As public relations professionals continue adapting to an artificial intelligence-driven media landscape, Muck Rack’s 2026 State of PR report reveals an industry that has moved past experimentation and into implementation. Where last year’s data captured a profession cautiously testing generative AI and bracing for earned media headwinds, this year’s findings show those same challenges have matured into defined strategies, particularly around a new frontier: generative engine optimization. The report confirms that AI is no longer a future consideration but a present-day operating standard while earned media and social strategy continue to evolve in step.

AI Adoption Reaches Standard Practice

Generative AI has solidified its place in the PR workflow. According to Muck Rack, 80% of PR pros now use generative AI in their work, up from 77% last year, while 61% believe AI and automation will grow in importance over the next five years, keeping it the industry’s top future priority for a second consecutive year.

What has changed is where PR pros expect growth to come from next. Media relations jumped to the second-highest future priority at 48%, up from last year, followed by strategic planning and reputation management. This shift suggests that even as AI adoption becomes routine, the profession is reasserting the value of traditional media relationships and human-led strategy as differentiators, not casualties, of the AI era.

GEO Emerges as PR’s Newest Responsibility Without a Clear Owner

The most significant new theme in this year’s report is the rise of generative engine optimization, the practice of ensuring brand visibility within AI-generated search responses. Nearly three-quarters of PR pros (73%) say GEO is at least somewhat important to their communications strategy today, with 15% calling it extremely important.

Yet ownership remains unresolved. Muck Rack found that 29% of organizations have no one currently responsible for GEO, while another 13% are unsure who owns it. Among those who have assigned responsibility, PR and communications teams lead, ahead of SEO or content teams, marketing leadership and dedicated AI or innovation teams.

Measurement is similarly nascent. Nearly four in 10 PR pros say they are not yet measuring GEO performance at all, and among those who are, the most common method is monitoring brand mentions in AI-generated responses, followed by tracking search visibility changes.

To improve visibility in AI-generated responses, PR pros are leaning on tactics that mirror classic earned media strategy:

• 55% are securing coverage in high-authority publications.
• 50% are creating more authoritative, data-driven content.
• 50% are optimizing content for search.
• 44% are restructuring content to be more machine-readable, using clear answers and FAQs.

This convergence signals that GEO is not replacing traditional PR tactics but rather validating them. Earned coverage in credible, high-authority outlets is proving just as valuable for training AI models’ perception of a brand as it is for human audiences, reinforcing that authoritative earned media has become a dual-purpose asset.

Earned Media Remains a Persistent Challenge

If GEO is the new frontier, earned media’s fundamentals haven’t gotten any easier. Muck Rack again found that securing coverage is nearly universally difficult, with only 2% of PR pros saying it has not become harder this year, unchanged from 2025.

The top barriers remain consistent with last year, though slightly softened in magnitude:

• 71% cite low journalist response rates.
• 61% point to shrinking media lists in relevant beats.
• 43% cite increased competition for coverage.
• 36% cite a lack of timely or newsworthy stories, and the same share cite shorter media cycles.

The persistence of these obstacles, even as the specific percentages ease slightly, confirms that the structural pressures facing journalists and PR pros alike (leaner newsrooms, fewer beat reporters, compressed timelines) are now a fixed feature of the media landscape rather than a temporary disruption.

Pitching Strategy: Wide Nets, Careful Personalization

The wide-net pitching approach identified in last year’s report holds steady. Nearly half of PR pros still pitch more than 20 journalists per campaign, including 24% who pitch more than 50, virtually unchanged from 2025.

Personalization, however, has pulled back slightly. This year, 66% of PR pros say they usually or always personalize pitches, down from 70% last year.

Among those who do personalize, 73% say they only adjust a few sentences to make the pitch relevant while a growing 15% now tailor every part of the pitch, suggesting a small but meaningful shift toward deeper, more deliberate personalization even as broad-based personalization has eased.

How to Pitch: The Formula Holds

Five years of Muck Rack survey data continue to validate a consistent formula for effective pitching:

1. Pitch one-on-one via email.
2. Pitch on Tuesdays.
3. Keep pitches under 300 words.
4. Pitch before noon.
5. Send the first follow-up three to six days later.
6. Limit follow-ups to one or two.

This year’s data shows word count discipline has tightened further, with 87% of PR pros keeping pitches under 300 words, up from prior years, reinforcing that brevity remains nonnegotiable in a media environment where journalist attention is scarcer than ever.

Media Format Diversification Continues

Online and digital outlets remain the dominant pitching target at 91%, but traditional formats are holding their ground and in some cases gaining share:

• 69% pitch newspapers (up from 71% in 2025).
• 64% pitch magazines (unchanged).
• 60% pitch TV (down slightly from 62%).
• 57% pitch podcasts, now tracked as a standalone category and already a top-five format.

Newer additions to the survey, including newsletters (42%), radio (35%), blogs (30%), and academic or professional journals (11%), show PR pros are pitching across a wider spectrum of formats than ever, a sign that audience attention is fragmenting and outreach strategies must follow.

LinkedIn Extends Its Lead

LinkedIn’s dominance as PR’s platform of choice has only strengthened. This year, 60% of PR pros say LinkedIn is the most valuable social platform for their work, up from 56% last year and a full 10 points above where it stood in 2024. Instagram trails at 18%, while X continues its decline, now selected by just 7% of respondents, down from 11% last year and 16% in 2024.

LinkedIn’s lead extends across every measure of platform value:

• 87% include LinkedIn in their company’s social media and communications strategy (unchanged from last year, still the top platform).
• 73% want to monitor LinkedIn specifically ahead of Instagram (61%) and X (49%).

The consistency across adoption, strategy and monitoring confirms LinkedIn has become the undisputed home base for professional PR engagement with no other platform posing a meaningful challenge.

Thought Leadership Cements Its Place

One of the more notable shifts this year is the growing weight of thought leadership within the PR function. More than half of PR pros now say thought leadership constitutes at least a quarter of their job, a six-point increase from last year. Media relations still anchors the profession at 84%, but content creation and media measurement and reporting are increasingly filling out the modern PR role.

This growth in thought leadership dovetails directly with the GEO conversation: As brands compete for visibility in both traditional search and AI-generated responses, positioning executives and organizations as credible, authoritative voices has become a strategic necessity rather than a nice-to-have.

Making Every Pitch Count in an AI-Shaped Landscape

Muck Rack’s 2026 findings show an industry that has absorbed last year’s disruptions and is now building deliberate strategy around them. AI adoption has gone from majority practice to near-universal standard. Earned media remains stubbornly difficult, but PR pros are refining rather than reinventing their approach.

The throughline from 2025 to 2026 is clear: Organizations that treat AI as a strategic amplifier rather than a replacement for media relationships, authoritative content and human judgment will be the ones best positioned to control their narrative both in front of journalists and inside AI-generated search results. As GEO ownership remains up for grabs, PR teams that move quickly to claim that territory will define how their brands are represented in the next generation of search.

Read our analysis of Muck Rack’s 2025 State of PR.

Brianna Loewke is a senior associate at Poston Communications based in Washington, D.C.