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2026 State of PR: 1,100+ Communicators Surveyed

Public relations is evolving faster than ever. Between generative AI, misinformation, and shrinking budgets, PR pros are being asked to do more—and prove more—with less.

Created in partnership with leading agency, We. Communications, Meltwater’s 2026 State of PR report reveals how over 1,100 global communications professionals are responding to these challenges and redefining what success looks like.

AI is officially mainstream: Over 90% PR teams have already integrated generative AI into their workflows for tasks like drafting press releases, optimizing content, and brainstorming.

Measurement is evolving: PR pros are under growing pressure to link comms outcomes to business KPIs, but over 40% are still measuring activity instead of outcomes

Budgets are tight, but expectations are higher: More than half of respondents expect little or no change in PR investment for 2026, despite increased demand for strategic impact.

Leadership buy-in is key: Communicators who can connect storytelling with data are earning their seat at the decision-making table.

Get more insights, benchmarks, and practical takeaways to strengthen your strategy and secure your seat at the leadership table.

Download the 2026 State of PR report to stay ahead of what’s next for PR. 

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The State of PR Report surveyed over 1,100 professionals on their views about the current state of the industry and expectations for the future.

State of PR 2026

The communications landscape is facing a defining challenge: polarization.

The 2026 USC Annenberg Global Communication Report, sponsored by Meltwater and developed by the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations, explores how political and social division is transforming the structure, strategy, and influence of the PR profession.

While artificial intelligence, hybrid work, and evolving media ecosystems continue to disrupt the industry, PR professionals say polarization is doing the most damage, intensifying reputational risk, increasing executive scrutiny, and complicating corporate speech. 

The impact is difficult to quantify, yet impossible to ignore.

Drawing on global survey data from agency and in-house PR leaders, perspectives from the U.S. general public, and interviews with Fortune 500 Chief Communications Officers, this year’s report examines:

How polarization is increasing PR’s strategic importance inside organizations

Why executive visibility and corporate activism are being reconsidered

How trust in media is shifting across generations

What communications teams are doing to manage risk in an increasingly divided environment

Why the future of the profession remains optimistic despite societal disruption

The findings reveal a powerful paradox: while polarization is widely viewed as harmful to society, it is simultaneously elevating the role of communications leaders as strategic advisors to the C-suite.

Download the 2026 USC Annenberg Global Communication Report now to gain data-driven insights and practical guidance for leading communications in a polarized world.

Explore how polarization is reshaping public relations. Read the 2026 USC Annenberg Global Communication Report, sponsored by Meltwater.

2026 USC Annenberg Global Communication Report | Polarization & the Future of PR

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Polarization is Reshaping PR - What Comms Leaders Need to Know

AI and LLMs are reshaping how brands are discovered, discussed, and defined. Reputation can shift in minutes, misinformation can spread at scale, and AI-generated summaries may shape how customers, partners, and talent perceive your brand — often without you knowing.

Without the right approach, brands risk losing control of their narrative—to social platforms, algorithms, and AI systems.

What brand management means today: How consistency, trust, and reputation are shaped in a world of real-time information

Why brand equity matters more than ever: How strong brands gain flexibility, resilience, and long-term growth opportunities

How AI and LLMs are changing brand discoverability: Why tools like ChatGPT and AI Overviews now play a role in shaping brand perception

How consumer insights support smarter strategy: Turning conversations and sentiment into actionable intelligence

The tools modern brand leaders rely on: From unified dashboards to AI-powered insights that support faster, more confident decision-making

If you’re tasked with protecting and strengthening your brand in a rapidly evolving environment, this guide will help you understand what’s changed—and how to respond.

A practical guide to modern brand management. Tools for addressing AI, reputation risk, social listening, and LLM visibility

Brand Management in the Age of AI

This new Meltwater Intelligence Report explores how public conversation, social platforms, and AI driven search are reshaping trust and reputation in the Australian insurance sector.

With insights drawn from nearly 5,000 media and online conversations across a 90 day period, ‘The Trust Gap’ reveals how customer perception is formed in moments of friction, uncertainty, and silence, and why insurers are often absent from the conversations that matter most.

Trust is no longer owned by brands: It is shaped across forums, social platforms, and AI generated summaries, often without brands being present in the conversation.

Frustration doesn’t build, it spikes: Claims related issues spread quickly across social channels before reaching mainstream media, shaping perception in real time.

Small moments can become big narratives: Individual experiences can escalate rapidly, turning into broader sector wide conversations about fairness and trust.

Uncertainty fills the gaps: When information is fragmented across media, influencers, and AI generated sources, customers are left to interpret conflicting signals.

Influence now sits with the crowd: Creators, communities, and AI systems are redefining how insurance products are understood, beyond traditional brand control.

If you are not visible, you are defined by others: AI generated search is driven by earned media and open web sources, meaning third party content shapes how your brand is represented.

Download the full report to understand what makes Australians trust, question, and choose their insurance providers today.

The Trust Gap: Reputation in Australian Insurance

The Trust Gap: What Public Conversation Reveals About Reputation in Australian Insurance

A smarter approach to analyzing social listening.

Sentiment tells you how people feel. But it rarely tells you why, or what to do next.

In a fragmented media and social landscape, brands are drowning in unstructured data. While sentiment and emotion analysis have become standard tools, they often miss nuance, misread intent, and fail to provide the context needed for confident decision-making.

This white paper introduces attitudinal analysis, a modern approach that reveals tone, intent, and meaning behind conversations across social, media, and voice-of-customer data.

