By the end of the year, mass adoption of public large language models (LLMs) as a replacement for traditional search will double public relations and earned media budgets, according to global research and advisory company Gartner.
In a report titled “Top Predictions to Inform 2026 Comms Strategies,” Gartner noted public LLMs will replace traditional search as audiences become more comfortable using tools like ChatGPT.
“As organizations adapt to new audience search behaviors, PR and earned media budgets must increase to ensure optimal AI search visibility,” it maintained.
“Reallocating paid budgets to PR and earned media is likely a logical option for most organizations, but it will require investment trade-offs, as well as a clear perspective on measurement and the intended impact on audience behaviors,” it added.
Jenna Guarneri, founder of JMG Public Relations, a public relations agency in New York City, explained that AI search doesn’t just change how people find information — it changes what information gets found.
“When someone asks an AI engine a question, it doesn’t return 10 blue links and let the user decide,” she told TechNewsWorld. “It synthesizes an answer and selects the voices it considers credible.”
“That means brands can no longer rely solely on paid placements to get in front of audiences,” she continued. “They have to earn visibility through authority and trust.”
“PR has always been in the business of building credibility, and credibility is exactly what AI search rewards,” she said. “This validates what strong PR professionals have known for years. Earned media is one of the most durable forms of visibility a brand can build.”
PR Regains Strategic Value
For years, PR has struggled to get recognition and sizeable budgets from senior stakeholders, maintained Jade Emmons, communications director at Skillable, a provider of hands-on learning and virtual IT lab experiences in New Port Richey, Fla.
“It isn’t as easy to quantify the impact of good PR compared to paid advertising, content, and event marketing,” she told TechNewsWorld. “With AI search using earned media and other ‘influence’ metrics to get audience attention, it puts attention on PR because there is a direct link between a good PR placement, AEO [answer engine optimization], and a prospect discovering your brand and product.”
AI search is freeing up money previously spent elsewhere, contended Adam Landis, head of strategic growth at Branch, a mobile analytics software company in Redwood City, Calif.
“As LLMs rise in popularity, marketers are desperate to remain relevant in the new medium,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Earned, organic media, and recent PR coverage are among the best ways to juice your rankings with an LLM.”
He pointed out that today, search advertising captures around 40% of digital budgets. “If that disappears, that money needs to go somewhere,” he said.
“We are headed back to the era when PR really mattered,” declared Anne DeSpain, founder of DeSpain Consulting, an AI operations and workflow automation consultancy in Park City, Utah.
“An era before brands figured out how to game Google through keyword stuffing and structured data tricks and when getting the word out required genuine storytelling and creative outreach,” she told TechNewsWorld.
“Google search became so formulaic that brand visibility was largely an engineering problem,” she said. “Now that LLMs are serving up brand recommendations in response to conversational queries, the rules have changed again.”
Brands Chase AI Visibility
There is increasing evidence that LLMs rely on earned media when producing their answers, noted Chris Ferris, SVP of digital strategy at Pierpont Communications, a public relations agency in Houston. “Forward-looking businesses will understand that investment in PR will have a long-term benefit in AI visibility,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“Also, take note that nearly all the AI companies have signed agreements with media companies for access to their news stories,” he added. “This is further confirmation that the AI companies are counting on reliable, objective, fact-checked sources of information to feed their LLMs.”
Some PR firms are already seeing a favorable impact on their bottom line from AI search. “Generative Engine Optimization is quickly becoming one of the most inquired services we offer, as companies are seeking to understand how they can be found in the likes of Claude, ChatGPT, Google AI search results, and more,” said Matt Bretzius, president and partner at FischTank PR, a communications and media relations firm in New York City.
“In fact, FischTank itself is also seeing a significant uptick in incoming new business leads from companies that find us through AI search. This is all to say: If you, as a company, aren’t already looking to understand how you can be found in AI search, you’re behind,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“With brand mentions and citations such a big driver of LLM visibility, it makes tons of sense for PR and earned media to gain more marketing budget,” added Tyler Jordan, founder and CEO of Jordan Digital Marketing, a digital marketing agency in San Francisco.
However, he cautioned against over-indexing on PR and earned media. “They’re not entirely in a brand’s control like paid media is,” he told TechNewsWorld. “That said, earned media and PR can do double-duty, building visibility and refining a brand’s positioning and identity to give clear signals to the LLMs.”
Employees Turn to AI Assistants
Gartner also predicted that by 2028, 75% of employees will rely on chatbots to obtain relevant internal communications, replacing traditional communications channels.
It explained that the increasing volume of traditional communication channels exacerbates information overload.
“Employees who report high information overload are 52% less likely to report high intent to continue working at the organization and 30% less likely to report high strategic alignment,” Gartner reported. “Employee chatbots offer an effective solution to the information overload and information burden challenge.”
“Chatbots used to obtain communications will have a real appeal to folks over more rigid platforms like Slack and Teams because the chatbots will presumably customize to a user’s behavior over time,” Jordan said, “and will likely incorporate other inputs like project management tools, not just a communication channel.”
JMG’s Guarneri added that legacy communication systems were designed around organizational structure rather than employee experience. “Digging through a server, searching old email chains, or waiting for an HR response creates unnecessary friction,” she explained.
“Employees increasingly expect information to work the same way consumer technology works — immediate, searchable, and conversational,” she said. “A chatbot that can instantly answer questions about benefits, policies or workflows removes that friction entirely.”
Personalized Communication or Hypersurveillance?
Another Gartner prediction: by 2029, 75% of communications teams will use analyses of employee digital footprints to design and deliver personalized communications.
“Personalized messaging has the potential to cure information overload by removing inconsistency, duplication, irrelevance, and effort-intensiveness from communications,” it explained. “Alleviating information overload is key to improving employee engagement, performance, and retention.”
However, David Sanchez Carmona, director for generative AI at APCO, a global advisory and advocacy firm, argued that personalization built on surveillance is a slow-motion reputational problem.
“Keystroke logging and digital-fingerprint tracking as productivity proxies are already in the press, and they read as exactly what they are,” he told TechNewsWorld. “If personalization is not transparent and obvious to the employee, it will land as hypersurveillance, and correctly so.”
Molly McKinley, founder of Redtail Creative, a marketing and strategic communications consultancy in Raleigh, N.C., pointed out that predictions like Gartner’s tend to treat AI adoption as inevitable and uniform. “The reality on the ground is messier,” she told TechNewsWorld.
“The companies investing in earned media and AI authority right now will pull ahead IMHO,” she said. “The ones waiting for the dust to settle are losing ground they don’t yet realize they’re losing. By the time the 2027 budget shift Gartner predicts actually happens, the leaders and laggards may already be sorted.”
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