About the paper
Muck Rack’s State of PR 2025 is an original survey study examining PR professionals’ roles, leadership perceptions, future priorities, media relations practices and social media use.
The survey was distributed primarily by email between 5 June and 16 July 2025; 1,089 PR professionals participated, with 911 usable responses retained after data cleaning.
The sample is heavily US-based, with 90% of respondents located in the United States and only 10% elsewhere, including 5% in Europe.
Length: 31 pages
More information / download: https://media.muckrack.com/documents/State_of_PR_2025_report.pdf
Core Insights
1. What does the report reveal about the current role and professional position of PR?
Media relations remains the dominant activity within PR. Eighty-four per cent of respondents say it constitutes at least a quarter of their work, considerably ahead of thought leadership at 45%, measurement and reporting at 44%, and content creation at 42%. Corporate communications accounts for a substantial share of the work of 30% of respondents, while crisis management, influencer relations, ESG and DEI are considerably less prominent as major job functions.
This creates a picture of a profession whose remit has broadened, but whose centre of gravity remains traditional media relations. Thought leadership, content and measurement have become important complementary disciplines, yet they have not displaced earned media as the defining PR responsibility.
The findings on leadership perceptions are more complicated. Based on the response categories shown on page 10, 33% say leadership understands their work completely and 47% say it understands it somewhat, producing a combined figure of 80%. The accompanying narrative inconsistently states 88%, which appears to be an error in the report.
More importantly, understanding does not necessarily translate into perceived value. Only 37% of respondents overall feel that PR is “very valued” by leadership. The gap between agency and in-house practitioners is striking: 50% of agency respondents feel very valued, compared with only 16% of brand-side respondents. At brands, 24% feel only slightly valued or not valued at all, compared with 8% at agencies.
The report therefore points to a persistent legitimacy challenge for in-house PR. Communications professionals may believe that leaders broadly understand what they do, but many do not feel that the function is accorded correspondingly high strategic value.
2. Which developments do PR professionals expect to shape the profession over the next five years?
AI and automation clearly dominate expectations for the future. Fifty-nine per cent believe this area will grow in importance over the next five years, well ahead of media relations at 35%, strategic planning at 33%, reputation management at 29%, and both influencer marketing and owned content at 28%.
This is not merely an expectation about the future. Generative AI is already mainstream among the respondents: 77% say they use tools such as ChatGPT or DALL·E in their workflow, while another 11% plan to explore them. Only 8% say they do not intend to do so.
The findings suggest that AI has moved rapidly from experimentation to routine professional use. However, the report does not examine what respondents use AI for, how intensively they use it, whether their organisations have governance policies, or whether AI is improving quality, productivity or outcomes. Adoption should therefore not be interpreted as evidence of maturity.
At the same time, established strategic disciplines remain important. Media relations, planning, reputation management, measurement and owned content all feature prominently among anticipated growth areas. The likely future is therefore not one in which AI replaces conventional PR functions, but one in which AI increasingly changes how those functions are performed.
The very low ranking of DEI and ESG communication is also notable. Only 4% identify it as an area likely to grow most in importance. That does not necessarily mean such issues are becoming irrelevant, but it does suggest that respondents no longer view them as major areas of professional expansion relative to AI, reputation, media and content.
3. Why has earned media become more difficult to secure?
The report presents earned media as operating under severe structural pressure. Seventy-two per cent cite low response rates from journalists as a challenge, while 62% point to smaller or shrinking media lists within relevant beats. Only 2% say it has not become harder to secure coverage.
Respondents also identify:
- increased competition for coverage: 49%;
- shorter media cycles and faster turnaround: 48%;
- reduced media appetite caused by the economic or political climate: 47%;
- a lack of timely or newsworthy stories: 42%;
- overloaded or understaffed PR teams: 32%;
- limited access to executives or subject-matter experts: 29%;
- difficulty personalising pitches at scale: 26%;
- conflicting internal priorities: 21%.
These findings indicate that the difficulty is not caused by a single failure in pitching technique. It reflects a combination of shrinking journalistic capacity, intense competition, rapid news cycles, weak story material and internal organisational constraints.
