Good morning leaders, are you all set for Q4?
Thanks for the replies and feedback on Simon’s mastering your edge newsletter last week.
This week Harry is back with a hot take on PR and why so many PR agencies are losing the game they should be dominating and the ripples it is having for marketing and business leaders.
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PR Agencies Should Be The GEO Pathfinders - So Why Aren’t They?
Harry Lang - Connect On LinkedIn - Teaching Business Leaders AI Through The Oxford AI School
There’s a particular brand of tragedy where a marketing professional is handed a winning lottery ticket and uses it like a coaster. That, as far as I can tell, is the PR industry’s current relationship with generative engine optimisation (GEO).
Before PR agency owners across the UK soil their collective pants in a fit of pique, allow me to back up a few incendiary paces and drop some evidence to support my click baity hypothesis:-
For over twenty years, the marketing world has cautiously worshipped at the altar of SEO - Jesus to Google’s algorithmic God (sorry Bing - at best, you’re Simon the Zealot in this analogy). We learned to stuff keywords, chase backlinks and grovel to an algo that ranked blue links with the sway of a Colosseum-thumbing Caesar.
‘Above the fold on P1 or nowhere’ was our mantra.
Then the machines learned to talk, and SEO started to look like the dad at the disco.
Now, a third of people asking “which is the best X” never see a blue link at all. They get a paragraph, a confident, oddly authoritative paragraph, written by an LLM that has decided, on your behalf, which brands deserve a mention and which should be cast to oblivion.
Yes, if you’re a pure SEO professional, it sucks to be you right now, but for PR agencies, your time to shine in realms beyond brand-building column inches.
Here’s the part that should make every PR agency owner spit out your oat Mochachino and dust off your Filofax with a fervour you haven’t felt since the early 2000’s:-
The machines aren’t reading client websites like the SEO days of yore.
They’re reading newspapers (how very old school).
Muck Rack has run its ‘What Is AI Reading?’ analysis three times over the past twelve months, and the number’s barely moved. Earned media accounts for a frankly absurd 84% of the links cited by AI.
Paid and advertorial content only manages a paltry 0.3%. Journalism makes up around 27% of everything the models quote, and the humble press release (the format everyone loves to hate) saw its citation rate climb roughly five times during the back end of 2025.
The single most valuable currency in the AI economy is credible third-party coverage, and unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s the stock in trade for you PR folks.
PR agencies have been selling (badly) measuring and quietly undercharging this stuff since the invention of the fax machine, so now it has real, attributable value.
Why the hell is the industry sitting on its thumbs like a petrified monk?
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The Uncomfortable Truth
Three things are now unequivocal, and PR agencies should have noticed them first:-
LLMs are trained to distrust the open sewer of the web and lean on credible outlets, wire services and notable experts instead.
There, I’ve said it. LLMs are content snobs.
They want the FT, The Telegraph, LinkedIn and (recently to a much lesser extent) Reddit, not some content farm churning out “10 Best Instagram Noodle recipe” listicles by the boatload. (Big brands win)
The second is ‘language over links’. As the team at Proper Propaganda put it rather cutely:-
“AI does not rank brands, it explains them.”
The machine wants to describe your client’s company in a sentence, and that sentence is assembled from how the wider world already talks about them. Narrative consistency and third-party validation stop being soft PR fluff and instead become the building blocks of the answer.
The third is expert positioning. AI models frickin’ LOVE a quotable human. A named chief executive, a subject matter expert, a spokesperson with a credible view. Building those people’s profiles within your client’s business and getting them cited in the right places is not some new competency PR must scramble to acquire, is it? It just hasn’t been a priority. Until now.
Greg Galant, who runs Muck Rack, manifested it clearly:-
“If your brand is not showing up in the media coverage AI is reading, you are not showing up in the answers AI is giving.
So we have a discipline in PR whose entire craft maps, almost comically, onto the mechanics of our new AI overlords. And what have you done with this golden goose? Inexpertly shoved a metaphorical plunger down its throat in an ill-conceived effort to make Foie Gras, rather than build it a comfy palace and waited for the eggs to drop.
Execution, or the lack of it
Doing GEO well through PR means targeting earned media with surgical intent, going after the specific high-authority publications and newsletters the models actually crawl rather than the ones that make a nice screenshot for the client’s next status report. Muck Rack found only a 2% overlap between the journalists’ PR teams pitch and the journalists AI actually cites.
Two per cent.
Just 2%!
