Ask journalists and PR pros what keeps them up at night about AI and you’ll typically variations on the same theme: the machines will reduce the cost of making content to the point where their jobs will look mostly redundant. Today’s models can already crank out competent articles and pitches (and plenty else), which makes the “human touch” feel less like a differentiator and more like a nice-to-have.
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Yes, AI is automating huge portions of knowledge work, and the ultimate outcome for media and adjacent industries is far from settled. But that’s only half the disruption. The bigger shift is that AI is rapidly becoming the default way people discover information. Billions now get information through AI experiences—chatbots, synthetic digests, and products like Google’s AI overviews—instead of clicking through traditional search results.
So the real power question isn’t “Can AI write?” It’s: Who gets surfaced when AI answers? The logic of these systems—how they crawl the web, what they trust, how they summarize, which sources they elevate, and what they quietly ignore—will dictate how journalism and public relations function going forward. It will also dictate how they collide, collaborate, and coexist. Sometimes journalism and PR align, sometimes they’re in conflict, but either way, AI becomes the interface where those dynamics play out.
What I’m talking about, of course, is GEO (generative engine optimization)—or, more precisely, the incentives GEO creates. AI answers are increasingly treated as the internet’s new front door because they’re wildly popular (ChatGPT alone has almost a billion users) and still growing. Google’s AI Mode for search, which swaps the “10 blue links” for an AI conversation, is now prominent on both the Google homepage and the Chrome omnibox. Some are predicting it becomes the default sooner than you might think.
If that happens, and it sure looks like it will, it’ll be brutal for publishers (a subject for another column). It would also locks in the AI summary as the primary portal to information for… well, pretty much everyone. But here’s the twist: it also suggests that the doomsday future journalists and PR pros fear—where automation and slop are the only viable weapons—doesn’t quite fit.
Why stories beat keywords
The game hinges on how generative engines decide what matters. Both journalists and publicists want their narratives to become the raw material for AI answers—PR on behalf of clients, media for itself—because appearing in those answers is a form of authority. The comforting part for journalism: studies show AI portals prioritize journalistic content far above commercial content (like corporate blogs and brand sites).
That’s good for PR pros too, because a big component of their work is media relations. Picture a PR campaign’s goals and messaging as one circle, and a journalist’s editorial interests as another. Where those circles overlap is where outcomes happen. That overlap is the highest-probability path for both sides to influence the summary an answer engine produces.
Why? Because AI engines don’t behave like classic search engines. Search cared about keywords; AI looks for patterns. When a generative system sees the same narrative echoed across sites, domains, and social platforms, it gains confidence in the summary it’s constructing. Domain authority—the strength of a specific URL—still matters, but topical authority matters more.
Translated: If an AI engine sees that a site, outlet, or individual has covered the same topic consistently, from multiple angles, and gets cited elsewhere, it strengthens the authority signal. That can matter as much as, and sometimes more than, generic coverage from a major (Tier 1, in PR language) publication.
This shifts the publicist-journalist relationship in two important ways. First, specialized journalists who own a beat become more valuable. The same goes for focused publications, which makes trade and B2B outlets newly relevant. Second, relationships with journalists remain crucial in media relations, but they’re no longer the whole strategy. Authority in an AI world can be reinforced through corporate blogs, social channels, and other formats. Journalistic content may be prioritized, but everything else helps lock in the narrative the engine thinks it’s seeing.
The beat as your brand
Now flip it around. Journalists have to play the same game. Their work may get first crack in GEO, but if it isn’t distinctive, it won’t stand out from competitors. If it’s too broad or too thin, answer engines will reach for sources that are more specific and comprehensive. If it doesn’t address the questions people routinely ask AI, the system will simply route around it and summarize something else.
So yes: in an AI-shaped media ecosystem, it’s better to have a defined coverage area than to be a generalist. But that’s just the cost of entry. In the same way PR builds a narrative across platforms and formats, journalists need to think about how to build those, too.
Most journalists make their living by writing articles. But if you want answer engines to notice what you’re doing, it’s sensible to distribute those stories across formats and channels. A personal website or newsletter. Speaking at events. Publishing in formats that AI systems and their users are increasingly tuned to, such as short-form video, podcasts, and whatever comes next. The objective is straightforward: increase the surface area of the stories you’re telling, the stories people are asking about in ChatGPT, Google, and Perplexity. Building your personal brand around them is a bonus.
The irony of this is that AI originally promised to offload “content marketing” chores around content, like writing social copy and SEO headlines, which virtually no journalist wanted to do. But with GEO as the new reality, thinking beyond the single story is more important than ever. You have to keep thinking about how your reporting can be repackaged, reframed, and redistributed so the systems that summarize the world actually see it.
The upside is that there’s an inherently human throughline to all this. Generative engines hunt for patterns, but they reward uniqueness inside those patterns. And uniqueness is what humans still do best. For journalists, it’s the scoops, the unearthed facts, the reporting that creates new information instead of remixing old information. For PR, it’s still the person-to-person relationships that reliably connect clients to those stories. As AI reshapes how stories are found and told, the advantage won’t belong to whoever can publish the most. It will belong to whoever can tell the most distinct story—and get it into the places the machines are listening.
