If you haven’t lain awake worrying about AI taking your job, you probably haven’t been thinking hard enough.
Something profound has happened in the past six months. I am getting people knocking at our door saying they need to pull money from advertising and put it in PR. Why?
It’s very simple.
They are going on ChatGPT, asking what the best 10 companies are in their area, and their names are not coming up.
Before making a large purchase now more and more people – me included – are asking LLMs what the best firms are to do any given task.
AI optimisation is just good PR.
For decades, PR has played second fiddle to advertising and billions of pounds that used to come to us story experts has been going to Google ads instead. Last year globally, for every £1 spent on PR, £16 was spent on paid search adverts alone. The average UK SME spends between £60,000 and £108,000 a year on pay-per-click campaigns. They all drank the ‘traditional media is dead’ Kool-Aid.
A couple of years ago, I spoke to the boss of a company with a turnover of £15m spending more than £1m a year on pay-per-click Google ads. Asked if he would consider spending a fraction of that on high-quality earned media, he said: “No way!”
He didn’t like that PR struggled to show the return on investment on every pound spent. And he didn’t see the point in organically ranking highly on search engines when he could just pay Google to put his advert above earned search.
But 2025 marks a seismic shift that will fundamentally reshape how businesses approach digital visibility.
For the first time in over a decade, Google’s dominance is cracking.
Google’s share of the global search engine market has fallen below 90 per cent for the first time since 2015, according to Statcounter.
In short, some people have stopped Googling and started ChatGPTing and Claudeing.
If you are one of them, you will already feel a bit like you are flicking through a copy of Yellow Pages back in 2000 when you go back to a plain old Goggle search.
We’re watching the convergence of channels – search, social, AI – all optimised by the same core signals that good PR practitioners have been building all along: credible sources, authoritative citations and earned media coverage. These are all the things that AI values most.
The businesses that recognise this shift early will gain an insurmountable advantage. That’s a lot of money coming our way.
So if you are a PR pro still lying awake at night worrying, for the first time in a long time you can thank your lucky stars that you’re not in advertising.
John Higginson, Partner at Higginson Strategy
This article was originally published in PRWeek.