On the second Monday of every month, PRSA is offering AI Pulse, a briefing hosted by Ray Day, APR, PRSA’s 2026 immediate past chair, that provides timely insights into the latest AI trends, tools and developments. Learn how to stay ahead of an ever-evolving digital landscape here.
Public relations professionals “should feel like kings and queens on the throne in your new kingdom right now, with how important you are, and how important the work is that you are doing,” Elizabeth Edwards said.
As artificial intelligence crawls the internet, “The signals you are creating with your content literally shape the way AI responds,” she said. “And that is a heavy, important responsibility.”
Edwards, founder and president of Volume PR and the Engagement Science Lab, was the guest Feb. 9 on “AI Pulse,” PRSA’s monthly brief. Held on the second Monday of each month, the professional development session is hosted by Ray Day, APR, vice chair of Stagwell, executive chair of Allison Worldwide, and PR’s 2026 immediate past chair.
Search engine optimization is still part of public relations, as practitioners use keywords in online content to help their messages appear near the top of internet search results. Now, in the AI era, communicators must also work to ensure their content is included in AI responses to people’s queries.
The shift toward AI answer engines dictates “the ways that we now optimize the messages that we are responsible for, and how they show up in different forms of AI search,” Edwards said.
“People are using the AI summaries so much more and relying on what the AI summary says that they are not clicking through to the websites” as often as they used to, she said.
Edwards cited statistics from software company Ahrefs, which found that websites have seen an 80% drop in traffic since the rise of AI answer engines. Many search results are now “zero-click” sessions.
A public relations ‘symphony’
Day asked whether AI tends to focus on earned rather than owned media — press coverage placed by PR pros, rather than the content they create and post themselves.
“Earned matters, but we can heavily shape [AI results] with owned content,” Edwards said. “Think of it as a symphony, where we have the music of PR activating earned, and then working with certain wire services and strong, reputable, trusted signal services. When that signal and that media result and your owned content all speak in harmony, the AI takes a big sigh of relief and says, ‘This is what I trust; this is what I point to.’”
When AI systems send people to your website, “it’s much less traffic, but it’s ten times more valuable,” she said. “Should your organization prioritize creating high-fidelity, AI-signal content to shape AI outputs? The traffic it will bring to your site is ten times more likely to purchase. That’s a pretty smart place to focus your energy.”
At the same time, however, about 53% of consumers distrust AI-powered search results, according to research from Gartner and Muck Rack. Citing a Gartner report, she said, “For marketers and PR professionals, our new job is to build topical authority by consistently publishing in-depth, accurate, well-researched content.”
Edwards said PR professionals should still create short, “snacky” content for people, but also need to write long pieces akin to white papers that AI answer engines will regard as credible and worthy of being included in their results.
“The algorithms want to see evidence that they can cite and trust,” she said. “So the more that we create rich, in-depth content — which, by the way, we can do a lot easier with AI — the more that AI sees us as trustworthy and more likely to be cited in its summations.”
The takeaway: In the AI era, credibility isn’t optional — it’s infrastructure.
Illustration credit: Ricky/Adobe Art
