For years, marketers have talked about performance like it only lives in traditional paid media dashboards (think CTRs, conversion, retargeting, etc.). PR is often seen as something completely different; some nebulous top-of-funnel, hard to measure awareness builder that could only be measured in coverage.  

But as any future-forward PR Agency will tell you, performance increasingly comes from credibility, messaging repetition, and presence across multiple channels where consumers discover information.  And those channels are changing, rapidly.  

PR is no longer just about media relations or influencer outreach. It’s not simply a collection of tactics (in fact, nothing makes this VP crazier than when someone says “can we just PR it?”). At its best, PR is a strategy for reaching audiences with the right messages through the people and platforms they trust most. And nowhere is this shift more visible than in the way people search for and discover information online. For brands working with a PR agency in Toronto, across Canada, or globally, this requires thinking about communications as a discovery toolkit rather than a standalone marketing function.

Today, discovery is increasingly driven by AI answers, conversational search, and summaries rather than traditional search results pages. Instead of scrolling through links, people ask questions and receive synthesized responses from tools like ChatGPT. This shift has major implications for brands and for the PR landscape. It also (excitingly) means something many of us in communications have always known to be true is becoming clearer than ever: PR is performance and performance increasingly depends on PR. 

Discovery is Fragmented 

The path to discovery used to be relatively straightforward for consumers. They might pick up a copy of VOGUE or FASHION, do a quick Google search, hit retail, or scroll a brand’s website. Decisions would follow from there. 

Today, discovery is much more fragmented. A person might first hear about a brand through a TikTok, see it mentioned in a media article, ask an AI assistant for recommendations, then look at Reddit reviews or ask their friends before finally making a purchase. Each of those moments contributes to how a brand is understood and evaluated, meaning that visibility is now cumulative rather than one- or two-off. In fact, Google research from 2025 shows 80% of online purchases involve multiple touchpoints across channels and platforms. 

The more credible touchpoints that reinforce the same narrative, the stronger the signal to purchase becomes. This is true not only for consumers, but also for the LLMs (Large Language Models) that feed AI sources like ChatGPT. Alongside traditional SEO, communications teams are beginning to hear more about AEO (Ask Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). While SEO focuses on ranking webpages in search results, AEO focuses on whether your brand appears in AI answers. Questions like “What’s the best mascara for short lashes?” “Where should I go in Lisbon?” are now being answered through synthesized responses built from multiple trusted sources, including earned (not paid) media coverage from trusted outlets, expert commentary, and owned channels like brand websites and blogs. 

This, my friends, is where PR becomes critical. Earned media, expert commentary, and credible editorial sources are among the top trusted sources that LLMs draw from when generating answers. A strong PR strategy ensures that brand messaging is present across those sources while remaining consistent, credible, and optimized for each platform. 

Brands that are consistently referenced across media, expert interviews, and cultural conversations build a strong digital footprint that AI systems can reference when generating answers. When a journalist writes about a brand, or an expert spokesperson is quoted in an article, that coverage becomes part of the broader knowledge surrounding the brand. In this way, earned media is increasingly part of the information infrastructure that feeds AI discovery. As someone who has always been a bit of a media relations nerd, I’ll admit this renewed importance of earned coverage makes me a little giddy. 

The PoweredPR™ Approach 

In today’s environment, effective PR strategies must operate like integrated communications plans, where tactics are pulled like levers to reinforce one another and bolster key messaging across touchpoints. Earned media should be leveraged to build authority and third-party validation (as well as AEO); influencer and creator partnerships help translate brand stories into real-life instances; owned content and thought leadership deepen B2C relationships and expertise; experiential scratches the growing itch for IRL engagement and shareable moments; affiliate integrations to convert; etc.  

When aligned strategically, these touchpoints work together to create a consistent narrative presence across the places and platforms that consumers live. At Faulhaber, we think about this through the lens of PoweredPR™ (think integrated comms 2.0). 

PoweredPR™ recognizes that communications channels no longer operate in isolation. Earned media, influencer partnerships, content strategy, IRL, and discoverability all work together to drive impact. Rather than treating PR as a standalone “tactic”, we treat it as the tool bench that drives messaging comprehension and amplifies performance across the touchpoints. 

That means thinking beyond coverage and focusing on the bigger category and consumer questions: Where are conversations about this happening? Who shapes credibility in this space? How does this brand show up across search, AI, and in real culture? We then build our strategy accordingly to connect the dots. It’s never one-size-fits-all.  

Measuring PR Performance 

Here’s the tricky thing: measurement and sales attribution in PR are still complex. Unlike paid media, the influence of earned credibility often unfolds across multiple touchpoints before a purchase happens. And there are limited ways to track unless we’re layering in affiliate integrations, UTMs, creator analytics, etc.  

This is where things can get tricky in practice. I recently had a client call me in a panic because they had heard an outlet had millions of impressions, while Meltwater (and therefore my reporting) showed only a few hundred thousand. Moments like this are becoming more common, and they highlight how quickly the media consumption landscape is evolving. But the reality is, the stories themselves haven’t changed. If anything, they may actually reach more people. What’s changing is how audiences access them. Increasingly, readers are encountering journalism through aggregated environments: AI answers, search summaries, newsletters, social feeds, and recommendation engines. As AI-driven discovery grows, fewer people will click directly into articles, which means traditional impression metrics may appear lower even while actual exposure to the story increases. 

As AI systems become more transparent about the sources they draw from, we’ll likely gain better insight into how media coverage and expert commentary influence discovery within aggregated answers.

With that said, performance in PR also comes down to how many credible touchpoints we can reach audiences with the same messaging. When people encounter a brand consistently across media coverage, creator content, search results, and AI answers, consideration is compounded, and that’s where communications begins to translate into real performance.