As AI-powered search transforms how brands are discovered, Sara Donnelly argues that cutting PR could become one of the costliest mistakes a business can make. Here, the Beyond Echo PR founder explains why earned media, third-party validation and consistent visibility now matter more than ever in the age of GEO, AEO and AI search…
There is a dangerous illusion that silence is cheap. The logic goes like this: We don’t really need PR right now, let’s pause the retainer and keep things ticking over with AI-generated or in-house content.
What feels like a sensible, tactical pause is always an expensive decision.
We are in the middle of an AI faceoff, but many companies still treat PR visibility like a content calendar rather than a compounding asset. They view their PR as a series of activity spikes. On for a launch, off for a quiet quarter, and on again when something needs announcing. But while the finance team sees a cost saving, the AI search engines powering GEO and AEO see something else entirely. They see nothing.
When you go quiet for six months, you aren’t just taking a break. You are paying what I call the Visibility Tax.
AI Search Works in Dog Years
In the old world of PR, a six-month silence meant a few coffees with journalists to get back in the game. In the new world of Answer Engine Optimisation, six months of silence is years of lost credibility.
Think of it as working in dog years.
AI models and Large Language Models do not reward occasional bursts of noise. They reward the consistent triangulation of authority; that’s a persistent feed of earned media, third-party citations, and active expertise that confirms you still exist and matter. The moment you stop feeding the machine with third-party validation, you don’t just stand still; you start to evaporate from the training data that powers the next generation of search.
If the AI cannot find a recent, authoritative record of your perspective, it won’t guess; it will simply move on to a competitor.
This is the part most quarterly dashboards don’t capture. The competitive gap between the brand that maintained consistent earned media and the one that went dark isn’t visible in your CRM. It shows up later, when AI-generated responses to your target buyer’s questions point somewhere else.
The CFO Is Solving the Wrong Equation
The case for pausing PR usually runs through the finance team.
A retainer is a cost line.
No launch this quarter means no obvious return.
Switch it off, save the budget, restart when there’s something to say.
The problem is that PR doesn’t function like a cost line.
Consider what would happen if you applied the same logic elsewhere. The CRM is expensive, and the sales team is having a quiet quarter – turn it off? The sales team’s LinkedIn Sales Navigator licences aren’t generating immediate pipeline – cancel them? No one would make those calls, because everyone understands that the tools exist to maintain capability, not to produce instant outputs.
Brand visibility works the same way. Visibility is a flywheel, not a light switch. Turning it off for a quarter doesn’t save you 25% of your budget; it adds a 50% surcharge to your next campaign just to regain the ground you ceded while you were silent.
The asymmetry matters. Brand presence has a higher marginal cost of re-entry than it does of continuity. The meeting where someone proposes turning off the retainer rarely includes a line item for what it will cost to rebuild. It should.
The Ambient Temperature of Your Brand
Think of your brand’s presence like heating a house. If you keep the heating on at a low, consistent level, the energy required to maintain that ambient temperature is relatively small.
Turn the heating off completely in the dead of winter, and the house doesn’t just get cold. The pipes freeze or the structure suffers. When you finally decide to turn the heat back on for a big launch, you have to spend an enormous amount of money and energy just to get back to zero.
Experience shows that obsessing over Share of Voice misses the point entirely. What matters is Share of Mind: the relevance you occupy when a buyer is making a decision.
Silence is not neutral. It is a strategy, and usually a bad one. When you are quiet, your competitors are not. They are accumulating the share of mind you spent years building. The white space you used to own gets occupied. The keywords you were once synonymous with start pointing elsewhere. The journalists you had relationships with change roles. By the time you decide to scale back up, the landscape has moved on.
You haven’t saved money. You’ve spent six months dismantling your most valuable defensive moat.
The Power of Triangulation
There is a version of this conversation where a marketing director says: “We’re still posting on LinkedIn, so we’re fine.”
AI search engines look for corroboration outside LinkedIn. They want to see that the expertise you claim on your own channels is reflected in the trade press, and referenced by independent third parties.
As I’ve said before, influence and volume are not the same thing. Influence means being the source that credible people — and increasingly, credible algorithms — reach for when the stakes are high. Volume without that authority is just noise.
If you cut the PR and keep the AI-generated or in-house social posts running, you are telling the algorithms that you have a loud voice, that’s all. You lose the power of triangulation. You become a brand that talks to itself.
This is why analyst relations has quietly become one of the most important signals in the new search landscape. A citation from Datos Insights, IDC, or Forrester is the kind of third-party validation that tells an LLM you are a credible source worth surfacing when a buyer asks a question you should be answering.
The Question to Ask Before the Next Budget Meeting
The invisible race is already underway. Most brands don’t know they’re losing it, because the losses don’t show up in a coverage report. They show up six months later, when the AI-generated answer to your prospect’s question names your competitor instead of you.
Before the next budget conversation, ask a different question.
Don’t ask: Can we afford the retainer this quarter?*
Ask: What will it cost to rebuild the ground we’re about to give away?*
Stop paying the Visibility Tax, because the cost of staying seen is almost always lower than the cost of being forgotten.
About Beyond Echo
Founded by Sara Donnelly, Beyond Echo PR is a Wigan-based consultancy specialising in B2B and tech PR for ambitious businesses across the Northern tech ecosystem.
Donnelly launched the agency after a 20-year career in the industry, including senior roles at Social Tech Communications, JAM and Firework PR. The agency focuses on helping tech companies raise their visibility through what Donnelly describes as “no-nonsense consultancy and good old Northern grit”.
Beyond Echo PR previously sponsored the Scale-ups edition of Tech Companies to Watch at Digital City Festival 2025 and the Female Tech Entrepreneur of the Year category at the 2025 Prolific North Tech Awards.
