

The report also contains about a dozen pages dedicated to media relations. The survey asked various questions about the pitches they received. These also provide insight into what goes on in their minds when reviewing those pitches.

Here are a few of the findings that stood out to me:

• Many reporters choose their stories. 40% of reporters say they choose their own story ideas and pitch those in editorial meetings. By contrast, just 3% say they only cover stories assigned to them by an editor. The rest fall in the middle, with 55% saying “it’s a mix of both.”

• Social media matters. Businesses that do media outreach ought to be active on social media. 65% of journalists surveyed said social media is at least moderately important for their work. The report does note that this has declined in the last few years.

• Most reporters do value PR relationships. About half of reporters (53%) say relationships with PR are “very important” (30%) or “important” (23%). Another 20% say they are “moderately important.”

• Most stories start with a PR pitch. Some 86% of reporters surveyed said some of their stories start with a PR pitch. Of those, 51% attribute between 1-10% of stories to PR. Another 17% put it at between 11-25%; 12% say it’s between 16-50% and, finally, 5% say more than 50% of their stories start with a PR pitch.

The report also provided figures on the volume of pitches received. I was surprised to see that just 14% of reporters say they receive more than 21 pitches a day.

I would imagine the volume of pitches is highly dependent on the beat. In B2B tech, I routinely hear from reporters that they easily get upwards of 100 pitches a day. It’s been that way for years. The trade reporter mentioned above certainly does.

One former Wall Street Journal reporter said she used to get emails at a rate of one per minute. Assuming a standard eight-hour day, the math works out to 480 emails per day. That would overwhelm anyone.

Another reporter I spoke with a couple of weeks ago has completely given up on email. His email address bounced, so I reached out to him on LinkedIn. He responded right away and explained he was getting too many irrelevant pitches, which rendered his email unusable.

(click image for higher resolution)

Why reporters delete PR pitches

Reporters rarely responded to pitches.

More than half (54%) said they rarely responded to pitches. Another 25% say they respond about half of the time. Lastly, about one in five “usually” (15%) or “always respond” (6%).

Why? Most pitches are not relevant.

Nearly nine in 10 reporters (88%) delete pitches because it’s irrelevant to their coverage. That’s not the only reason why they might disregard a pitch.

The survey asked: What causes you to immediately disregard or delete a PR pitch?

Here’s how the responses broke out:

• 88% said it’s irrelevant to my coverage;
• 71% said it’s overly promotional or advertorial;
• 50% said it looks like a mass email;
• 46% said it’s sent repeatedly without response;
• 40% said it’s too long or unclear;
• 35% said it’s addressed to the wrong name or outlet;
• 26% said it lacks any source access; and
• 3% cited other unspecified reasons.

(click image for higher resolution)

What makes a good PR pitch?

Relevance is the operative word in effective PR pitches. The survey asked respondents: What makes a pitch genuinely relevant to your audience, not just your beat?

• 78% said it directly affects the community my audience belongs to;
• 45% said it has a clear local or cultural context;
• 28% said it includes voices from the community impacted;
• 28% said it avoids generic or stereotypical framing;
• 20% said it reflects my audience’s lived experiences; and
• 3% cited other unspecified reasons.

How well do PR pitches adhere to these guidelines?

Not well. According to the report:

“Just 3% of journalists say PR outreach always reflects the community their outlet serves, and 13% say usually.”

Rules of thumb for PR pitching

Muck Rack has been running this same survey for eight years. Over time, reporters have been consistent about the tactical aspects of pitching.

• Use email. “62% of journalists prefer to be pitched via 1:1 email.”

• Most don’t care what day you pitch. “50% don’t care which day they are pitched, but of those that do, 18% prefer to be pitched on a Monday.”

• Pitch before noon. “78% want to receive pitches before noon.”

• Be succinct. “69% prefer pitches that are under 200 words.”

• Follow up, sparingly. “50% say one follow-up is ideal, and 51% say it should come within 3-7 days later.”

These are all just table-stakes – the constraints within which PR has room to be creative.

No response isn’t a “not interested”

That trade reporter in the opening of this post goes to show that no response isn’t the same thing as “not interested,” it’s more like a “not right now.”

If you take his words at face value, he didn’t cover the story I was pitching because he wasn’t interested. He didn’t cover it because the brand is unfamiliar and he’s busy. However, he’s aware of the company now, which improves their chances.  It’s a step in the right direction.

This is an important point: It’s unrealistic to expect to go from no coverage to lots of coverage without a few steps in between. This speaks to factors we don’t see often in surveys of journalists, nor in surveys of PR professionals: Patience, resolve and consistency matter a lot when trying to break through the noise.

It takes time to build familiarity and prove your relevance. You have to do all of the things mentioned above – and do it reliably over time.

Media relations is a game of momentum. Even for the best PR practitioners, there’s no magic button, but there are clear signs of progression.

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The top PR priorities, challenges and opportunities in 2026 [survey]

Image credits: Gemini and respective study

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“Marketing contracts under economic pressure despite growing value and AI gains.” That’s the title of the 35^th edition of The CMO Survey.

It’s a factual title based on the averages compiled from responses; however, it’s not uniform. Averages can be deceiving, so readers should avoid drawing generalized conclusions – and examine the pockets carefully.

This survey had 308 respondents, and has, historically, done well in obtaining input from senior marketing leaders. About two-thirds of respondents come from the B2B sector. That includes ~40% of respondents who work for B2B product companies and ~26% who work for B2B services companies.

The survey has been conducted since 2008, though the biannual cadence has been reduced to annual since 2025. That’s probably the right move since survey fatigue is a real problem.

It’s headed by Christine Moorman, a professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, with support from Deloitte and the American Marketing Association.

I’ve reviewed nearly every survey since its inception and have written about half of them – when something in the data stands out to me.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this year’s survey, so I’ve highlighted those points along with my own commentary below.

1. Marketing’s economic optimism sours a bit

“Economic optimism among marketers has declined to 56.8 (on a 0–100 scale), its lowest reading since the pandemic,” according to the report. “More than half of marketers (50.7%) report being less optimistic than last quarter – the highest level of pessimism since June 2020 – while those reporting greater optimism have fallen to 22.2%, down from 31.2% one year ago.”

Commentary: As noted in the commentary, this sentiment is not uniform. Real estate and energy verticals are far more optimistic, with scores around 69 – about 13 points above the average. Similarly, other sectors are lower. Mining and construction turned a bit gloomier with a score of 38.

I’ve observed similar ups and downs within the technology sector. For example, VC investment has trended towards more money in fewer deals. AI is hyped to a level that’s reminiscent of 1999, where every startup adds dot-AI to their name the same way companies added dot-com during the internet’s crazy growth stages.

