PR Measurement Finally Has Its Moment

Every communicator has had the experience of receiving a text from a parent about something they read in the news about our client or employer. I call it the dad metric. If your dad sees it in the paper, you've hit a meaningful threshold. It’s relatable. It’s human. And for a long time, it was one of the best indicators of a successful PR campaign.

Parental recognition still matters, but it's not all we've got.

AI has become the go-to resource for decision-making — from which deodorant to buy to what cloud provider to choose. Earned and owned media are the most influential inputs into how AI understands a company. Which means they're finally measurable in ways that matter.

We can quantify visibility lift before and after a campaign. We can isolate which outlets and which assets actually drive discoverability. Not generalized brand rankings in a subscription dashboard — but campaign-specific analysis with citation data down to the URL.

That's not only a shift in measurement. It informs strategy.

AI citation analysis shows which earned stories move the needle, which publications reliably influence AI models in your category, where your owned content is missing or outdated, and what you should publish next to strengthen the dataset AI learns from. It turns measurement into a forward-looking planning tool.

For the first time, PR can diagnose visibility gaps and engineer improvements, not just circulate clips.

If you’ve spent your career wishing for better PR metrics, this is the moment. AI-mediated discovery makes earned and owned media some of the most measurable (and strategically influential) inputs in the GEO stack.