The Communicators Pulling Ahead Right Now Are Doing These Six Things

14 July 2026

Linda Zebian: 

PR professionals are still in the business of building trust, shaping narratives and protecting reputations. We’re still telling stories. We’re still repeating our points until they’re sticky. We’re still drafting releases and talking points and managing client expectations and difficult media moments. 

But almost everything around that work has changed. 

AI has blown up how people find information. Social and earned media are no longer separate disciplines. And my personal favorite: executives who once viewed communications as a support function—or in some cases an afterthought—are finally starting to understand what’s at stake when it’s underfunded or brought in too late. 

Everyone’s talking about the PR inflection point. Even business publications that spent decades ignoring PR practitioners are suddenly covering our industry. I’m grateful for the attention. But talking about change and preparing for it are two very different things. 

The communicators pulling ahead right now aren’t necessarily more tech savvy, better storytellers, or even more experienced than everyone else. They’re just adapting faster. 

Here are six things they’re doing differently. 

1. Understand your AI visibility and make every decision based on that. 

Yep, I said every decision. You may already be doing it without realizing it. But having the data to support those decisions is the story we need to get better at telling internally. 

Your visibility in AI-generated answers is largely a function of your earned media presence. In fact, about 84% of citations in AI-generated responses come from earned media. The outlets that cite you, the journalists who cover you, the third-party sources that reference your research, all shape how AI talks about your brand. 

The good news is that getting a handle on this doesn’t require a technical background or an entirely new set of skills. Securing the earned media is PR 101. 

Tools now exist that let you run prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude and see exactly how your brand shows up in AI-generated answers: which sources are being cited, what narrative is taking shape, and where the gaps are. You can compare how AI describes you versus a competitor. You can identify which journalists and outlets are driving the conversation and use that information to sharpen your pitching strategy. 

The tools aren’t that scary. 

In my experience, most communicators who try them for the first time are surprised by how accessible they are. What takes more work is building the coverage strategy that actually moves the needle over time–and that’s where communications expertise matters most. 

And if prompting feels intimidating, you can use AI for that too. Many GEO platforms will help build and refine prompts for you. 

2. Call Your Agents 

In Muck Rack’s 2026 State of AI in PR report, only 12% of PR professionals said they were using AI agents in their work. 

The actual number is almost certainly much higher because most people using agents don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. 

If a platform monitors coverage and alerts you to unusual activity before it becomes a crisis, that’s an agent. If software analyzes a journalist’s recent work and surfaces likely questions before a briefing, that’s an agent. If your PR platform automatically connects a placed story back to the original pitch, that’s an agent too. 

What agents actually do is handle the multi-step, time-consuming work that slows down every PR team: building media lists, monitoring trends, preparing briefing documents and compiling reports. In other words, agents are just a way of getting the tools you already use to do work on your behalf. 

The communicators who embrace these tools will have more time for the parts of PR that are genuinely irreplaceable. The ones who don’t will spend that time on the same work they’ve been doing since they were entry-level and, frankly, shouldn’t have to do anymore. 

3. Prove the business case. Every time. 

The most persistent challenge in communications is convincing the people who control budgets that the work matters. 

Share-of-voice, sentiment, and media volume tell part of the story. But the communicators earning leadership seats are the ones connecting PR outcomes to revenue, recruiting, and reputation in language the C-suite actually uses. PR builds long-term relationships with journalists and creators that fuel awareness, leads, conversions and retention. When it’s resourced properly, it amplifies every other marketing investment. When it isn’t, the impact is felt everywhere.

Measurement needs to be a part of how we operate, not an afterthought we address when someone asks for a quarterly report. 

4. Get into the room before the crisis starts. 

By the time communications gets called in, the most important decisions have often already been made. 

PR teams are most effective when they can identify risks before they escalate. That requires being embedded in business decisions early. It requires real-time media and social monitoring so that when something starts moving, you catch it while it’s still manageable. And it requires building enough credibility internally that communications becomes part of the planning process, not just the response process. 

Everyone says PR needs a seat at the table. But how? 

It starts with the first three points on this list. Bring data. Prove business impact. Use technology to work more efficiently. Become the person in the company who understands how brands become visible in AI-generated answers. 

People listen to the person who can explain what’s changing, what threats exist, and what to do about it. 

5. Stop treating earned and social as separate strategies. 

Social is faster than news. It’s also unwieldy and unpredictable. A story that breaks on Instagram becomes a headline. The headline gets picked up, shared, discussed, and sometimes even corrected based on that discourse. 

Modern communicators need to operate across both simultaneously and fight for access to social insights to anticipate tomorrow’s story. I’d go a step further: in many organizations, social should sit within communications. 

If reputation is increasingly shaped in comment sections, creator content, and social conversations, it makes less and less sense to separate the teams responsible for managing it. 

Teams that continue treating earned and social as separate functions will always be reacting instead of anticipating. 

6. Invest in the journalism ecosystem you depend on. 

This one is personal. I spent a decade in corporate communications at The New York Times during one of the most consequential shifts in modern media, when journalism moved from being largely ad supported to reader-funded. 

As communicators, we spend a lot of time asking journalists for their attention and trusting them

to tell our stories fairly. We should spend more time thinking about what we’re doing to support the profession itself. 

That can mean respecting reporters’ time and inboxes. Subscribing to quality journalism. Supporting independent outlets. Speaking up when journalism is under attack. Being thoughtful about the role we play in the information environment we’re all operating in. 

A healthy press isn’t just essential for democracy. It’s essential for PR, too, and we should act like it. 

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Linda Zebian is VP of Communications at Muck Rack.