Outside of this survey, economic data is all over the map. War, changing trade policy, inflation, AI and shifting government policies are obfuscating traditional forecasting methods.

Finally, optimism, or the lack of it, is infectious. Marketing, as the public face of a company and an influential internal organization, has to put on a brave face. That’s part of the job.

(click image for higher resolution)

2. It’s not tariffs, but the perennial changes to tariffs

This report pins a sizable portion of slipping optimism and more on tariffs:

“Tariffs are also suppressing business investment. Among companies changing investment levels, those lowering investments outnumber those making increases by almost four to one.”

It later quantifies this by showing that about 1 in 5 businesses (~22%) are trimming investment as a result of tariffs.

Commentary: It’s not the tariffs that are hurting business investment; it’s the constant changes to trade policy. The best business case for investment hinges on assumptions, which are inherently risky, even in the best of times.

The fact is, business investment, for most companies, is a multi-year obligation. They aren’t going to invest if trade policy changes from month to month.

Businesses dislike uncertainty more than taxes, which is the nature of tariffs. If the government sets the rules, without changing them every month, businesses will find a way to adapt. That’s what capitalism allows, which no other economic model can match.

3. Businesses have doubled down on customer marketing

The report traces policy uncertainty to shifts in marketing spend:

“In response to this uncertainty, almost half of marketers are pulling back their targeting strategies to focus on increasing the loyalty of their existing customers rather than pursuing new customers, especially new geographic markets. Growth spending is following a similar pattern with companies spending almost 60% of their budgets on market penetration strategies that focus on selling more of existing products and services to existing customers. This inward orientation is a consistent theme across the 2026 findings.”

This also shows up more clearly later in the survey, with findings around customer retention. Marketing leaders rate their company’s customer retention efforts higher than customer acquisition efforts. This is especially prominent in the B2B marketing sector as both B2B product and services outperformed the overall average.

Commentary: About this time two years ago, I covered two surveys that showed customer marketing was a neglected opportunity. Twenty-four months later, it feels like every company has fixed that – and then some.

For example, the volume of emails, calls and texts I get with cross-selling and upselling pitches is at a 12 on a scale of 1-10. Similarly, SaaS businesses have increasingly seen in-app messages as an untapped channel. QuickBooks, which is made by Intuit, barrages me with constant in-app messages.

It’s beyond obnoxious or inconvenient – it’s a sustained pattern of distracting interruptions on a daily and weekly basis. There’s little-to-no chance I’d reward that effort by buying more. On the contrary, I’m actively looking to find a replacement to rid myself of the noise.

That’s what marketing has to keep in mind, because while I’ve singled out an example, it’s pervasive in the tech sector; every company is doing it now. Nobody minds an occasional pitch, but don’t harass your customers. Your SaaS product is a strategic marketing channel when used sparingly; it’s a time-sucking irritation when businesses get overzealous.

4. AI needs a dose of reality

“AI use in marketing has nearly doubled in two years, rising from 13.1% of marketing activities in 2024 to 24.2% in 2026,” respondents said. “Generative AI has expanded even faster, growing 220%, from 7.0% to 22.4% over the same period. Companies project AI will account for 55.9% of marketing activities within three years.”

Commentary: We are at peak AI hype, or at least I hope we are. The most prominent voices stand to gain by making such claims. That conflict of interest is a healthy reason to be skeptical.

I read, study and use AI on a daily basis. I have conversations with clients that develop this stuff. It’s not AGI and it’s not even close. Absent some unforseen break through, there’s no way any of this will happen with an LLM.  These systems are not delivering an answer based on truth; they are predicting the answer based on probability.

To be clear, generative AI is extremely useful, but it hasn’t lived up to the hype and I suspect the hype will mirror cold fusion: ‘just around the corner’ for the last 50 years.

It’s a bubble, just like the dot-com era was a bubble. The internet proved to be an invaluable tool, but it took a couple of decades. Generative AI is going to be similar – and new jobs will undoubtedly emerge – which is what happens every time society embraces significant new technological innovation.

The top generative AI use case in this survey was content creation (74%). That’s a huge risk to couple with the ‘good enough’ attitude some businesses have adopted.

It’s not good enough. Not when three-fourths of marketing content is produced by AI and all sounds the same. Further, editing AI copy can take as much, and even more time and effort than just doing it the right way the first time – not to mention the cognitive atrophy that comes with this over-reliance.

I’ve come to believe that generative AI enables a single subject matter expert (SME) to produce an output of 1.25 SMEs. Will it have an impact on entry-level hiring? We are already seeing that effect.  The quip that ‘you won’t be replaced by AI, but you might be replaced by someone who learns to use AI’ has aged well. That’s exactly the trend to watch.

5. Outsourcing trends bring goodness to service providers

A little more than one-third of respondents (~34%) outsource digital marketing. That trendline will continue for at least the next two years, according to the survey. Here again, there is variance depending on the vertical market.

Digital marketing has had a tangible impact on business results too: “The contribution of digital marketing to company performance shows improvement over time with 73.2% of companies scoring 5 or above on the rating scale.”

Commentary: It’s a good time to be a consultant or freelancer. Businesses are resisting headcount growth and larger agencies are getting too expensive. Those people who are good at their jobs can comfortably build a business at rates traditional service providers just can’t match.

That’s a warning sign for marketing leaders, too: Employees who are good at their job are a flight risk. And businesses are behaving badly. The number of tech companies that report fat margins and also lay off thousands of employees on the same day is breathtaking.

This is going to bite them down the road. They will need to hire again in the future, and they’ve completely trashed their own brands. High-performing talent has options and a long memory.

6. Marketing’s value is increasingly recognized but…

“Organizations prioritize marketing capabilities to achieve higher return on investment for marketing spend,” the report says. On a scale of 1-7, respondents said marketing earns a 5.9 in terms of the “importance of marketing capabilities to an organization’s success.”

This new found appreciation for marketing is long overdue, but challenges remain:

“The most cited deficiency is not a missing skill but inadequate resourcing: 22.3% of marketers say existing capabilities simply lack the people, time, and budget needed to function effectively.”

The survey puts this into perspective, a bit later:

“Marketing headcount growth has slowed to 2.5% over the past year, down sharply from 5.4% in 2025, with companies projecting a similar modest pace of 2.6% growth in the year ahead.”

Meanwhile, sales have grown, but margins have shrunk, so pressure on cost-cutting, especially human resources, is likely to continue.

Commentary: Consultants and freelancers are good options, especially if you treat them as an extension of your team. That can help bridge the gap for talent, but there’s something far more important that marketing leaders can do: think programs, not campaigns.

Campaigns last for a short period of time. They require a lot of effort to get started and when it’s done, you’ve got to start all over again. Research. Strategy. Creative. Briefings. Review and approval. This is all just merely pushing paper around at the expense of execution.

