Most PR tactics that used to work don't anymore. They still get executed because someone's KPI depends on them — not because they move a buyer.

Should you still send the mass press release?

No. Blasting 400 reporters on a wire is a 2004 tactic in a 2026 media landscape. Send five targeted pitches to journalists on the beat. The rest is noise — and increasingly, noise that AI engines penalize.

Should you keep chasing print-only hits?

No. The trade press digital footprint outranks the print masthead inside AI answers. A story in an industry vertical that's crawled, structured, and linked will get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity long after the newsstand copy is in recycling.

Are influencer trips still worth it?

Only if the deliverable is durable content — a review, a long-form post, a video that lives on a domain the AI engines already trust. A story is not a deliverable. A citation is.

Should you still write awards submissions the same way?

No. Rewrite them as case studies with numbers, named executives, and a schema-friendly structure. Awards are retrieval anchors now. Treat them like assets, not vanity.

Should you keep the quarterly "thought leadership" cadence?

Stop calling it that. Call it what it is — industry intelligence. Publish it on properties the engines read. Make sure the executive's name is attached to real, entity-rich prose. Recycled LinkedIn platitudes are the fastest way to get filtered out.

What does 5WPR do instead?

5WPR operates as an AI Communications firm — combining public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization, and AI-visibility research. Every earned hit is now measured for its impact on Citation Share inside the AI engines, not just its impressions in a media report.

The single tactic to stop first?

Optimizing for the media report instead of the buyer's next question. The buyer is asking the chatbox. Meet them there.

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.