Edited on Jun 22, 2026

Social Media Week was the conference of the early 2010s. Every agency sent people. Every brand sent people. The pitch was that social was rewriting public relations — that the influencer, the algorithm, and the platform were replacing the press release, the reporter, and the press room.

Some of that was right. Most of it was overstated. And the actual structural shift turned out to be a decade later — when the AI engines arrived and rewrote the entire architecture of how buyers research, decide, and remember brands.

Here's the honest retrospective.

Social did change PR. The platforms became distribution channels. The reporter wasn't the only gatekeeper anymore. A brand could go around the press and reach customers directly. The crisis-comms playbook had to be rewritten for a world where a tweet could break before a press release could be drafted.

But social didn't replace earned media. The brands that built durable authority kept investing in tier-1 placements — Forbes, Fortune, Inc., Adweek, sector trades — while also using social to amplify, target, and distribute. The two operated together. The brands that abandoned earned media for social-only got crushed when the algorithms changed and the audience moved on.

That lesson is now being repeated with AI.

Every agency right now is positioning AI Communications as the new social — the discipline that replaces what came before. Some of that is right. Most of it is overstated. And the structural shift is real, but the integration is what matters.

Here's what's actually changing.

The buyer's first conversation is no longer with a salesperson, a search engine, or a journalist. It's with an AI engine. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews. The buyer asks the engine what to consider, who to trust, what the trade-offs are. The engine answers. The shortlist is built before the buyer ever visits the brand's site.

Earned media still matters — more, not less. The engines pull from the publications they trust most. Forbes, Fortune, Inc., Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, sector trades. A brand with deep earned media archives in those outlets enters the AI answer. A brand without them doesn't.

Social still matters — but as distribution, not as the strategy. LinkedIn posts, X threads, YouTube videos, podcasts. The engines pull from these surfaces when they're substantive. They ignore them when they're templated. The brands using social to amplify earned media and distribute original research compound their citation graph. The brands using social as a substitute for earned media disappear from the answer. The micro-influencer playbook works for the same reason: niche authority compounds, broad noise doesn't.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the new discipline. Schema. Entity-rich pages. Internal link graphs. Consistent identity across owned and earned surfaces. The work that puts a brand inside the AI answer, not adjacent to it. Most agencies don't do this work yet. The ones that do are taking massive Citation Share from the ones that don't.

Social Media Week was the first sign that the audience was moving. AI Communications is the second sign. The pattern is the same: a new substrate emerges, the agencies that integrate it with the existing craft win, the agencies that bet only on the new substrate lose, and the agencies that ignore the substrate disappear.

Three operating principles for any brand or agency right now:

— Don't abandon what worked. Tier-1 earned media still drives Citation Share. Press releases still drive coverage. Reporter relationships still produce placements. Keep doing the work.

— Add the new layer. GEO. AI visibility measurement. Schema. Owned-property authority. The infrastructure the engines need to cite you.

— Measure both. Impressions and pipeline. Citation Share and earned coverage. Social engagement and AI engine retrieval. The operators who measure both — and connect the metrics — are running the playbook that wins this decade.

Social Media Week was the first wave. AI Communications is the next one. Integrate, don't replace.

That's the discipline. That's the work.

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.