Instead of running campaigns, structure programs that run indefinitely by building systems and processes. For example, treat email marketing as a program, not a campaign. This provides a repeatable, iterative and scalable approach, as opposed to reinventing email marketing with every campaign.

I’m not suggesting you skip strategy. What I am suggesting is that marketing builds the strategy once – and then executes. From that point forward, learn from that iteration and improve the next time.

Let your team run with it and have them brief on the progress during your meeting cadence. Revisit the research and strategy once a year, or after significant changes in leadership or market conditions.

The survey found 71% of marketing leaders view agility as key to their organization’s marketing success. You can’t possibly be agile with constant reinvention. You have to empower your team; train them well, provide left and right limits and document a decision-making process for issues that go beyond the limits set.

7. Marketing’s influence and responsibilities grow

This edition of the report has a lot of good news for marketing, too.

For example, its responsibilities have grown:

“Marketing’s formal scope of responsibility has continued to grow, with notable increases across a wide range of activities since 2025, including revenue growth (+10.3), public relations (+9.9 percentage points), and customer insight (+8.8).”

The “prove it” infatuation has moderated:

“Pressure from CEOs, boards, and CFOs to prove marketing’s value has eased slightly from 2025 levels but remains the experience of most marketing leaders.”

And marketing leaders have a seat at the strategy table:

“Marketing leaders are also participating more frequently in board meetings. By these measures, marketing’s organizational standing has strengthened.”

All this comes with a cautionary signal, too:

“The predominant response is a shift toward short-term impact over long-run gains…Marketers have devoted roughly twice as much time managing the present (68%) as preparing for the future (32%) every year since 2019.”

Commentary: The increased responsibility requires marketing leaders to delegate. You cannot do it all on your own, so hire good people and empower them to do their jobs.

Marketing should not lighten its efforts to measure results because the pressure has eased somewhat. The pressure on marketing for measurement is cyclical.

As for board meetings, it’s about time. Studies show board members with marketing experience improve shareholder returns by 3% – so it just makes sense, logically and financially, to have your marketing leadership involved in business planning.

The short-termism doesn’t strike me as alarming. In fact, I think the breakout of 70/30 seems about right. The one caveat I’d offer is that functions like public relations, brand and reputation are not built in a single fiscal quarter.

These awareness programs take consistent, high-quality effort over time to work. These do pair well with short-term lead generation programs, like PPC, paid social and email marketing.

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An easy-to-read review of 17 B2B marketing studies summarizing 2025

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April of this year will mark the seventh consecutive year I’ve provided steady summaries stemming from the world of PR software makers. When I started, I was providing updates on a dizzying array of announcements.

Many of them were around mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Too many in my book for any one company to effectively integrate them. I know that because over my career I’ve been involved, from a communications standpoint, in more than a dozen transactions.

Sometimes I was part of the acquiring company. Other times, I was part of a company being acquired. I even had a chance to do a divestiture while in-house, and then pick that divested company up as a customer years later on the consulting side. It’s given me a vantage point of what happens before, during and after these transactions.

I’ve concluded that M&A is easy to plan for and hard to execute. Executives put too much credence into their assumptions and not enough in the variables. Many fall in love with a deal, which blinds them to the risks that require mitigation, and sends a personalized invitation to join the sunk cost fallacy.

The variables are many. Employees want a purpose. Customers are fickle. Markets are unforgiving. When you start to add a second or third M&A on top of one that’s barely been swallowed, it quickly becomes a project that’s unwieldy to manage.

The pace of M&A has certainly slowed, even as I’ve pared back these missives from monthly to quarterly. The playing field I started covering in 2019 looks very different today – yet there’s still room left for one more deal, albeit one that makes sense – even as some of the old ones are still getting straightened out.

1. Signal AI acquires Memo for readership data

Media monitoring provider Signal AI announced it acquired Memo. Memo is a communications measurement platform that centers on providing readership data for placements. Instead of guessing how many people may have read an article, Memo provides data.

“Memo’s data is sourced directly from publishers via a network of data partners with direct integrations,” said Signal AI CEO David Benigson in an email exchange. “It’s not modelled or inferred, it’s based on actual readership data from the publisher side.”

Planned product integration

“This acquisition will integrate real readership metrics into Signal AI’s reputation and risk intelligence platform and services, giving Chief Communications Officers (CCOs) and reputation management teams a clearer, more holistic view of how their stories actually perform, what’s shaping their reputation, and which narratives pose a genuine threat to their brand,” the company said in a press release.

Benigson’ s email said the two companies have had “a long friendship” and initiated a formal partnership in 2025. That partnership achieved “tons of commercial traction” that eventually led to the decision to acquire the company.

“The strength of the commercial partnership, combined with clear customer demand for Memo’s dataset, led us to begin more strategic discussions towards the end of last year,” Benigson added.

Background on both companies

Memo was founded in New York in 2018. It has raised $19 million in Series A funding and has 46 employees, according to PitchBook.  Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, although PitchBook has classified the transaction as a leveraged buyout, which basically means someone borrowed money to buy the company.

Signal AI provides sophisticated media monitoring to help manage risk and reputation. It monitors “traditional media, social, podcasts, and regulatory filings to protect their brand value.” Memo has landed around 65 customers, Benigson said, which adds to the 750 customers Signal AI serves.

Singal AI was founded in 2013, employs roughly 240 people and last raised $165 million in a Series E round, bringing its total funding to $268 million, according to PitchBook.

In October of 2025, Signal AI partnered with Propel, an all-in-one PR software provider started by a former PR agency owner. The partnership provides Propel customers with more in-depth media monitoring options.

Signal AI takes a unique approach to monitoring – it aims to identify and track emerging issues early before they can snowball into business disruption. Signal AI and Memo are arguably joined at the hip in serving enterprise customers who operate “in high-reputation or high-scrutiny environments,” Benigson added.

2. Muck Rack rolls out new AI features for media relations

Muck Rack announced two new AI-powered features for identifying reporters and influencers the technology thinks you should be pitching.

First up is the Media List Agent. It will recommend “journalists based on your goals and analyzes your pitch content to improve targeting.” The agent will also work in the background to “discover relevant journalists” and also suggest “who to add or remove with clear rationale,” a company representative said in an email.

Next is AI Visibility Badges. This feature highlights “the journalists and outlets most frequently cited by generative AI models, giving you a new way to prioritize outreach.”  The badges appear for users sorting through possible contacts under “people, outlets and articles,” and users will soon be able to filter results based on their track record of AI citation.

The company also said it’s used AI to simplify Boolean searches. Its “AI Search Agent” will “translate your plain-language prompts into structured Boolean searches.” Boolean search is a logical query method that uses operators like AND, OR, and NOT to precisely combine or exclude terms for more accurate results. Some users find it tricky to employ.

(click image for higher resolution)

3. Onclusive finally sews its acquisitions together

About four years after buying Critical Mention, Kantar Reputation Intelligence and PRgloo, Onclusive has rolled out a unified platform. The unified platform combines the final product into four modules:

• Mention: Tracks where your brand is mentioned across news, broadcast and social media;
• Review: Create or manage press reviews or daily content;
• Contact: A database of journalists and influencers; and
• Measure: Analyze the impact of your coverage.

In 2019, prior to any M&A, I took a close look at its monitoring capabilities, which looked both thorough and expensive. Since then, Onclusive has gone through a lot of changes. It’s seen leadership turnover and hasn’t made much noise in the way of new product announcements or innovations.

The company is casting this announcement as a better user experience – rather than using separate tools, as in a best-of-breed approach. In reality, it’s joining a crowded and mature field of all-in-one PR software products. I also suspect the company’s brand recognition in the U.S. pales in comparison to the major incumbents in the PR software space.

4. PR tech briefs

• Meltwater makes it official with Reddit. Meltwater was granted Reddit partner status, which allows the company to continue accessing “Reddit’s enterprise data APIs” for media monitoring.

• Notified press release optimizer. Notified presents an AI Press Release Optimizer to “strengthen release drafts before distribution by improving structure, clarity, authority and quotability.” Notified owns GlobeNewswire.

• TV eyes a new media player. TVEyes announced an easier-to-use premium media player. The tool lets customers search, watch, clip, and analyze video and audio content with helpful features like thumbnail previews and transcripts.

• Semrush rebrands Prowly. SEO toolmaker Semrush rebranded Prowly, a PR software provider it acquired in 2020. Prowly is now the “Semrush AI PR Toolkit.” Rebranding an entire software company as a mere toolkit is quite possibly the most anti-climactic ending to an acquisition I’ve seen in the 7 years I’ve been writing about PR software.

• PRToolFinder filters for freebies. Tech directory PRToolFinder announced filters for users to find free PR software and free trials of PR software.

• Service providers turning software providers. Omnicom announced OMNI, an AI-powered system that pulls together data, technology, and expertise from across Omnicom (including after its merger with Interpublic) to help brands plan, create, buy, and measure their marketing more effectively.

5. New vendor survey data and reports

• PR inspiration. “86% of journalists say PR pitches inspire at least some stories, yet 88% delete pitches that miss their beat,” according to a survey of 900 reporters by Muck Rack.

• Change as an obstacle. 60% of PR teams surveyed “cite the rapidly shifting media landscape as their biggest challenge,” according to a Cision survey.

• AI use in PR needs no prompting. More than “90% of PR teams have already integrated generative AI into their workflows,” according to a survey by Meltwater.

PR software coverage for 2026

Here’s how to get on my radar if you are a vendor. At some point this year, I plan to write a separate and updated “comprehensive” list of PR software providers. I’ll likely place a query in Peter Shankman’s Source of Sources when I get ready to compile it.

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5 takes on Gartner’s new optimism for PR and earned media in the age of AI

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When generative AI was still fairly new, an entrepreneurial friend of mine saw an opportunity. He would create a new site, in a niche space, and use generative AI to generate a steady stream of new content for it.

The planned business model? Advertising, of course.

It didn’t last long. The site was unable to produce meaningful traffic or engagement.

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An experiment across 20 sites

Bogdan Babiak, and the team at the SEO firm SE Ranking, performed a similar experiment, as published in Search Engine Land, on a greater scale. They started by purchasing 20 new domains across 20 different industries, including business, technology and industry.

Importantly, none of these new sites had “backlinks, domain authority, brand recognition, or search history.”

Next, they identified 100 long-tail keywords for the popular “how-to” and used generative AI to generate 100 articles for each site. That’s 2,000 articles in total.

Finally, they added these sites to Google Search Console, submitted site maps and “we left the sites untouched to observe performance over time.”

Short-lived results

In the first month, about 71% of the articles had been indexed by Google Search, which Babiak calls “notable” for domains with “zero-authority.” It generated ~120,000 impressions and 244 clicks – which my math works out to ~.12 clicks per article.

The results aren’t much, but aside from setting up the experiment, the effort wasn’t much either. A well-researched blog post easily requires 4-6 hours of time or more. Generative AI requires a prompt.

That’s a promising start for a brand-new site – especially with no other promotion other than organic search. But it didn’t last. By the six-month mark, the sites had collectively earned 706,328 impressions and 1,062 clicks.

Divided by six months, that works out to about the same level of impressions and clicks each month over that time frame. Overall, it works out to about one click for every two articles.

A year later, and full 16 months after starting the experiment, those sites earned another 300,000 impressions and another ~381 clicks. In total, the sites gained 1,092,079 impressions and 1,381 clicks.

It just goes to show what many of us in marketing, who have been paying close attention to generative AI, have been saying for a while: “good content” may be subjective, but generative AI doesn’t come close to meeting the standard.

Why content generated by AI doesn’t perform

Babiak provides some sound analysis for why the content didn’t perform, including the following:

• “No backlinks or external validation.”
• “No authors, credentials, or real-world expertise.”
• “Much of the content resembled what already exists.”
• “No internal linking, topical organization, or clear hierarchy.”

Datelines and bylines have been important trust signals for branded content for a long time.  Yet the biggest factor in my assessment is the third bullet.

Generative AI works on probability, so the content it produces is statistically driven. It is not the best content, nor the worst content, but average content.

No one is going to bookmark, share, subscribe or revisit a site with average content. That’s especially since they can prompt AI for themselves and get a more personalized answer, and drill down on areas that are of their interest.

Accelerating the sea of sameness

Marketing and PR professionals working in B2B technology circles know that the “sea of sameness” has been a problem long before generative AI became commonly available. Too many companies look to see how their competitors describe things and rush to match the language.

The result has been a “sea” of content that all sounds the same. No flavor. No distinction. No informed viewpoint. All repetition. The results are telling – prospects and customers can’t understand what distinguishes one company from another.

So, what do they do? They ask trusted colleagues. They look at analyst reports. They stick to brands that are familiar – because familiarity is safer. No one is going to take a chance buying an unproven product from an unfamiliar company that sounds like they do the same thing as everyone else.

A math analogy for marketing communications

I was always capable of performing well in school as a kid growing up. I never had to work too hard to make decent grades.

That changed when I got to high school. Algebra, in particular, was challenging for me to wrap my head around. The teacher was a bit aloof, and I, as a teenager, had a lot of competing interests.

I didn’t fail the class, but I was required to take a similar class again the next year. The teacher was qualified to teach math, but his primary job was teaching music. That meant he had a completely different way of explaining Algebra – and perhaps a better way to connect.

When he explained it, I understood. Suddenly, these math problems that seemed abstract became real and logical. Math wasn’t a mystery; it was a puzzle and a solvable one at that.

That’s what I think humans bring to the table when it comes to developing marketing and communications content. Humans don’t set out to just explain the thing the way AI does; they strive to connect to readers, or content consumers, and bring context that brings ideas to the real world.

An average of the internet

If you ask 10 people the same survey question, you might get 10 different answers. However, if you ask 100 people, you’ll start to see a solid average.

If you ask 1,000 people, the average becomes clear. This is how confidence intervals in surveys work – it’s the confidence that if you ran the same survey, you’d get the same results.

These LLMs have sucked up an internet’s worth of content already. The average is set. It won’t get worse, but it also won’t get better.

There are a lot of credible SMEs that have come to a similar conclusion. Nikita Bier, who is focused on eliminating AI-generated spam on X, recently noted that he thinks the platform will be successful.

Why? “We are very close to approaching the limit of the content being indistinguishable,” he said recently. And you can see from the results of the experiment above that Google is figuring it out, too.

There are no “hacks” or shortcuts to marketing and PR. It takes time, effort, data, consistency, and perseverance. Generative AI is a useful tool for augmenting your marketing and communications team, but it’s not a replacement.

It’s definitely not a replacement for good writing. That’s not my opinion, but a conclusion we can draw on a mounting pile of data.

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Media relations, what many think of as “PR” isn’t a magic button. PR people don’t have mythical powers that can suddenly produce coverage.

While journalist relationships can help, too many in PR feign familiarity with a reporter and pretend it’s a relationship. A reporter will take a story idea from a PR if it’s solid, timely and newsworthy, no matter the relationship.

From a B2B perspective, PR is about matching a client’s ideas to news trends and helping them articulate those ideas in a newsworthy fashion to the right person. Relevance matters. So does intrigue, novelty, and timing.

There’s no doubt that media relations is more challenging today than when I started out years ago. I’ve come to believe that’s why a lot of PR people don’t like media relations work: it’s hard work, and like salespeople, you face a lot of rejections.

You’ve got to find a way to push through it.  That’s why I enjoy it. I tend to see it as an intellectually stimulating problem that’s (mostly) fun to solve.

Good PR people learn how to snoop useful information out of clients that aids in developing good pitches. It’s about eliciting ideas, kicking them around, and figuring out where and how they apply to current news trends. Below are a few things that PR savvy clients do to get more out of their PR teams.

1. Access to information

A good PR person is a consummate consumer of information. They should be continuously developing good pitch ideas. But they can’t work in a vacuum; PR needs regular updates about what’s happening inside a company.

I say this all the time: thought leadership requires actual thought and actual leadership. Clients are the SMEs on their business and technology; PR’s expertise rests in communicating that expertise. It’s the delta of those two things that makes all the difference.

A few good ways to facilitate information flow include:

• Dedicate a portion of a monthly call to what’s new in a client’s business;
• Schedule dedicated 30-minute brainstorming calls with a different executive every month; and
• Send clients ‘viewpoint’ questions by email about emerging trends.

For its part, PR should never be afraid to ask basic questions, even if you already know the answer. Letting a client articulate their answers and listening carefully often leads to new ideas for pitching and old topics.

2. Responsiveness, especially to reporters

PR spends a lot of time and effort trying to persuade reporters that a certain view merits inclusion in a story. When they get a bite and ask a client for an answer, the client has to answer responsively.

Whether it’s scheduling a call or sending a written answer, you absolutely have to be responsive, or you miss your chance. If you drag your feet, you may get written off in that moment for the next opportunity, too.

3. Impeccable timing

When a client asks me how we landed certain coverage, my first answer is usually timing. Some people call that luck, but I think luck is the intersection of good preparation and timing.

In media relations, good timing means having a view that nests well with current news. Maybe that timing is around a holiday, maybe it’s around a long-standing trend, or maybe it’s about an emerging issue. Few things matter more in media relations than timing.

4. Let PR lead new announcements

Generally, every new announcement, if it has news merit, should be led by PR. Not with email marketing. Not through a product page. Not with an advertisement.

Why? Reporters avoid covering something that’s already been “covered.”

There are some nuances and exceptions to this idea. A study, for example, should be hung on a company page just before pitching. Why? Reporters want a source to cite.

5. An appetite for risk

News is something that defies expectations. Ideas that defy expectations are scary, and they’re often lonely. You’ve got to have an appetite for risk. This means having a willingness to say things that other people are thinking but are too afraid to say aloud.

An appetite for risk does not mean callous, although the sensationalized headlines that are so common today are tempting. It doesn’t mean saying wild things for the sake of attention.

It means having a willingness to speak to aspects that make you uncomfortable. It’s not the successes that make a good business story – it’s the setbacks. I’ve always found that if a pitch makes me a little nervous to send, it’s probably a good one. That’s true for blog posts, articles and press releases as well.

6. A bias for action

Too many good PR ideas get kicked down the road because they require effort, and clients are busy. We’ll write that report one day. We’ll do that survey another time. We can look for a customer case study on that point after the quarter ends. Often, those good ideas get put on a shelf and collect dust for infinity.

Putting some effort into deep thinking and thoughtful long-form analysis is crucial for thought leadership. When clients oblige and dig into the details, they wind up with a successful initiative that leaves them with one thought: I wish we had started doing this sooner.

7. Be open to feedback

I’ve worked with marketing executives who perform extensive PPC and social ad testing. They often have a strong view, based on data, on which ad performs the best. That view informs how they frame announcements, and sometimes that comes into conflict with PR.

News works differently from ads. One is trying to sell a product, while PR is selling a story. Testing ads on buyers may not necessarily produce results on how best to frame pitches or press releases. That’s what PR brings to the table – the context and angles that are being reported or are likely to be reported.

What businesses want from PR and what the media wants from PR have small sections of overlap. Clients have to be receptive to such feedback if they want coverage.

8. Avoid second-guessing pitches

PR will draft a press release and send it to a client for review. The client typically has several people review the release and it comes out very different at the end of that process.

I never let a client review and approve my pitches (although I’ll share them after the fact, completely transparent). I’m an agent. I’m acting in their best interest. When the press release machinations happen, I’ll do the client a favor and use my original draft as the pitch, which leads me to this next point: avoid second-guessing PR pitches.

I say avoid because you don’t want willful ignorance to reflect poorly, but if you’ve got an experienced professional working for you – get the heck out of their way and let them work. Your role here is to feed them information as you get it and be responsive to media inquiries.

If they make a small mistake, consider that an investment. Ask them this question: What did we learn from this mistake?

9. Consistency and patience

Think about this question from a B2B perspective: How often have you purchased a B2B software product based on a single email the first time you received it? For most people, the answer is probably “never.”

