A few weeks ago, a prospective client told us they found energi PR through Claude. Not through a Google search, not through an ad, but because an AI tool, when asked who to talk to about healthcare PR, sent them our way. At the time I filed it away as flattering. But the more I read the more I think it might be something else.

I have been doing this long enough to remember having to explain, patiently and quite often, that PR and advertising are not the same thing. In those days the distinction was simple. PR was third-party endorsement. It is one thing to say your product or service is the best, and quite another for that assessment to come from an unbiased source. That credibility gap was the whole point of the discipline.

Over time the lines blurred. PR expanded into sponsored content, influencer engagement, experiential programs. Practitioners and agencies wanted more than to rely on journalists as the gatekeepers of news, and rightly so. But somewhere in that process we willingly began to focus less time on the thing that made PR so powerful to begin with. The coverage nobody paid for.

Now AI generative search is putting a number on exactly how much this matters. A recent study tracking 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini found that 84 percent of AI citations trace back to earned media. Paid and advertorial content accounts for 0.3 percent. When someone asks an AI engine who is best in a specific category, it is not reading the ads. It is reading what others, including journalists, have said.

The prospect who found us through Claude was not an anomaly. It is the mechanism working exactly as it was designed, the same mechanism PR was built on many decades ago, third party validation as the source of credibility. AI has simply automated the part where a human decides which source to trust.

So here is the question I come back to. Will we, as an industry, own this moment, or will we hand the strategic edge to ad agencies the way some handed over social media? We have decades of experience in exactly what AI search now rewards. It would be a shame to let it go to someone else.

And to be fair, credit where it’s due. A recent LinkedIn post from Paola Iuspa is what instigated the above rant.