5 Major Shifts Coming To Business PR In 2026—And How You Can Prepare For Them

This article, written by Annabel Burba, was originally published on Inc.com.

This year has been complicated for public relations professionals. On one hand, many say it was demoralizing to watch the journalists they’ve built relationships with get laid off as publications from the Washington Post to Teen Vogue to Business Insider cut staff.

Still, the proliferation of generative artificial intelligence tools and the rise of generative engine optimization, or GEO, has led many to see a silver lining. “It’s never been a better time to be in PR,” says Lauren Kleinman, the founder and CEO of Dreamday, a PR and affiliate agency based in Los Angeles. “Trust signals are more important than ever,” according to her, because large language models prioritize information from credible, reliable sources above all. That means PR, which helps brands get referenced by such sources, is an invaluable tool for businesses that want their names to appear in ChatGPT queries and Google AI Overviews.

With AI capabilities continuing to improve at a rapid pace, the media landscape continuing to shift, and political tensions rising as the U.S. approaches its midterm elections, next year promises to be just as complicated as 2025 for publicists to navigate—or even more so.

To determine just how interesting things will get, Inc. asked several PR founders and executives how they’re planning to approach the year ahead. Here’s what they predict their industry will look like in 2026:

Cutting-Edge Publicists Will Use Custom AI Tools

AI tools are nothing new for PR professionals at this point. Three in four publicists currently use generative AI for everything from brainstorming to drafting pitches to writing press releases, according to a survey by PR platform Muck Rack. Because only 38 percent of these respondents said their company has an AI policy in place, however, many PR agencies will likely spend 2026 formalizing their approach to AI.

Some firms are taking this even further. New York City-based Haymaker Group, for example, is developing a custom AI tool for in-house use, according to Meir Sabbagh, the firm’s senior vice president and head of operations. Haymaker is planning to train this tool to complete certain time-intensive tasks, he says. Kleinman is also working with an AI consultant to develop custom GPTs for specific use cases. “The idea is that these GPTs will be trained on our best pitches, our case studies, our founder stories,” she says, and Dreamday will use them to improve its speed, accuracy, and consistency.

Doing so, she adds, will allow her team to “focus on deeper storytelling, building relationships both with our clients and with editors, and more outside-of-the-box thinking—which are things that AI cannot replace.”

PR Will Become More Measurable Than Ever

As GEO has risen in popularity throughout 2025, a few products that aim to enable PR professionals to track how press hits impact AI search have emerged. In July, Muck Rack launched its Generative Pulse product, which promises to do just this. Both Kleinman and Sabbagh say their agencies are currently trying the tool out.

Hannah Cranston, founder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based Hannah Cranston Media, says her agency is developing its own proprietary tools to track GEO. Being able to measure which articles large language models pull from has changed the PR game, according to her. “For so long, folks believed that it was just a qualitative field,” she says. “And it is not the case anymore—it can be really, really quantitative.”

While Sabbagh says he doesn’t think that measurable AI search performance is “going to replace the value of reputation [and] brand awareness that PR will always have,” he agrees that GEO has provided the industry with “a metric that founders and executives will actually start to look at and say, ‘Oh, that means something.’”

Substack Will Be A “Must-Have” Channel

Substack used to be a fringe media channel for PR agencies, according to Cranston. In the beginning of 2025, the founder recalls considering the newsletter-centric subscription platform as more of a “nice-to-have” than a “must-have.” But that’s no longer true. Cranston—as well as Kleinman, Sabbagh, and Jason Morris, the CEO of San Francisco-based PR firm Inkhouse—identifies landing Substack hits as one of her top priorities for 2026.

“We very much treat Substack as its own channel,” Kleinman says. “It’s just as important as pitching Wirecutter or CNN Underscored, or any other top tier publication.” She reports that Dreamday has landed more than 150 press hits on Substack in 2025.

These newsletters command smaller audiences than traditional media outlets—Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me, for example, has around 150,000 subscribers while the New York Times has north of 12 million. But niche often equals higher trust, according to Kleinman. “I shop more from Substackers now than I do [from] top-tier publications,” she says, “and it’s because I follow that one editor’s style, and I like her specific style, whereas when she was at InStyle, let’s say, you’re getting an amalgamation of a lot of different recommendations.”

Press Releases Will Have A Comeback

For years, PR thought leaders have been declaring the press release dead. But now, thanks to GEO, many publicists are seeing the medium in a new light.

Lizi Sprague, co-founder of the San Francisco-based Songue PR, for one, says that earlier this year, she wondered if her agency needed to be writing as many press releases as it was. “Do journalists still read press releases?” she wondered. Then, Sprague says she realized that the question she should have been asking was: “What’s training the AI that answers the questions about our company?”

“Press, in my experience, want that one source of truth,” she says, “but AI needs that one source of truth … otherwise, they’re just going to be creating a whole other narrative.” With this in mind, Sprague says she has now drafted more press releases this year than she has since co-founding Songue in 2019. Cranston and Kleinman say they’re both starting to think more strategically about the medium as well.

Things Are Going To Get Political, Whether You Like It Or Not

This year, “almost every market has become politicized,” Morris says, meaning that at any given moment, an elected official could set their sights on your business or industry. “And with 2026 being a midterm election year,” he adds, “it’s going to be the same thing, but on steroids.” This makes having a crisis plan essential for companies of all shapes and sizes in 2026, according to Morris.

Cranston, meanwhile, advises clients to speak up about the causes they care about. Most brands don’t have major announcements or launches each month, she says, “so you have to create the news, you have to create that timeliness”—and getting political is a surefire way to do so.

You, of course, “don’t need to comment on everything,” she adds, “but you do need to comment on the things that impact you as a human, your customer base, your brand.” As an example, one of her clients, Winx Health, got political for the first time in 2024 and saw both its revenue and social media engagement explode as a result. “What may turn some away also attracts a whole host of new folks,” Cranston says.