AI is changing which journalists matter to PR

Ask most people for their AI score and you’ll get a blank stare, or maybe the wary look people save for someone who’s about to pitch them a gadget or a subscription.

For journalists, the phrase is starting to mean something else. Now that AI services are essentially the new Google, AI answers are becoming the new battleground for who is considered authoritative on any particular topic. When your name or your outlet keeps surfacing in queries about your beat, your AI mojo is high, and the public relations business has started putting a number on it.

Muck Rack got there first, introducing its AI Visibility Badges back in March. They sort journalists and outlets into tiers based on how often AI cites them. Cision followed suit in July with a dashboard that shows which journalists turn up in AI answers. The logic isn’t hard to follow: PR firms exist to safeguard their clients’ reputations, and more of that reputation now gets written by a chatbot. Journalists have an outsize hand in what the chatbot says. Studies have consistently shown that AI search engines prefer earned media to anything a brand pays for or publishes itself, and journalism alone accounts for 20–30% of the links they cite.

PR people have always kept close tabs on influential journalists, so in one sense none of this is new. The AI version of this is different in two ways. First, it’s allowed PR pros to attach numbers to the work they do, which has pushed them into a more strategic role at the companies they work for. And second, it’s changed the definition of what an influential journalist is. For the reporters who fit the new definition, and for the outlets that employ them, that’s an opening.

Comms teams can finally show their work

In a sense, AI is the best thing to happen to public relations in a long time. Soon after AI answer engines came into being, a cottage industry emerged to address the demand for how to optimize content so it shows up in AI answers. (We can probably retire the “cottage” part: valuations have passed $1 billion and exits are in the hundreds of millions.) Related, but distinct, is the question of what those answers actually say. That’s the reputational piece, and reputation is the whole reason PR exists.

The point is both can now be measured, giving PR teams a clear way to demonstrate the impact of their work. A pitch turns into a published article, the article gets cited in AI answers, and you’ve got about as straight a line from cause to effect as the influence business ever offers. When Walmart announced its CEO’s retirement, for instance, its comms team tracked “not just immediate coverage, but what was happening across AI and the LLMs.” And the more influential the journalist, the greater the impact.

Here’s the part reporters should pay attention to: “Influential” doesn’t mean what it used to. The PR industry’s decades-long obsession with “Tier 1” media, the big national or global brands like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is no secret. But AI answers favor topical authority above general authority, meaning the engine will often cite the work of a lesser-known journalist on a niche beat at a trade publication before someone less immersed in the topic, even if they work for a prestigious outlet. Muck Rack put a number on the gap when it compared the journalists PR teams pitch most with the ones AI cites most: The overlap was just 2%.

The math behind that preference isn’t mysterious. A writer who understands every nuance of a topic, and writes about those nuances in detail, hands the AI more to work with for a wider set of queries. And the queries themselves are getting more detailed: Google says searches in its AI Mode run two to three times as long as traditional ones, with one study finding ChatGPT prompts average 23 words. With that much specificity, AI can point straight at whoever has written about the exact question, bypassing the familiar top-down list of search results that tends to surface the same sites again and again. Recency counts, too: citation rates are highest in an article’s first seven days, so continuous coverage of a niche also works in your favor.

This isn’t just a theory. 5W, a PR firm that tracks which trade publications AI cites, found that “specialist trade publications outperform general news on LLM citations within their vertical.” Its advice to PR teams: “Reweight the media list.” Examples from the past couple of years aren’t hard to find. In the debate over chip export controls, SemiAnalysis, a deep-in-the-weeds research firm, became a go-to source for outlets like Foreign Policy. STAT, Endpoints News and Fierce Biotech are the health trade outlets AI leans on most, according to 5W, and Skift dominates in travel. The nerds, in other words, are winning.

Your coverage counts even if you ignore the pitch

To be clear, I’m not suggesting journalists start thinking of themselves as an arm of the PR industry. They shouldn’t, and their influence and credibility largely depend on them not doing that. But PR is nonetheless an important if not necessary component of the information ecosystem, and as AI spreads, PR professionals will increasingly create ranking systems like 5W’s Trade Press AI Index. Whether your coverage is glowing or brutal is beside the point. Anyone managing a brand’s reputation has to account for your work either way, even if you never answer a single one of their emails. The score is what counts.

Journalists who suddenly find themselves relevant in the age of AI would be smart to accept that reality. AI influence is a new measure of professional capital, and it’s worth both building and using. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Access: High-profile politicians and CEOs almost always reserve interviews for the most prestigious publications. That could start to shift as more PR teams figure out how much power specialist publications have to frame the narrative in AI.
• Social presence matters more than ever: AI behaves a lot like the rest of us here, turning to social networks and big content platforms both for information and to check whether a claim is credible. LinkedIn is one of the most-cited sources in AI answers, and more than half of those citations go to members with fewer than 10,000 followers. Keeping your profiles fresh and well maintained sends a credibility signal AI picks up on, and it costs almost nothing.
• Going deep is less of a liability: Every beat journalist has to balance how deep they go vs. how wide an audience they want to target. AI, however, goes as deep as the query needs, so even ultra-specific topics will eventually reach the right people. The pull of AI now runs toward the weeds.

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What newsrooms should do with their specialists

Publications have a new set of rules to learn, too, and that goes double for the general-interest ones. For starters, blocking AI services will cost you in a world where authority is currency. Plenty of publishers will decide that’s a tradeoff they can live with. At a minimum, though, there’s a middle position that keeps you in the game: Block the crawlers that gather training data while allowing the ones that power AI search, so the engines can still cite your work without training on it.

Broadly, publications should let their reporters cook: encouraging them to explore their beats thoroughly and go deep whenever possible. Of course, how a story or an in-house expert shows up in AI isn’t the only audience consideration, but most of the time that’s a matter of style more than substance. Stop and explain things for casual readers, but don’t hold back on the rich detail. There’s a catch, though, and you can see it plainly at Substack: Authority that’s attached to a byline can walk out the door along with the person who owns it.

As certain reporters watch their credibility in AI climb, some AI-minded publications may be tempted to build a reward system around it. Tread carefully. Traffic-based reward systems like the Gawker-era leaderboards ended up incentivizing thin content around topics with the widest audience. And the way AI treats press releases suggests the system can be gamed: the ones that get cited contain twice as many statistics and two and a half times as many bullet points as the ones that don’t. Even so, simply including AI presence in a regular review of internal KPIs can go a long way.

There’s more at stake than bragging rights. As the PR side of this equation gains influence, so does the spending power of its clients. Certainly, the church-state separation between editorial and commercial must remain sacrosanct, but existing business models are there to leverage AI credibility: newsletter and event sponsorships, advertorial and branded content, and even the nascent economy of advertising directly to bots. Credibility has always drawn commercial interest, but it used to take scale to cash in. Now a publication—or even a single section—with a smaller audience and the ability to break through in certain AI narratives can theoretically compete.

A publication that’s earned its credibility through deep reporting on niche topics also has the exact formula for a high-end “pro” product that commands a premium price. Between the incentives of AI and a PR industry with a larger strategic footprint, demand for more Politico Pro-type products will likely go up. After all, the comms teams tracking your reporters are exactly the kind of professionals who pay for that depth, and Politico Pro reportedly brings in more than $125 million a year. That said, no media business should make a strategic shift that big lightly. The closure of Axios’ Pro Policy in 2025 is a reminder that having all the ingredients guarantees nothing.

Will AI visibility outlast the Klout score?

If you’ve covered the media for a while, you may be feeling some déjà vu. In the 2010s, Klout was a service that tried to attach a score to someone’s social media influence, which briefly had currency in PR circles. Then social platforms’ interest in news rose and fell, and Klout gradually faded away, shutting down in 2018. It’s a cautionary tale for anyone trying to quantify something that keeps evolving, and whose relevance depends on who’s looking.

Could AI scores turn out to be just as faddish? Sure. But AI’s potential to change how we consume information looks bigger by an order of magnitude. If we all end up asking our Muses or Dots to bring us the stories we want, they’re going to cast their searchlights across the internet. The smart reporters and publications will be the ones who built something that reflects back exactly what they want to see: deep expertise, right where the beam lands.

A version of this column appears in Fast Company.