Something similar is at play when you are pitching reporters. You can’t expect magic the first time you show up, because you haven’t earned a reputation yet. Reporters worry about credibility, hype and misinformation. Reliability and trust are earned over time. You’ve got to show up consistently, with good ideas over time, to earn your way in.

10. Honesty

Your lawyer can’t help you if you aren’t completely honest. Your accountant can’t help you if you hide numbers. Doctors can’t make an accurate diagnosis if you withhold that embarrassing symptom. The same is true for PR.

You’ve got to be completely honest about the good and the ugly for PR to work effectively. If you lie to a PR person and they, in turn, unknowingly lie to a reporter, you’re going to get caught, and you are going to be blacklisted.

As one beltway pundit once said about crisis communications: tell it early, tell it all, and tell it often.

It’s about collaboration

One of the things good PR professionals at outside agencies and consultancies strive to do is be an extension of your team. But that only works when it’s a two-way street. A lot of this comes down to learning good client management skills; however, even the best PR professional in the world is only going to be as good as the client’s collaboration.

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Media pitching: Adding perspective to Michael Smart’s FAQs for Muck Rack

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LLMs are poised to replace search and more and more businesses will turn to PR and communications functions to help them through this change.

That’s according to a list of predictions the organization recently published on its website titled, “Top Predictions to Inform 2026 Comms Strategies.” The top takeaway for comms professionals is Gartner’s prediction for budgets:

“By 2027, mass adoption of public LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will drive a 2x increase in PR and earned media budgets.”

At the time of this writing, 2027 is just a little more than eight months away. I’m not surprised by this idea. Most of the contributors to my annual predictions roundup, at the end of 2025, said just that: Generative AI makes PR and business priority.

I am a little surprised at the speed at which Gartner says this will take place – and by the firm’s rather sudden interest in the space. So, this past weekend, I read through Gartner’s predictions. Below, I’ve highlighted a few of the findings that stood out to me and along with my commentary for consideration.

1. What’s in it for Gartner?

Gartner has only recently started paying attention to PR software and comms tech. They published a “market guide” report in 2025. A market guide is a step below a “magic quadrant” report. It contains the same basic information, but the analyst firm doesn’t rank vendors in a quadrant.  The firm uses a guide when they have assessed that a market is nascent.

PR software has been around for more than 25 years, but it’s a low-growth market. It’s been a while since I’ve dug into market sizing, but I’d venture it’s a roughly $15-$20 billion market. That’s all in – services and software – although one PR firm puts the value of “reputation” market at $7 trillion. There are a lot of areas for overlap outside of PR.

The biggest buyers of PR software are those that do media relations – which is only 26% of the market – according to recent surveys. While there are buyers outside of media relations, I just don’t think it’s a big enough focus area for this to be profitable for an analyst firm.

I’ve never seen a PR software vendor buy an analyst report reprint and promote it. I doubt most PR people, outside of the tech world, would even be familiar with the likes of Gartner or Forrester. So, the question remains, what’s in it for Gartner?

Generative AI is raising the ante for sound communications. It’s given us tools for analysis and understanding, but also dramatically increased the capacity for output. Most social platforms have embedded generative AI natively. We’re already drowning in content; the pile is only going to grow.

That’s elevating PR and communications among business priorities. Gartner was clear that it sees comms budgets and influence growing, and I think the firm is trying to figure out how to play in this space. They are probably right about choosing a market guide. And if you are a business leader wondering about PR, then here’s your sign.

2. Gartner says PR is key because generative AI will replace search

Gartner’s views on generative AI may bend some SEOs out of shape. Gartner thinks generative AI will replace traditional search as the primary way people access information. There have been several reports of conflicting data, but it does seem like generative AI is beginning to edge out search. Currently, generative AI relies heavily on news to retrieve answers, and PR is the best function in corporate America to influence news.

Here are a few quotes from the Gartner post:

• LLMs rely on news. “…more than 95% of links cited are nonpaid mentions and coverage, with 27% originating directly from earned media.”

• PR is better positioned than SEO to influence generative AI. “While traditional SEO efforts are best served by marketing, the growing demand for answer engine optimization (AEO) to build visibility and reputation requires Communications-specific skills to balance stakeholder trust and platform requirements.”

• Earned media budgets will adjust accordingly. “PR and earned media budgets must increase to ensure optimal AI search visibility. Reallocating paid budgets to PR and earned media is likely a logical option for most organizations, but it will require investment trade-offs, as well as a clear perspective on measurement and the intended impact on audience behaviors.”

Comment: I think there’s merit to the notion that generative AI may replace much of traditional search. It’s just a whole lot easier, accuracy aside, to rely on AI for an answer than to pick through a bunch of links yourself.

However, I don’t think this will unfold as cleanly as Gartner’s prediction suggests. First, some LLMs, like ChatGPT, seem to rely on Google’s search results as a trust signal. Second, I think this will evolve into a hybrid format, combining search and LLM results in a single screen, like Google’s AI Overviews. So, don’t throw out traditional SEO just yet.

Media relations is a path to earn your way into LLM results, but it’s going to come from pitching good stories. Gartner notes that “Press releases tend to get the fewest number of citations.” To be sure, I don’t believe this rules out “press releases” per se, it’s not the format, but the distribution: wire service distribution of those releases does not seem to have an impact.

Solid pitching has never been harder. The focus on clicks has made news broadly sensationalized. Headlines are optimized to evoke emotions rather than inform. Reporters are required to produce more stories in less time. Their inboxes are brimming with pitches they don’t find helpful.

To be successful, it’s going to take sustained observation, research, and effort, along with impeccable timing.

3. Internal comms must get comfortable with chatbots

The analyst firm is predicting chatbots will take center stage as the primary channel for internal comms. Here are a few points they say that stood out to me on this point:

• Chatbots replace other internal comms channels. “By 2028, 75% of employees will rely on chatbots to obtain relevant internal communications, replacing traditional communications channels.”

• Chatbots are the answer to information overload. “The increasing volume of traditional communication channels exacerbates information overload… Employee chatbots offer an effective solution to the information overload and information burden challenge.”

• Chatbots are a personalized medium. “Chatbots will improve information accessibility and provide personalized, relevant communications. For pull communications, employees will ask questions and get personalized, curated answers. For push communications, chatbots will send customized push alerts to specific employee segments.”

Comment: Gartner’s advice to comms leaders is to scale “down less-engaged channels” and use that time and budget to invest in chatbots. This makes sense, but you are still going to need some. Generative AI is reliant on content to produce answers, so you still need to be producing internal information. It’s channel replacement, not content replacement.

4. The rise of “narrative intelligence”

As the old adage goes, facts tell, but stories sell. It defies logic, but to the human mind, stories are a thousand times more compelling than statistics. It’s just how our brains work.

