Carly Martinetti

AI will double PR budgets and replace internal channels: Gartner forecast - Communicate Online As communicators brace for another year of AI disruption, two of Gartner’s latest predictions suggest the function is on the brink of its biggest reset in

📌 sources:
generativepulse.ai/report/
www.semrush.com/blog/ai-seo...
communicateonline.me/news/ai-wil...

THE NEW REALITY:
We're watching a once-in-a-generation shift in how people discover brands.

The companies investing in real earned media (that is, true third-party validation) are the ones building a moat.

Every month without it?

Good luck catching up.

And for marketers who spent the last decade buying their way into "earned-looking" content... native ads, sponsored posts, advertorials pretending to be editorial... AI is seeing right through it.

For PR teams already doing the work, every placement you secure isn't just building credibility with human readers anymore; it’s informing the AI systems that are increasingly deciding which brands get recommended and which ones don't exist.

Brands still treating PR as a "nice to have" line item below paid media and SEO are in store for an awakening (I was going to say “rude awakening” but that would be… rude).

WHAT THIS MEANS:
Gartner is essentially telling CMOs: the channel your customers use to find you is changing to AI; and earned media is what AI trusts.

We've been watching this play out with our own clients... one saw 38% of their leads this year come directly from earned media surfacing in ChatGPT queries (we got them in the NYT, WSJ, Wired, Forbes, TechCrunch, and others).

Muck Rack's research shows that more than 95% of links cited in AI-generated answers come from non-paid sources, with half of all AI citations coming from content published in the last 11 months. And per Semrush, AI search visitors convert at 4.4x the rate of traditional organic search.

THE EVIDENCE:
Between the first half of 2024 and first half of 2025, ChatGPT traffic grew 608%, while Google and Bing both declined.

Their latest report lays it out: mass adoption of AI as a replacement for traditional search is going to force a fundamental reallocation of marketing spend away from paid, toward earned.

PREDICTION: Gartner says that PR and earned media budgets will DOUBLE by 2027... and the reason why should matter to every marketer still pouring money into paid channels. 🧵

Not "till death do us part."

Their leadership team and sales org had one flagship Axios piece to rally around... not five forgettable mentions in outlets nobody's heard of. One credible piece travels further inside a company than a dozen shallow ones ever will.

"Exclusive" in PR means "first dibs."

Then I emailed Supply Chain Brain, Supply Chain Dive, Supply Chain 24/7, and more trade pubs a day later with fresh angles that went beyond the initial story. Because Axios had already run it, they were more open to picking it up too.

And from the company's side—

We gave Axios Pro exclusivity on a tech client's 8-figure funding round. Paywalled, yes... but an investor reached out the next day asking to get in on the next round.

Here's what people miss, though... landing the exclusive in a high-authority outlet first actually makes the broader pickups easier. Other editors see that a rigorous publication already vetted the story.

It lowers their risk and raises your credibility.

And if you're working with a good PR pro, they're already lining up other publications to squeeze every ounce of awareness out of that "exclusive" piece once it's been up for at least a day.

A client once asked me, "Wait... so if we give them an exclusive, it only runs in one place?"

The answer: No.

"Exclusive" in PR really means: "You get first dibs. I solemnly swear you will be the FIRST to break this story. But once it's live on the Internet, anyone else can run with it." 🧵

- ProRata AI's 50% revenue share with 500+ publishers: www.businesswire.com/news/home/2...

As Microsoft Expands AI Marketplace Strategy, Admanager Takes the Lead in Healthcare Content Licensing As Microsoft accelerates its AI marketplace strategy formalizing how AI models and services are distributed and monetized Admanager, powered by Doceree, announced the launch of the Licensed Content Marketplace, healthcare's first structured AI content licensing infrastructure built specifically for medical publishers.

- Microsoft / IAB Tech Lab collective licensing efforts: martechseries.com/content/as-...

Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access Pay per crawl is a new feature to allow content creators to charge AI crawlers for access to their content.

- Facebook’s algorithm change tanked publisher referral traffic by 58%: www.niemanlab.org/reading/fac...

- Cloudflare’s "Pay Per Crawl" toll booth: blog.cloudflare.com/introducing...

- Search traffic drops to major publishers (including BI's 55% drop): www.wsj.com/tech/ai/goo...

Do people click on links in Google AI summaries? In a March 2025 analysis, Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one.

- Users click links only 8% of the time when an AI summary appears: Pew Research Center (July 2025): www.pewresearch.org/short-reads...

- 82% of AI search citations come from earned media: Muck Rack’s "What Is AI Reading?" Report (December 2025 analysis of over 1 million AI citations): natlawreview.com/press-relea...

📌 Sources & Data Mentioned in the Post:

But unless we find a way to better compensate publishers, the snake will keep eating its tail, slowly making its way to the very head.

This is a golden age for PR. AI searches make finding information easier than ever, and they lend the greatest credibility to earned media (@NotablyPR clients are already getting leads thanks to AI “referrals”). AI labs need high quality journalism to improve future models.

— Prorata has launched a revenue-share model where publishers get 50% of revenue tied to actual usage of their content. Over 500 publishers have signed on.

The takeaway:

— Cloudflare has built a tool that lets publishers charge AI crawlers for access to their content, basically a toll booth for bots

— Microsoft, IAB Tech Lab, and others are building collective licensing infrastructure in the same "pay for what you crawl" vein.

So you’ve got a bruised media industry that never really recovered being dealt an even harder blow by AI’s disruption of their business model.

I know. That’s a lot of doom and gloom.

So I searched for promising responses to this (and yes, I may have used AI to do it 😅). Three stood out: