Gartner predicts PR budgets will double by 2027.
Not because the old playbook is working. Because the new one requires earned media at its foundation — and most brands don't have it.
The research firm's latest report — Top Predictions to Inform 2026 Comms Strategies — lays out five forecasts that describe a communications industry being rebuilt around AI-driven discovery. The first prediction is the one that should keep every CMO and CCO awake: mass adoption of LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will force a 2x increase in PR budgets.
Here is the number that matters: 95% of links cited by AI answer engines are nonpaid. Earned. Shared. Organic owned. Not ads. Twenty-seven percent come directly from earned media. ChatGPT traffic grew 608% year-over-year. Perplexity grew 262%. Google declined.
5W Rebuilt the Firm Around This Exact Thesis
When we repositioned 5W as the AI Communications Firm, we made a specific bet: that the buyer's first conversation would move from search engines to AI engines, and that the brands showing up in those answers would be the ones with earned media infrastructure — not the ones buying ads.
We built Citation Share as a measurement framework — tracking how often a brand appears when a buyer asks an AI engine a question that should belong to that brand. We partnered exclusively with Curium, the Princeton team that coined GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). We publish original AI visibility research through Everything-PR and its network of intelligence platforms — thirty-plus publications of trade research designed to be cited by the AI engines themselves.
That is not a services menu. It is an operating model. Earned media feeds the AI engines. GEO structures the authority. Citation Share measures whether it is working. One firm. One system.
Gartner Confirms This Is a Communications Discipline — Not SEO
The GEO conversation in 2025 was dominated by SEO vendors repackaging keyword tools. Gartner's report draws the line. Answer engine optimization, Gartner writes, "requires Communications-specific skills to balance stakeholder trust and platform requirements."
Not marketing. Not search optimization. Communications.
The reason is structural. The sources AI engines trust most are high-domain news outlets, institutional content, and academic research. Press releases get the fewest citations. When queries imply recency — 49% of citations come from news coverage. That means the skill set required to influence AI answers is the skill set of a PR firm. Media relationships. Narrative placement. Proactive coverage. Crisis response. The fundamentals — rebuilt for a new distribution layer.
Five Predictions That Describe the Next Four Years of Communications
Gartner's full report covers five forecasts. The first gets the headlines, but all five describe the same structural shift:
1. PR budgets double by 2027 as LLMs replace traditional search and AI engines favor earned media.
2. 75% of employees use chatbots for internal comms by 2028 — replacing newsletters, intranets, and even managers.
3. 45% of CCOs adopt narrative intelligence tools by 2029 to monitor reputation as disinformation accelerates.
4. 75% of comms teams personalize internal messages by 2029 using employee digital footprint data.
5. Data and analytics spending doubles to 6% of the communications budget — up from 2.9% — by 2029.
Every one of these points in the same direction: communications is becoming core business infrastructure for the AI era. Not a support function. Not a cost center. The operating layer that determines whether a brand exists inside the answer — or doesn't.
What Every CEO Should Be Asking Right Now
Your brand is already being described inside AI engines. Right now. The only question is whether you built the infrastructure that shapes the answer — or whether you inherited whatever the model assembled on its own.
Gartner's recommendation: audit your AI answer visibility. Shift budget from paid to earned. Build a media function calibrated for AI recency. Measure it.
That is not a future problem. That is a Q1 problem. And the firms that solve it first will own the category for the next decade.
Build the infrastructure before the crisis — not during it.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.