As such, Gartner thinks there’s an opportunity for media monitoring tools to embark on “narrative intelligence.” Instead of you looking at tone and sentiment in clips and trying to extract an emerging narrative, monitoring tools will simply provide it.

Some of the quotable lines from the piece include the following:

• Narrative intel augments reputation. “By 2029, 45% of CCOs will adopt narrative intelligence technologies to support reputation monitoring amid an intensifying disinformation landscape.”

• Early warning signs of emerging narratives. “The legacy listening and monitoring tools that CCOs rely on to monitor mentions, keywords, coverage, and conversations miss the early warning signs of damaging narratives. These narratives can emerge from both mainstream social media platforms and fringe areas of the internet.”

• Media monitoring tech investments poised to grow. “CCOs forecast that their investments in technology will increase more than any other spend category in 2025. Some of this investment is expected to go toward narrative intelligence platforms in the next three years.”

Comment: Once a narrative takes root in the public consciousness, whether it’s true or not, it’s really hard to change later. Identifying those narratives, and knowing how to feed or combat them, has always been a secret superpower of effective communicators.

While I agree with Gartner that the need exists, it’s going to be interesting to see if the solution providers latch on to this notion. Of all the vendors I’ve been watching for the last ten years or so, Singal AI is one vendor that I think is probably best positioned to capitalize here.

5. All this puts a greater emphasis on PR measurement

If PR’s budget does grow, Gartner is right that measurement needs to be dialed in. Here are a few of Gartner’s ideas on this point:

• Comms underinvests in measurement. “CCOs underinvest in measurement and monitoring capabilities, allocating just 2.9% of their budgets, well behind marketing, which commits 8%.”

• PR has long struggled with measurement. “Nearly half (47%) of CCOs report difficulty in demonstrating the impact of their function, while 34% say their teams are still viewed as cost centers rather than value drivers.”

• Outcomes versus outputs. “CCOs must develop outcomes-focused measurement frameworks that go beyond tracking outputs to assess how Communications initiatives influence audience behaviors and business outcomes.”

Comment: Measurement has always been a weak spot for PR, but in this case, you need to be prepared to tie citations in LLMs to either behavior change or business results. It’s hard to tie any one activity to an outcome, because it’s hard to attribute a given news mention to sales results, for example.

I also don’t think PR can “win” on news coverage alone. The media landscape is fractured. It doesn’t have the reach or influence it did when many of us were coming up. Anyone who reads me knows I sound like a broken record: what you do with a media mention after earning it is just as important as earning it in the first place.

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PR software vendors race to add AI features to comms tools [PR Tech Sum No. 63]

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There’s little tolerance for mistakes in corporate culture, and that too is a mistake.

It’s obvious whenever two business functions have a clash of ideas. Sales and marketing clash over GTM and lead routing. Corporate communications clashes with marketing over positioning and messaging. There are plenty of other examples across business.

When I say “mistake,” I’m referring to conscious decisions to execute on a program that falls short of the objective. The conflict over outcomes that follows deters future experiments. It creates a culture where no one is willing to take calculated risks.

Mistakes are better viewed as opportunities. Even a failed experiment leads to knowledge and experience, which may provide long-term benefits.

Science provides a good illustration. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which was subsequently generalized, is one such example.

Einstein was a theoretical physicist. He didn’t conduct experiments himself; he figured out those theories by writing out math equations (which blows my mind). An incredible number of the predictions derived from his equations have been observed in experiments over the course of decades (such as that mass and energy are interchangeable, time dilation, gravitational lensing, and more).

While he didn’t conduct experiments himself, he did use the results of experiments to tinker with assumptions and variables. One assumption he made, which was counterintuitive at the time, was to assume the speed of light was constant. No one had thought to try that before his time.

One such experiment was the Michelson-Morley experiment, by scientists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in the 1880s. They set up an elaborate global experiment to measure the speed of light, from the Sun, as the Earth revolved around the Sun over the course of an entire year.

The hypothesis was that light from the sun from one vantage point would be slower and light from the other direction would be faster. Their hypothesis was wrong.

While they were mistaken, they learned something that would lead to a breakthrough in science with relativity: the speed of light was constant. It was counterintuitive at the time, but Einstein plugged that constant into his equations and the math worked.

Science celebrates mistakes and relishes being wrong because being wrong narrows the pathway to eventually being right. Marketing and communications should also celebrate mistakes. As PR people ought to know, it’s not the success that makes for a good business story, it’s the setbacks.

The technology world has adopted this idea too, with the mantra “move fast and break things.” Breaking things leads to new insights. Marketing, PR and communications should strive for the same thing.

The next time a team or individual contributor fails spectacularly, put your criticism aside and instead ask them this question: What did we learn from this mistake?

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Art or Science: The difference between a puzzle and a mystery for creative marketing and PR 

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It’s safe to say the state of PR in 2026 is pretty good.

As with the advent of social media more than a decade ago, PR is having a moment with generative AI. Indeed, generative AI made PR a key business priority in 2026.

Of course, PR is not without challenges. One of the findings from a survey summarized below is that 75% said PR is more challenging today than a year ago.

That reflects findings from a survey that a team of collaborators and I conducted in 2020. At that time, 75% of PR and comms pros say media relations is getting harder – up 25% over the previous three years in the same survey.

Chances are, it’s going to be harder next year, too. That’s just the way of the world, so the best approach is to accept it as fact, develop yourself professionally, and iterate and improve.

1. State of PR Report by Meltwater

Meltwater says it surveyed 1,100 PR professionals around the world for its “State of PR Report.” About 500 respondents, nearly half, are based in the U.S., and another 100 are from Canada. The remainder are from various countries, “with Europe being particularly well represented.”

Below are some of the findings that stood out to me. Except where it’s obvious, these are all pluralities, that is, the most responses for each answer, but not a majority of respondents:

• 26% said media relations is their main task;
• 46% said 1:1 email is the most effective way to pitch media;
• 47% said PR manages social media for their brand;
• 62% said LinkedIn is the most valuable social media site;
• 37% said PR manages influencer marketing;
• 28% said reactive work, like crisis, is their biggest time suck; and
• 35% said they provide progress reports monthly.

The section I found most interesting of all was on the actions PR thinks leaders could take to improve the effectiveness of communications:

• 19% said prioritize PR in the overall company strategy;
• 19% said allocate more budget to PR;
• 18% said provide clearer goals and direction;
• 17% said improving cross-functional collaboration;
• 14% said investing in tools and training; and
• 10% said increase engagement with PR metrics and outcomes.

Comment: The biggest answer missing from this list is time. Time is what leaders can provide to improve PR results. PR thrives on ideas and we can only get those ideas through communication.