There is also an important asymmetry in the results: the largest barriers are external to the PR function, but several internal weaknesses compound them. PR teams may have less access to genuinely newsworthy material, insufficient time to customise outreach, or limited access to credible spokespeople. The report therefore implies that improving media relations performance cannot be reduced to better email wording. It also requires stronger story development, internal coordination and more selective targeting.
4. What do the findings say about the quality and scale of media pitching?
The report depicts pitching as relatively broad and only moderately personalised.
Nearly half of respondents pitch more than 20 journalists for each campaign or announcement: 23% pitch between 21 and 50, while 25% pitch more than 50. Only 12% typically pitch five or fewer.
These pitches are also often sent to journalists with whom the PR professional has limited previous contact. Thirty-six per cent have worked with only a few of the reporters they pitch, and 31% have worked with about half. Only 31% have previously worked with most or all of them.
At first glance, personalisation appears widespread: 70% say they always or usually personalise their pitches. However, the next question qualifies that claim. Seventy-five per cent say personalisation consists of changing only a few sentences. Just 11% tailor every part of the pitch to the journalist, while 13% personalise only the greeting.
The combined picture is therefore one of semi-personalised outreach at scale. Practitioners are not generally sending completely identical mass emails, but neither are most producing deeply tailored pitches for individual journalists.
This may help explain the low response rates identified elsewhere in the report. The study does not establish causation, but it suggests a tension between scale and relevance: PR professionals are trying to reach large numbers of journalists while also claiming to personalise their messages, yet most personalisation remains relatively light.
The report’s five-year pitching summary reinforces conventional practice: nearly 70% prefer one-to-one emails, 87% keep pitches below 300 words, 51% prefer Tuesday, 80% pitch before noon, and 54% send their first follow-up three to six days later. These findings describe prevailing practitioner preferences, however, rather than demonstrating which practices produce the best results.
5. What are the report’s most important implications for PR strategy and measurement?
The strongest strategic message concerns measurement. Sixty-seven per cent say that producing measurable results is the best way to increase PR’s perceived value among leaders or clients. This is far ahead of creative solutions at 12%, executive visibility at 11%, and reputation-risk management at 6%.
This finding is particularly significant when considered alongside the low perceived value of in-house PR. It suggests that practitioners see evidence of results as the main route to stronger organisational legitimacy. However, the report does not define “measurable results”. These might range from media outputs and engagement metrics to changes in awareness, behaviour, reputation or business outcomes. The lack of definition means respondents may not share a common understanding of what meaningful measurement entails.
The social media findings also have clear strategic implications. LinkedIn has consolidated its position as the most important professional platform:
- 56% regard it as the most valuable platform for PR;
- 87% include it in their organisation’s social and communications strategy;
- 70% want to monitor it.
By contrast, X has declined sharply. Only 11% now regard it as the most valuable platform, and 39% say they stopped using it professionally during the previous year. Nevertheless, 41% still include it in their organisational strategy and 52% want to monitor it. This suggests that X may be losing value as an active communications channel while remaining relevant as an environment that organisations feel obliged to observe.
There is a wider gap between declared strategic importance and monitoring capability. Although respondents say their companies use an average of 3.6 social platforms, 53% do not use social listening tools at all. Only 14% use them daily and 8% weekly. This raises questions about how organisations evaluate conversations, emerging issues and audience response across their multichannel presence.
Overall, the report implies five priorities for PR leaders:
- connect communication activity more clearly with measurable organisational outcomes;
- treat AI adoption as an operational and governance issue, not merely a tool experiment;
- make earned-media outreach more selective and substantially more relevant;
- reconsider channel investment as LinkedIn strengthens and X weakens;
- improve monitoring and listening capabilities so that multichannel strategies are informed by evidence rather than platform presence alone.
The report’s conclusions should nevertheless be interpreted within its sample limitations. It is based mainly on US practitioners, agencies make up 51% of respondents, and some questions changed wording from earlier surveys. The authors therefore caution that direct year-on-year comparisons may not always be valid.