PR budgets are often the first to come under scrutiny when costs go up.
Connecting the dots between earned media spend and immediate revenue is a battle that even the most successful teams still face at the end of each quarter.
In Australia, 46% of businesses surveyed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in June 2026 reported that operating expenses were on the rise, driven by business overheads and staffing. This is a reality that research over the years and anecdotal experiences have affirmed as an exponentially increasing issue.
So what can teams do to protect their PR budget? Our team examines the root causes of the disconnect between spend and business impact, how to reframe the conversation with executives, and how to build a budget defence practically.
While PR has become a larger, more critical piece of brand discovery due to the relationship between earned media and AI search, spend is still on the chopping block.
Two-thirds of PR managers surveyed by Cision in their Inside PR 2026 report cite resource pressures as a concern.
Compared to other communications channels like paid media, ROI for PR campaigns can feel ‘soft.’ Paid metrics like CPC and CPA are easier to point to on a spreadsheet and are less contested than coverage volume, audience awareness and sentiment.
However, it has grown harder to ignore how earned media has become more intrinsic to consumer trust, and how coverage is bolstering LLM citations.
In a 2024 report, Echo Research found that corporate reputation was tied to 28% of market capitalisation on the S&P 500. Intangible factors like trust, brand perception, and leadership credibility are increasingly valued as a financial asset. Earned media thrives in this space, tying organisations to a myriad of beneficial associations, from familiar mastheads to independent journalists and quoted experts.
The rise of misinformation also implicates the consumer. The University of Canberra’s 2026 Digital News Report found that Australia has the highest level of ‘concern about what is real or fake online’ globally, up 3 points year-on-year to reach 77%.
Credibility is also prioritised by LLM models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity, which have become the search engine of choice for many Australians. Online news websites and press releases in particular provide the structure that AI platforms need when they are trying to source reliable information. It’s why press release distribution platform PR Newswire ranked twelfth on a study from Semrush on the most-referenced domains by LLMs.
As a result of where the media landscape has shifted, the cost of cutting PR has become even more volatile. Businesses risk weakened reputation management and visibility on established powerhouses for brand discovery.
Best practice PR crisis management views PR as reputational insurance. Consistent brand messaging, media relationships and historical transparency mitigate risk; moving beyond the bucket of ‘nice to have visibility.’ Brands with weaker earned media presence will be more exposed when a crisis hits.
To convey this to executive leadership, internal conversations need to work on redefining what earned media is and what coverage ensures against today.
Building a defence case to sustain or increase your PR budget means understanding the priorities and biases of your C-suite. Here are six ways to proactively shut down the idea that earned media visibility is not intrinsically tied your organisation's competitive momentum.
The value in PR metrics may be clear to your team, however, impressions and AVE often struggle to convince CFOs alone. They are often perceived as activity metrics rather than outcome metrics.
To justify their value, reporting needs to show the funnel that routes from coverage, to branded search lift, to site traffic, leads, and conversions.
To track lifted branded search volume around a specific date following a specific PR campaign, search intelligence software like Trajaan, Google Trends, or Google Search Console can demonstrate clear benchmarks.
Referral traffic tracking from press placements, something that most teams already have in place through UTMs or otherwise, is another outcome metric to rely on. Being able to cite a statement like “Coverage on [date] led to an X% increase in branded search the following week and X attributed website sessions” is a strong asset.
However, best practice reporting knows that PR often isn’t the last touchpoint before a website session or conversion. In most instances, multi-touch attribution data is the best way to showcase where and to what degree touchpoints with earned media have contributed to a conversion as a top-of-funnel driver.
To dissuade the bias the PR operates in a silo with vanity KPIs, make the effort to spell out and analyse how PR activities are working towards and achieving the same business goals that the sales and operations teams have.
Map earned media coverage to the success of product launches, expansion into a new market, investor confidence, or crisis resilience.
It becomes easier to defend PR deliverables like coverage volume and AI citations when the discussion you have around them is consistently tied to something leadership already cares about.
Paid media can be an easier investment to sell when there are so many clear metrics dispersed along the journey from cost to conversion.
To do the same for earned media, the focus should be on ROI. Define cost-per-impact clearly and use the same method each reporting period so that you have historical data to back up your argument.
In 2026, PR Agency Baden Bower surveyed 512 business owners who had invested in both paid advertising and earned editorial placements. The results showed a 4.7x higher ROI from PR, with 74% reporting better customer lifetime value from earned media. The core performance metrics used, that any team can incorporate into their own stack, included lead-to-close rate, customer lifetime value, brand search lift, and referral traffic quality.
