Clients regularly ask PR agencies the same question: “How do you measure ROI?”

It is a fair question. Businesses are under pressure to justify spend, marketing teams are increasingly data-driven, and leadership teams want communications tied directly to commercial outcomes.

For a long time, PR managers struggled with this conversation because the industry often measured activity instead of impact.

Reports focused on how many media releases were sent, how many interviews were secured or how many pieces of coverage were generated. While those metrics still have value, they rarely tell the full story. As several recent industry analyses have pointed out, including reporting by Presscart and Prowly, the communications industry is now moving away from vanity metrics and towards measuring influence, trust and discoverability.

A new way of thinking

That shift is changing how businesses should think about PR entirely.

Because the reality is, PR has never been about publicity alone. At its best, public relations shapes perception, builds authority and creates commercial trust over time. The challenge is that these outcomes are cumulative. They are often indirect. And they usually happen across multiple touchpoints simultaneously.

A client may first hear about your business in a media article. Then they might see your managing director quoted on LinkedIn. A few months later, they hear your name mentioned at an industry event. Eventually, they search your business on Google or ask an AI platform who the leading firms are in your category.

That is how we build a reputation, not through one article, but through consistent positioning repeated over time.

Strong brands don’t make this mistake

This is why one of the biggest mistakes organisations make is constantly changing their messaging. They become reactive to trends or internal priorities, losing consistency in the market. One month they want to be known for innovation, the next month for growth, then for culture, then for disruption.

The strongest brands are far more disciplined than that. They understand what they want to own in the minds of stakeholders, and they repeat those messages relentlessly across media coverage, owned content, executive profiling, keynote speaking opportunities and digital platforms.

Over time, repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity creates trust. Trust creates commercial outcomes.

The old method of measurement 

Historically, PR firms in Australia have measured ROI through a fairly standard framework. Metrics such as media reach, share of voice, sentiment analysis and advertising space rate equivalents became the industry norm. Coverage in publications like the Australian Financial Review or The Australian carried weight because tier-one media signalled authority and credibility, which still matters enormously.

But the communications landscape has evolved significantly over the past few years because search behaviour has changed.

PR and SEO used to operate as separate disciplines; today, they are deeply interconnected.

Every high-quality piece of media coverage contributes to a company’s digital footprint. It creates backlinks, drives branded search traffic and reinforces trust signals that search engines use to determine relevance and authority.

Importantly, media coverage often has a much longer lifespan than traditional advertising. A strong article can continue to appear in search results years after publication, influencing prospects long after the campaign has finished. I often refer to placed organic digital media like real estate – it just keeps going up in value, the longer it lives online, the more views it gets. Paid media is often removed after the campaign money runs out.

For professional services firms in particular, this matters. When prospective clients search for your services, they are not just evaluating websites. They are evaluating digital reputation. They are looking for evidence that the market already recognises and trusts that organisation, and media coverage becomes part of that evidence.

But now another layer has entered the conversation entirely: GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation.

Enter AI and GEO

As AI search tools become more mainstream, businesses are increasingly being discovered through AI-generated answers rather than traditional search alone. Platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini synthesise information from trusted online sources to answer questions directly.

AI search significantly changes the role and importance of PR.

As Prowly’s analysis of PR ROI noted, AI search visibility is increasingly influenced by brand mentions, media credibility, consistent messaging and online trust signals rather than traditional SEO tactics alone.

In practical terms, this means that every interview, article, and thought leadership piece contributes to whether your organisation is surfaced, referenced or recommended by AI systems.

PR is no longer just influencing human audiences. It is influencing the machine’s interpretation of authority, and it isn’t just reading tier-one publications. I am amazed at some of the hardly known publications that have become visible in AI generated answers.

Public Relations as a broader lens

These are the reasons why measuring PR ROI today requires a broader lens. Traditional communications metrics still matter, but they should sit alongside search visibility indicators, branded search growth, referral traffic, inbound leads, recruitment outcomes and broader reputation signals. All of these should be linked back to a campaign’s goals.

Questions I would ask as a PR professional when analysing the success of a campaign would include:

• Are our key messages being repeated consistently in media coverage?
• Are we becoming more discoverable online?
• Is branded search increasing?
• Are high-quality publications referencing our executives?
• Are AI platforms recognising our expertise?

Those are far more commercially meaningful questions than simply counting media clips.

There is also another important point often missed in discussions around PR measurement: not everything valuable can be measured perfectly.

Reputation does not operate in a straight line. Nor does trust.

As many communications professionals know, some of the most commercially valuable outcomes from PR happen quietly – a stakeholder feels more confident, a prospective client moves forward faster, an investor feels reassured during uncertainty and a new recruit decides your business feels like the best fit.

These are not always easy to attribute in a spreadsheet, but they are real nonetheless.

The future of PR in Australia will belong to agencies and organisations that understand this convergence between communications, search, authority and digital trust.

Because increasingly, PR is not just about generating visibility. It is about building a strong reputation ecosystem that both humans and machines recognise your organisation as credible, authoritative, and worth paying attention to.

Author:

Amanda Lacey, Founder and Director