AI Search Needs PR. Suddenly, Everyone’s Claiming to Be a PR Expert.

Earned media is critical for AI search. So over the past few years, the number of people selling and promoting PR services has (unsurprisingly) increased. Massively.

But as with any spike in demand, not all of these ‘experts’ are everything they’re cracked up to be. Every day I’m seeing more and more examples of people with minimal PR expertise giving poor quality PR advice. And it’s actually quite infuriating.

This isn’t about SEO agencies expanding into PR or AI search. That’s a natural move, and many of the best digital PR practitioners have SEO backgrounds. No, this is about people selling PR expertise they haven’t actually developed.

So why does this matter, how did we get here and how do you actually find legitimate PR professionals?

Because earned media is one of the critical drivers of AI search. And PRs are earned media experts.

AI platforms rely on third-party, authoritative trustworthy sources. Things like external validation, brand entity strength and messaging consistency are crucial if you want to be recommended. All of which were important in traditional search but are now essential in AI search. Check out our blog on why PR is so important for AI search for more info on this.

As search changes, so do the tactics marketers need to use. We’ve seen it with SEO agencies expanding their services into digital PR, and we’re now seeing it again with both PR and SEO agencies expanding into AI search. This type of growth is inevitable – and essential – as the search landscape changes. And most of the agencies doing it have invested in genuine expertise to steer their new offering, exactly as you’d expect.

For example, we launched our AI search PR offering to help brands improve their AI search visibility and performance. But we didn’t just launch this service out of the blue. We combined our extensive in-house digital PR, media and search experience with a heavy investment in our AI search capabilities. Research, tools, training. We worked hard to build real expertise, and it was based on decades of best PR practice. Plus, we’ve partnered with technical SEO specialists to provide the services that we don’t offer.

However, some in the search industry are now selling services they simply haven’t the skills or experience to deliver…

What really annoys me is when some, and only some, in the SEO industry realise that something they don’t know how to do (e.g. earned media) is key for search performance, so they start trying to do it themselves. Badly.

They don’t hire an expert in that discipline. They don’t put the years of work in to become an expert themselves. They just take that discipline, rename it to something that sounds a bit SEO-y, and start offering poor quality, shoddy recommendations on topics they have limited experience in.

I’ve seen so many instances of this in so-called ‘expert advice’ online:

• Mass emailing/spamming thousands of journalists with AI-generated pitches
• Prioritising brand mentions above all else, regardless of whether the coverage damages trust or credibility
• Commenting on trending news stories when the brand doesn’t have any legitimate expertise or relevance on the topic
• Even creating fake experts or AI-generated spokespeople

It appears everywhere from GEO guides, LinkedIn posts and blog content to actual agency service pages (with some fancy marketing terminology bigging it up). And it’s usually from individuals presenting themselves as media relations experts despite having little to no PR background.

Poor quality PR doesn’t just waste budget. It can create long-term, business-critical risks. Brand perception, audience trust, journalist relationships and a strong reputation all take years to build – but can be damaged by one bad decision. Once they’re gone, they’re incredibly difficult to rebuild.

It’s like hiring an electrician to fix a water mains issue. Yes, they might have a rough idea on where to start. But they’re probably not going to do a good job, and there’s a chance they end up flooding your street. So why risk it?

The same principle applies across marketing. Can you imagine the uproar if traditional PR agencies with zero technical SEO expertise suddenly started selling basic, low-quality tech SEO audits as a revolutionary new solution? If a team of PRs started selling enterprise site migrations after reading a few blog posts on the topic? It would be madness.

As mentioned above, the issue isn’t agencies branching out into new service areas. It’s about dodgy SEOs promoting and selling poor quality services from other disciplines without any actual knowledge or experience of said discipline. Sigh.

Ultimately, I think the problem is that a lot of these people are pretty good at selling themselves. They use big words and complex-sounding concepts to hide the fact they haven’t got much real experience.

You need to do your due diligence. Look into the consultant or agency’s history.

• Have their people got years of genuine experience and expertise, or have they sprung out of nowhere after the AI search boom?
• Do they appear positively across the web through media coverage, commentary, reviews, interviews etc, or is their presence limited solely to owned channels?
• Have they got good examples and case studies from (real) past clients, or are they lacking reliable proof points?
• Do they share valuable resources and insights across their earned and owned channels, or is it just a load of AI-generated slop?

As AI search continues to evolve, real cross-discipline expertise is becoming increasingly important. But expertise still has to be earned.

If they are real experts, you’ll see it pretty clearly. And if they’re not, then please go somewhere else. There are so many incredible, talented people working across the PR industry. It won’t be hard to find one of the good ones.

If you’re looking for an expert, award-winning PR & digital PR agency with 30 years’ experience, please get in touch. We’d love to chat.