Cheering at the wake
Earned media is back, they say, but earned from what, and paid for by whom?
"Earned media is back", "citation is the new click". If you have spent any time on PR LinkedIn this past month, you have seen some version of these lines circulating, mostly in response to Google's announcement at I/O 2026 that Gemini 3.5 Flash would become the default model inside AI Mode and that the experience would expand globally across nearly 200 countries and 98 languages.
Following the news, the online PR community slipped into one of its periodic moods of self-congratulation. For a discipline that has spent most of the last decade losing share to paid channels and watching its media-relations heritage shrink alongside the media that once supported it, the celebration is understandable. I also think the celebration is premature, and that it tells us something uncomfortable about how our industry is reading its own situation.