Every organisation will have its own sales cycle, but it’s often the case that earned media compounds and becomes more effective at converting over a longer period of time. Being able to compare earned and paid media performance clearly, especially when executives are more familiar with the latter and unclear about the timeframe for ROI is a good place to start.
Media monitoring tools like Streem are built to prove the results of your work. Through our Instant Insights platform, you can curate a personalised, evergreen dashboard of charts and benchmarks that can be used again and again.
Some of the metrics you can use, which go beyond AVE, include:
SOV is a predictive reflection of market position. Where there is lost SOV in the media, it means that prospects are seeing less of your brand, and more of your competitors.
The charts below compare SOV between two major airlines. The first chart measures mentions across Online, Print, TV, Radio, Magazines, Podcast, and Influencer Social media types, where it is clear that Airline B has outpaced Airline A, owning 80.7% of the conversation over a 30-day period. In the second chart, which depicts SOV by Social Shares, the narrative switches, with Airline A owning 79.4% of instances where media items have been shared to social media.
Give a practical example, like SOV before and after a specific campaign run by your team, or SOV within a category where a competitor has recently succeeded after investing in press.
Linking spikes in media coverage to spikes in subsequent website traffic gives leadership a clear cause-and-effect relationship between your work and a core performance metric.
Within the Instant Insights dashboards on the Streem platform, one of our charts is dedicated to capturing how often specific terms within coverage has been mentioned. For example, the chart below tracks how often food, lines, comfort, and customer service were mentioned within a pool of wider coverage on Airline A from the previous example.
Using this data, you could track mentions of a product, campaign, features of a service or otherwise to showcase the effectiveness of PR investment and secure quantifiable outcomes for earned coverage.
This is your earned media quality, with a tie-in to LLM visibility. Domain authority is a search engine ranking score. While you may have earned more total coverage this year, this metric shows you whether that coverage is taking place on high-ranking sources that will cut through. It's also a metric that is prioritised by LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini when they are filtering for reliable information. This means that the better your domain authority is. the more effectively your earned media is being distributed across these platforms.
Sometimes, illuminating the forecasted outcome of cutting PR budget is the best way to convince leadership of its day-to-day significance.
Lay out what typically happens when investment in earned media visibility is put on pause, ideally using historical data from your own organisation’s activities. Cite declining SOV, drops in branded search over time and therefore less success with paid media that relies on traffic volume. Emphasise the tightening relationship between earned media and SEO, AEO, and GEO.
Highlight the risk of weakened crisis management. If your brand appears in negative news and the team doesn't already have allocated function, response times will be slower and less effective.
The takeaway here should be that pausing PR defers a larger cost.
AI has made corporate reputation a more tangible and measurable asset, and AI-generated results continue to rely on earned media for credible, up-to-date information.
LLMs have led to a rise in zero-click search in recent years, which is when a user's Google search results in them skimming over an AI overview rather than clicking on a website to find answers. Already, 50% of Australians who use AI for search use it most frequently to get a direct answer to a query. Responses reflect holistic brand health, and tell you what misconceptions the market has about your business.
With operating costs rising, it's more important now for PR and communications teams to be able to quantify and articulate the business impact of their work. Bookmark this page to keep the response structures below on hand.
| When they say... | Your reporting says... |
| "We can't measure the ROI" | "We can now tie coverage to branded search lift and traffic. Coverage on [date] after our PR efforts led to an X% increase in branded search the following week and X attributed website sessions." |
| "Paid media is more predictable" | "We've actually seen a X times higher ROI from earned media when compared to paid media, with X% better customer lifetime value." |
|
"Nobody will notice is we pause for a quarter" |
"Last quarter, our competitors gained X% Share of Voice in the market we're currently prioritising expansion in for both media mentions and |
| "What's the actual risk of cutting this?" | "Cutting PR spend means operating against one of our leading organisational goals at the moment, reputation management. Reducing monitoring and media engagement means opening ourselves up to risk and potentially larger costs than the budget line we're debating. After a full year, 51% of companies impacted by crisis still trade below their pre-crisis market value, according to a study by Phronesis over 2020-2024." |
Streem delivers a complete media intelligence solution backed by trusted local experts. Featuring realtime media monitoring, in-depth analytics and reporting, social listening, and press release distribution, Streem supports over 1100+ corporate, government, and agency clients across Australia and New Zealand.