Why sentiment and emotion analysis break down in real-world text, especially with sarcasm, ambiguity, and mixed signals

The limitations of legacy emotion models (including why frameworks like Plutchik’s Wheel no longer hold up for linguistic analysis)

How attitudinal analysis captures intent, tone, and context — not just positivity or negativity

The Conversus Attitude Framework, a 15-attitude system built from hundreds of millions of real conversations

How attitudes predict behavior like churn, loyalty, advocacy, and purchasing intent more reliably than sentiment alone

Practical use cases for brand perception, crisis detection, competitive intelligence, CX, and marketing optimization

This white paper is essential reading for:

Marketing & Brand Leaders seeking deeper insight into perception and intent

PR & Communications Teams managing reputation, crises, and narratives

Insights & Research Professionals working with unstructured data

Agencies & Strategists delivering high-impact analysis to clients

CX & Customer Intelligence Teams focused on loyalty and churn prediction

Get the full white paper to explore how attitudinal intelligence transforms unstructured data into confident decisions.

Download your report on "From Sentiment to Emotion to Attitude"

How attitudinal analysis, reveals tone, intent, and meaning behind conversations.

From Sentiment to Emotion to Attitude [Report]

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From Sentiment to Emotion to Attitude

Document-level sentiment is no longer enough, here’s what to do instead.

Traditional sentiment analysis was built for a simpler media landscape. Today, conversations are complex, multi-entity, and full of nuance. 

This co-authored white paper from Meltwater and Converseon explains why organizations must move beyond document-level sentiment to entity- and aspect-level analysis to unlock more accurate, actionable, and AI-ready insights.

Download the white paper to learn how leading brands, researchers, and communications teams are closing critical insight gaps and future-proofing their analytics.

In Getting Granular with Sentiment Analysis, you’ll discover:

Why document-level sentiment creates blind spots in modern media and social analysis

How entity-level sentiment reveals who or what sentiment is actually about

How aspect-level sentiment uncovers the specific drivers shaping perception

Real-world examples showing how mixed sentiment is misclassified, and how granular models fix it

Why granular sentiment is becoming essential for AI accuracy, explainability, and governance

How entity- and aspect-level approaches improve recall, precision, and actionability

This report is designed for professionals who rely on sentiment data to guide decisions, including:

Social listening and media intelligence teams

Market research and insights professionals

Data, analytics, and AI governance leaders

If accuracy, transparency, and actionability matter to your work, this paper is for you.

Through Meltwater’s partnership with Converseon, research-grade NLP models and attitudinal analytics are integrated directly into Meltwater’s enterprise social intelligence capabilities, enabling deeper insight without sacrificing scale.

The result is a practical, evidence-based guide to the next evolution of sentiment analysis.

Download your report on Getting Granular with Sentiment Analysis

Why organizations must move beyond document-level sentiment to unlock more accurate, actionable, and AI-ready insights.

Getting Granular with Sentiment Analysis

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A practical GEO playbook for comms + marketing teams in 2026.


AI is changing discovery fast. Customers are no longer just searching, they’re asking and large language models (LLM) are increasingly the place where audiences get recommendations, summaries, and guidance on what to do next. 

For comms and marketing teams, that creates a new challenge and opportunity: how your brand appears in AI-generated answers, who gets mentioned, what gets said, and which sources shape the story. In this webinar, you’ll learn how leaders are defining visibility in an LLM-driven world and how to start measuring and improving it, without guessing.

Winning in an LLM-First World: How to build a 2026 GEO game plan for an LLM-first world, including how discovery is shifting and what marketing and communications teams should prioritize. 

Turning AI Visibility into Action: Real-world examples from a leading brand on how teams combine AI visibility with social insights and complementary research methods to uncover whitespace opportunities, close insight gaps, and strengthen consumer trust. 

Measuring AI Visibility with Gen AI Lens: Understand how Meltwater’s Gen AI Lens can compare how brands and competitors appear in LLM-generated answers, identify visibility gaps and the sources shaping model responses. 

Complete the form to view the webinar on-demand, and dive into these trends and see how you can apply these ideas to your strategy for the year ahead.

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On-Demand Webinar: GEO Strategies for 2026: How to Win in the LLM Visibility Era

AI is changing discovery fast. Customers are no longer just searching, they’re asking and large language models (LLM) are increasingly the place where audiences get recommendations, summaries, and guidance on what to do next. 

Thank you! We hope you will find this webinar insightful.

On-Demand Webinar: GEO Strategies for 2026 - APAC

The State of PR 2026 Report, created in partnership with leading agency, We. Communications reveals an industry at a crossroads. While PR fundamentals remain essential, AI, narrative risk, and rising expectations are reshaping how communications leaders operate and how they prove impact.

Diving into the survey input from more than 1,100 PR professionals, this on-demand webinar decodes the trends, tensions, and opportunities that matter most to communications executives right now.

During the session, we break down the findings into clear leadership takeaways, including:

The top challenges PR teams face, and why they’ve intensified

How AI is transforming PR workflows and strategic visibility

Shifts in media relations, pitching, and journalist engagement

The growing importance of social listening and narrative intelligence

The measurement gap, and what leaders must do to close it

This recorded session will leave you with data-backed insights and practical guidance to future-proof your comms function for the year ahead.

Request a Demo

 The State of PR 2026: What PR Leaders Need to Know Now

Explore the top PR and communications trends shaping 2026, based on insights from over 1,100 global PR professionals

On-Demand Webinar: 2026 State of PR

On-Demand Webinar: 2026 State of PR - AMER

State of PR 2026 Global Webinar - March 19

During the session, we break down the APAC survey data into clear leadership takeaways, including:

The top challenges APAC PR teams face, and why they’ve intensified

The State of PR 2026: What PR Leaders Need to Know Now

Explore the top APAC PR and communications trends shaping 2026, based on insights from over 1,100 global PR professionals

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