Like the same percentage of those reading this article in The Drum who earn over £200k base per year. You may as well spend your time shitting out a thousand social handles and praying you get followed by Zendaya.
You’re firing the bazooka towards the wrong postcode - no, scrap that:- the wrong continent and if you don’t adjust your aim, somebody else will win the war instead.
Getting it right means structuring content, releases, data and digital assets so the LLMs can lift and cite them cleanly, instead of burying one useful statistic under nine paragraphs of “We’re delighted to announce this loathsome twaddle”.
It means measuring your ‘share of model’, tracking why and when Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and the rest mention your clients, and how they describe them. Better that than counting AVEs like it’s 2001 and you were all super stoked to get Simon from Blue wearing your client’s branded T-shirt at Cafe de Paris.
SEO now turn AEO tool Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that unlinked brand mentions correlate with AI visibility roughly 3x more than backlinks do, meaning the thing PR generates as a by-product is now the thing that moves the dial. If an agency can’t turn that into a sellable product, a retainer and a dashboard, it deserves everything coming to it in the next few months.
The Bloodbath, And Who Survives It
Here’s where I stop being so gosh darned cheerful.
The World Economic Forum reckons AI and automation will displace 92 million jobs by 2030 while creating 170 million new ones, with 59 in every 100 workers needing to reskill along the way. The churn is - and will continue to be - savage, and traditional PR, Creative, Integrated, Network, Performance, and SEO agencies that do the thing the machine now does for free won’t be invited to the party.
Agencies pitching manual effort priced by the day rather than AI augmented, high quality, output measured work are selling combs to a world of bald men.
If you look at the top of the tree:
There’s WPP, once worth £24bn, which dropped out of the FTSE 100 in December 2025 with a market cap of £3.1bn, its shares having fallen 62% in a single year, shedding Coca-Cola and a $1.7bn Mars account on the way down.
Publicis is gasping for air
Omnicom is busy swallowing IPG,
And the whole Holdco model now looks less like a fleet of Gigayachts and more like a dump of scuttled oil tankers with submerged captains arguing about who owns the last roll of Duck Tape.
Winners & Losers Or Just Losers?
My bet is that the big networks will start to drown in a soup of compromise. Too slow, too overweight and too myopic to pivot at the speed the AI era demands, they will be hoovered up by the richest of their ilk or defenestrated by a new breed of disruptive agency.
Smaller, more nimble agency models that deploy global campaigns using an output-rewarded fee structure, using AI to augment scrappy human teams who produce tier-one work in higher volume, with higher ROI in a fraction of the time. They might even get paid in rev share on results, so cheap will their campaigns be to run, and so confident they’ll ultimately become in their expected deliverables…
I expect the first of these to scale pretty soon, quietly winning newsworthy creative, PR and media pitches the big networks assumed were theirs by birthright.
PR Agencies Fight Back Today
It doesn’t have to be this way. PR agencies could lead the fightback, owning the raw material the machines are begging to be fed, plus the relationships, creativity and craft to sell the outputs to an expanding and increasingly desperate array of shit scared clients. The only thing missing is the will to stop lambasting GEO on conference panels and start selling it as a core competency next Monday morning.
So, to every PR and SEO agency owner reading this, wondering whether the LLMs are hunting down your business:- they are, and they’re not.
The robots are flirting with your clients, and they’re increasingly owning their customers’ eyeballs, but you’re the only ones holding the true map.
You can own this field, but RIGHT NOW is the only time to shit or get off the pot.
The pathfinders who move now will own the bays the Holdco tankers are too heavy to moor in.
Everyone else will carry on using their winning Lotto tickets as coasters, right up until last orders.
Harry Lang runs The Oxford AI School which teaches teams the basics of AI in an intuitive, practical and fun way. The School has modules to cater for numerous industries, including ‘GEO For PR Agencies’. Harry is also the author of ‘Brands, Bandwagons & Bullsh*t,’ available on Amazon. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, check out the School’s socials or email him to book an AI training course at Harry@TheOxfordAISchool.com
» If you enjoyed today’s article, enjoy 3 of Harry’s other recent unfiltered takes:
It Is Possible To Have Too Much Of A Good Thing – Just Ask AI About Content Diarrhoea…
I Used to Laugh At Britain’s Right-Wing Bigots. I’m Not Laughing Anymore 🇬🇧
Thanks for reading this week, we have a special 100th newsletter next week, where Harry and I banish marketing channels, poor tactics and maybe throw a few curveballs into room 101. Have any you would banish? Please hit reply today and let us.
Danny Denhard & Harry Lang
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