AI and the golden age of strategic PR

Something fundamental has shifted in the way the world decides what to believe about an organisation, and most Nigerian boardrooms have yet to reckon with it. When a potential investor, partner or customer asks an AI what your company does, the answer that comes back is already being assembled from sources you may never have thought to manage. The question of who is telling your story has acquired a new and urgent dimension.

This year’s World PR Day theme is the Golden Age of Strategic PR, and for once, the data arrived before the slogan. It tells a story that every leader who allocates budget between paid media and earned media needs to understand.

In May 2026, Muck Rack published the third edition of a study tracking how ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini cite sources, analysing well over 25 million links across 17 industries. The finding has held consistent across every edition going back to July 2025: 84 percent of all AI citations come from earned media rather than from brand websites, paid placements or sponsored content.

Paid and advertorial content accounted for 0.3 percent. Journalism alone represented 27 percent of all cited sources. Researchers at the University of Toronto confirmed the structural nature of this preference, finding that AI search engines cite earned media roughly five times more often than brand-owned content.

Neil Patel, who built a career helping companies dominate Google search rankings, acknowledged after Google’s latest I/O conference that the discipline he had spent decades mastering was being fundamentally remade. What AI trusts, and therefore what it surfaces to the hundreds of millions of people now using it to make decisions, is what credible, independent voices have said about a brand. The editorial endorsement that PR has always pursued turns out to be the very currency these systems were built to value.

This should land differently in Nigeria than it does anywhere else.

According to a Google and Ipsos study released in January 2026, 88 percent of Nigerian adults have used an AI chatbot, the highest adoption rate of any country surveyed. A separate report found that 74.1 percent of digitally enabled firms in Lagos, Abuja and Rivers State are already deploying AI tools for research, planning and customer engagement. Nigerian professionals and consumers are already living inside this shift, using these tools daily to evaluate companies, research partners and make purchasing decisions.

Consider what this means in practice. When someone in Lagos or London or Johannesburg asks ChatGPT about a Nigerian bank, a fintech company, a real estate developer or a government agency, the answer will be assembled primarily from what BusinessDay, TechCabal, TheCable, Premium Times, Channels, Nairametrics and other credible editorial outlets have published about that institution.

If the coverage is thin, outdated, or nonexistent, the organisation effectively disappears from the fastest-growing discovery channel in the world. If the coverage is negative and unaddressed, that narrative becomes the permanent answer. No amount of advertising spend changes what the algorithm retrieves.

In November, Nigeria will host the World Public Relations Forum in Abuja, welcoming over 3,000 delegates from 126 countries. The country with the world’s highest AI adoption rate is also the country where the global PR profession is gathering to define its next chapter, and that convergence carries a responsibility. Nigerian communications professionals are positioned, by circumstance and by numbers, to demonstrate what strategic PR looks like when the machines are already listening.

For decades, the case for strategic PR rested on intuition and professional conviction, true but difficult to prove in a language that survived a budget meeting. The algorithms have now supplied the proof. Earned media is the primary input into the systems that will shape how the next generation discovers, evaluates and trusts your organisation. The golden age belongs to the discipline that understood this principle before the machines confirmed it: trust cannot be manufactured, only earned.

Edward Israel-Ayide is the founder/CEO of Carpe Diem Solutions, a strategic communications and PR consultancy serving clients across Africa.