One way to nudge this is to set up time, at least once a quarter, to have a conversation with leaders around the business. Come with a list of questions, including asking for their views on issues and trends. Those conversations will not only provide genuine fuel for PR, but they’ll also check the box on many of the other answers provided to this question.

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Read the full report by Meltwater here – registration required. 

2. State of AI in PR by Muck Rack

Muck Rack says it polled 564 PR professionals in December 2025 for its “2026 State of AI in PR” report. The report didn’t say where the respondents were based, but I’d wager most of them, if not all, are based in the U.S.

As the title suggests, all of the questions are centered on AI. Here are a few of the findings that stood out to me:

• 93% said AI accelerates their ability to complete work;
• 82% said AI improves the quality of their work;
• 98% said they edit text generated by AI;
• 59% said they are not comfortable with AI agents acting on their behalf;
• 57% said they use at least one premium AI tool; and
• 77% said entry level PR are overly reliant on AI and that’s causing them to miss learning the basics they’ll need to be successful.

The section on use cases – how PR is using AI was the most interesting. Below are the top AI use cases in PR:

• 86% use AI for editing and refinement;
• 76% use AI for research and insights;
• 74% use AI for writing and content creation;
• 68% use AI for strategy and planning;
• 51% use AI for administrative or operational tasks;
• 30% use AI for media list building and outreach;
• 19% use AI for measurement and reporting; and
• 19% use AI for creative asset production.

Comment: The quip that “You won’t be replaced by AI, but you might be replaced by someone using AI” has aged well. I believe a productive subject matter expert (SME) who uses AI effectively will improve their output by 1.25-1.5 times.

Why an SME? Because I think you have to have some knowledge and experience to know when AI is wrong. While it’s useful for brainstorming and summaries and the like, it does make a lot of mistakes. Inexperienced staff don’t have the wisdom yet to tell the difference.

While I believe most of the talk of replacing white-collar jobs is hyperbole, it is having an impact on entry-level jobs. And if those new to PR are relying on AI without going through the mental struggle of foundational learning, succession planning and promotions is going to get messy.

One last thought on AI: I never let AI write my first draft. I’ll use it to brainstorm beforehand – and suggest improvements after – but I want to maintain my core skills and persevere what makes my work unique.

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Read the full report from Muck Rack here – registration required. Or get some different takes on the findings here – no registration required.

3. State of Digital PR by BuzzStream

Buzzstream says it “interviewed 150+ digital PR professionals” for its 2026 “State of Digital PR Report.” Most respondents were based in the UK (57%), followed by the U.S. (29%).

The survey asked a broad range of electric questions. Below are a few of the findings that stood out to me:

• 75% said PR is more challenging today than a year ago;
• 65% said they do not use a press release distribution service;
• 64% said the biggest challenge with PR vendors is outdated media contacts;
• 55% follow up with a journalist once; another 33% do it twice;
• 51% said it takes 3-6 months for PR to produce results; and
• 26%, a plurality, said their top challenge was getting coverage.

It was the section on SEO that stood out to me the most. The majority, 86% of respondents, said PR builds backlinks. More than half (53%) said PR collaborates more closely with SEOs than any other function.

• The real kicker was the fact that 16% of PR respondents said they pay for backlinks!

Comment: Everyone in PR knows, or ought to know, that buying backlinks is like playing with fire. This 2007 era post from Google calls it “manipulating search engine rankings.”  If you get caught, and you will sooner or later, you risk being penalized and your online visibility will drop to zero. It’s very difficult to recover from such a penalty.

A better reason to avoid such scams is trust. Trust is hard to build, easy to lose, and we’re all starting from a deficit. At a fundamental level, businesses need people to believe what they say in order to be successful. Trust is disproportionately more valuable than a backlink.

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Read the full report from Buzzstream here – no registration required.

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The claims PR pros sometimes make of relationships with journalists are mostly BS; here’s what actually matters

Image credit: Google Gemini and respective reports

The post State of PR statistics: Summaries to 3 different “State of PR” surveys appeared first on Sword and the Script.

You’ve seen those listicles. The ones where a technology company lists “the top” or “the best” tools in any given industry.  The catch is they list their own tool – and usually at the top.

It’s self-aggrandizing and off-putting. Most people avoid talking to people who are full of themselves. That extends to businesses, too, and to the best of my knowledge, it’s still people who buy software.

Undoubtedly, this perception comes from my roots in PR.  Who would you trust more: the software company that says they are the best – or a customer review, analyst report or independent article that does? That’s the same classical distinction in approaches between PR and advertising.

Even so, we can understand why a company succumbs to the temptation to compile a listicle and slap its name at the top. Up until now, they’ve ranked in search, and more importantly to marketers, they get regurgitated by AI. In other words, when a user prompts AI for the best tools in a given category, such listicles are likely to rank.

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But that may well be changing, according to Search Engine Land, based on some quick evaluations by Amsive VP of SEO Strategy and Research Lily Ray. She analyzed websites that had dozens, or even hundreds in some cases, of these self-aggrandizing listicles and found that search traffic has dropped noticeably:

“In multiple cases, organic visibility dropped 30% to 50% within weeks. The losses were not domain-wide. They were concentrated in blog, guide, and tutorial subfolders.”

This will likely have an impact on AI search tools. For example, ChatGPT is reportedly reliant on Google search results to provide its own answers:

“Presumably, these drops in Google organic results will also impact visibility across other LLMs that leverage Google’s search results, which extends beyond Google’s ecosystem of AI search products like Gemini and AI Mode [and AI Overviews], but is also likely to include ChatGPT,” Ray wrote.

It wasn’t just the listicles that were getting hit, but other shady SEO practices intended to game search rankings:

“Self-promotional listicles likely weren’t the only factor impacting organic visibility. Many affected sites also showed signs of rapid content scaling, automation, aggressive year-based refreshes, and other tactics tied to algorithmic risk.”

In other words, what’s getting crushed is synthetic attempts to trick search engines, AI tools, and ultimately people. And that’s the way it ought to be. This was entirely predictable.

The secret to good marketing is that there are no shortcuts. Marketing is hard because distrust is the default mode of your target audience – because of tactics like self-aggrandizing listicles. It takes knowledge to understand the market, focus, effort, and trial and error over time.

It’s a fool’s errand to pursue cheap and cheerful tactics. Unfortunately, if the SEO games of the last 20 years are any indication, AI visibility is just the start of a whole new game of whac-a-mole.

On the other hand, the technology is advancing rapidly, so your chances of getting caught, penalized and being set back many months, is a real risk.

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Check out my weekly blog posts, weekly podcasts, or a monthly newsletter via Substack that rounds up interesting reading from the last 30 days (examples).

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
B2B tech vendors that hide pricing may never make a prospect’s short list 

The post The end of the self-aggrandizing listicle in search and AI appeared first on Sword and the Script.