I’m not much for year-end reminiscing, and I’m usually pretty bad at predicting the future. But as I get ready for another CES, I feel unusually confident about one thing.

2026 is going to lock in a real shift in PR. We’re moving out of the attention era and into the memory era.

If you’ve worked in the field for any length of time, you know the old loop. An article publishes. The outlet logo goes on the website. Maybe a quote gets dropped into a pitch deck. Then everyone resets and chases the next “moment.”

That sequence is dying (yay!).

What matters now is what sticks around after the moment passes.

When someone asks an LLM to explain a category — which is increasingly how people explore consumer tech — your brand has to show up and do so clearly.

We all know that AI systems pull from what already exists. How journalists describe products. How founders explain the problem they’re solving. How categories and category norms get defined over time.

The existing corpus about your brand and your category is everything. A lot of that material comes from earned and owned media, editorial context, and repeated explanation across the web. Which means PR’s core function has shifted.

PR as the library builder

PR now shapes reference material.

Every article becomes a data point. Every quote turns into reusable language. You’ve probably seen this if you monitor your AI presence with a good tool like Scrunch

If you’re planning PR for 2026, this is the mental shift: PR as library building. The trouble is that activity is easy to confuse with progress. I’ve made that mistake myself. You may have as well.

A flurry of articles feels productive. A big launch spike looks good in a report. But when coverage describes you differently each time, leans on vague language, or frames the problem inconsistently, it doesn’t compound.

It cancels itself out.

AI systems struggle with that kind of noise the same way humans do. There’s nothing stable to grab onto.

The brands that show up reliably in AI answers tend to share one trait. They’ve been explained the same way, by different people, in different places, over time.

That doesn’t happen by accident. A lot of PR output is forgettable by design. We’ve all written it. Feature stacks that read like a laundry list. Bullshit updates that don’t connect to anything larger.

That material doesn’t teach anyone anything.

What travels is explanation that feels grounded. Those ideas survive and reappear in reviews and affiliate articles. Eventually, they show up in AI answers.

New ways of plying the craft of PR

The consumer tech companies that punch above their weight don’t “do PR” the way most teams think about it.

They’re disciplined about language. Careful about where they show up. Willing to say no to coverage that muddies the story. They protect the narrative even when it means fewer hits in the short term.

We’re moving past volume. In crowded consumer tech categories, performance advantages narrow fast. Pricing clusters and features start to mimic each other. What stands out is how a brand is understood when everything else converges.

Memory is the new differentiator, and if PR isn’t actively shaping how your brand is remembered, it’s not doing its job in 2026.