Media Relations Became Machine Relations—And It Happened Overnight

The audience for your PR isn't journalists anymore. It's the algorithms that decide what billions of people see.

---

I've been doing this for eight years now—building a PR company from zero to hundreds of successful placements for startups and unicorns alike. And I've never seen a shift happen this fast.

Stacker dropped their Earned Media Edge report this week, and the headline alone tells you everything: "Media Relations Are Becoming Machine Relations—And Most Brands Aren't Ready."

They're right. And if you're running comms for a brand in 2026, you need to understand what just changed.

The Old Game Is Over

Here's how PR worked for decades:

1. You craft a story
2. You pitch journalists
3. They write about you
4. Humans read the coverage
5. Some of those humans become customers

Simple. Linear. Human-to-human.

Here's how PR works now:

1. You craft a story
2. You pitch journalists
3. They write about you
4. AI systems ingest that coverage
5. AI recommends you (or doesn't) to billions of users
6. Some of those users become customers

Notice what changed? The audience isn't humans anymore. Or rather, humans are the final audience. But the immediate audience—the one that determines whether your story reaches anyone at all—is algorithmic.

ChatGPT has 810 million monthly users. Gemini just crossed 750 million. Perplexity processes 100+ million queries daily. When someone asks "What's the best solution for X?"—and they're increasingly asking AI instead of Google—your earned media either shows up in that answer or it doesn't.

The journalists are still the gatekeepers. But the AI is now the distribution channel.

Why This Changes Everything

The implications are profound and most brands haven't caught up yet.

Timing matters differently now. MuckRack's data shows that 50%+ of AI citations come from content published in the last 12 months. The highest citation rates occur within seven days of publication.

That feature you got in Forbes last year? It's already fading from AI relevance. The AI systems favor fresh. They want to know what's happening now, not what happened in 2024.

Publication quality matters more than ever. AI systems weight sources by authority. They know the difference between TechCrunch and some random blog. They've ingested millions of articles and learned which publications consistently produce credible information.

This isn't theoretical. Run a query in ChatGPT about any competitive category. Look at what it cites. It's pulling from Tier 1 publications almost exclusively. The long tail of coverage that used to matter for SEO? AI ignores most of it.

Your owned content isn't trusted. AI systems discount what you say about yourself. They're trained to recognize marketing language and self-promotion. What they trust is third-party validation—journalists, analysts, industry experts saying good things about you.

This is why earned media has become the single highest-value asset for AI visibility. It's the only content AI systems fully trust.

The Category Opportunity

Here's what excites me about this shift: we built AuthorityTech as an AI-native Machine Relations (MR) agency before AI search was even a thing. We focused on guaranteed placements in top-tier publications because that's what drove real results for brands.

Now it turns out that approach is exactly what AI visibility requires.

The brands that invested in earned media over the last few years—real placements in real publications, not just content marketing—are suddenly miles ahead. The brands that focused exclusively on SEO and owned content are discovering their strategies have a massive blind spot.

The Citation Gap is real: only 12% of URLs cited by AI systems rank in Google's top 10. SEO success doesn't translate to AI visibility. Earned media does.

This creates a land grab. The brands that figure out machine relations first will own their categories in AI recommendations. The brands that wait will find themselves fighting for scraps.

What Smart Brands Are Doing

The playbook isn't complicated, but it requires discipline:

Continuous earned media, not campaigns. You can't win AI visibility with one big PR push per quarter. The algorithms favor recency. You need a steady drumbeat of coverage—not just for human audiences, but to keep your brand fresh in AI training data and retrieval indexes.

Quality over quantity. Ten placements in Tier 1 publications beat 100 placements in publications AI doesn't trust. Be selective about where you pitch.

Entity optimization. Wikipedia, Google Knowledge Panel, Crunchbase, LinkedIn—these are the structured data sources AI consults to understand what your company is and does. If they're outdated or incomplete, you're feeding AI bad information.

Message consistency. AI systems synthesize across sources. If your positioning is different in every article, the AI description of your brand will be confused and generic. Clear, consistent messaging gets cited clearly.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Most PR agencies aren't ready for this. They're still measuring success in impressions and clip counts. They're still running quarterly campaigns instead of continuous programs. They're still treating earned media as a communications function instead of a growth function.

The agencies that adapt will thrive. The agencies that don't will become irrelevant—not because journalists stopped mattering, but because the purpose of media relations changed overnight.

Your PR doesn't just need to reach human audiences anymore. It needs to train the machines that reach human audiences.

That's machine relations. That's the new game.

And if you're not playing it yet, your competitors probably are.

---

Ready to see where you stand in AI search? Get your visibility audit—it shows you exactly what ChatGPT and Gemini say about your brand when no one's looking.