Nope, it was not an astrological event.
That glow lighting up the sky? That’s the Comms-Industrial-Complex reading Gartner’s predictions about PR budgets doubling by 2027 thanks to Generative Engine Optimization.
But extra cash for agencies is not the real story. Gartner’s third prediction is.
It reads:
By 2029, 45% of CCOs will adopt narrative intelligence technologies to support reputation monitoring amid an intensifying disinformation landscape.
Gartner is largely correct about this.
However, widespread monitoring of narrative will happen sooner than 2029. Narrative consistency is already one of the most important responsibilities of PR in the LLM era. It will be how competitors attack one another.
A range of new metrics are already rising to prominence to reflect new realities.
Among these are:
- Narrative Drift Index (NDI). This concept gets at the difference between how LLMs view your brand and how you want them to understand you. PR teams will soon obsess over NDI. We may even see billings tied to changes in it. In case you are interested, we developed a rudimentary measurement framework for the concept here.
- Narrative Consistency Score (NCS). As you might guess, this metric looks at a sample of communications outputs – from web pages, to media coverage, Subreddits, and activity in other places – and extracts key themes and assesses consistency. It is going to be important not only as a brand health lens but also in times of crisis.
- Share of Explanation (SOE). As the future unfolds, the real prize will go to those who shape how a category is framed by LLMs. Share of Explanation is the main way to assess this. The metric gets at how much of a brand’s language influences wider, category-level explanation. Those who define the playing field will win the game.
So how should you prepare for the brave new world that will be here sooner than Gartner claims?
In addition to shifting how you see PR, there are two parallel tracks to go down if you haven’t already done so:
Start with a heuristic and system we are calling the Brand Narrative Stack, which aims to give you a full system for building monitoring clarity and signal consistency.
You should also give this GEO checklist a look for any gaps you might need to fill.
We are in a world of new, narrative architecture, and any Comms or Marketing pro will soon be judged by how robustly their work contributes to the building and maintenance of these structures.