Is your brand PR ready? 5 steps for the AI era

In this episode, Slava Balykov joins host Jason Mudd to discuss how you can assess your brand's public relations readiness before a crisis or AI tool exposes your gaps. Slava shares his five-step framework, explains how to respond when AI gets your brand wrong, and reveals what executives really want from PR reporting.

Tune in to learn more!

Watch the episode here:

Meet our guest:

Our guest is Slava Balykov, a senior communication and public relations leader and member of the Public Relations Institute of Ireland. Slava brings 15 years of experience across technology, financial services, telecommunications, and consumer brands. He helps organizations identify reputation gaps before a crisis or major change exposes them.

5 things you’ll learn during the full episode:

1. How to assess your brand's PR readiness in the AI era
2. Five steps to PR readiness
3. Why you should understand your information environment before investing in AI optimization
4. How to check what AI says about your organization and what to do when it’s wrong
5. What executives want from PR reporting and why coverage volume rarely delivers it

Listen to the episode here:

Quotables

• "Before optimizing anything, organizations need to understand the information environment that already exists around them." — Slava Balykov
• "Critical doesn't mean incorrect." — Slava Balykov
• "Treat readiness as an ongoing diagnostic, not a one-off exercise." — Slava Balykov
• "Quality is much more important than quantity." — Slava Balykov
• "Measuring impressions or the number of appearances feels like what people call vanity metrics, as opposed to true business impact." — Jason Mudd

If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to share it with a colleague or friend. You may also support us through Buy Me a Coffee or by leaving us a quick podcast review.

Resources

Guest’s contact info and resources:

• Slava Balykov on LinkedIn
• Slava's five steps to PR readiness in the AI era:
  
  1. Establish your baseline.
     Understand what information about your organization is currently discoverable and identify important gaps, contradictions, or outdated information.
  2. Review owned information.
     Make sure your website, corporate pages, leadership profiles, and other controlled touchpoints clearly and accurately explain who you are and what you do.
  3. Look beyond owned channels.
     Examine credible third-party sources, including media, industry publications, and other independent references, to understand the wider information environment around your organization.
  4. Diagnose the gaps.
     Compare owned and external information. Investigate where they materially differ and determine whether the issue is outdated information, factual inconsistency, legitimate criticism, or a broader positioning gap.
  5. Monitor over time.
     Information environments continually change. Regularly review important sources and AI-generated answers to identify new gaps and keep your communications foundation current.
     

Additional Resources:

• Reputation management for AI search: Monitoring and response framework
• Rethinking reputation management in public relations for the AI era
• AI search is the new front page
• How do you measure PR? A guide to meaningful metrics
• Listen to more episodes of the On Top of PR with Jason Mudd podcast.
• Find out more about Axia Public Relations.

If you like this episode, you're going to love this:

• AI and PR with Microsoft's CCO Frank Shaw
• The PR playbook for getting recommended by AI with Unusual
• How to prepare for any communication crisis with Tom Ciuba
• Crisis lessons learned from Southwest Airlines

Recorded: September, 2026

About your host Jason Mudd

Jason Mudd is a nationally recognized public relations expert featured by CNN, Entrepreneur, Forbes, NPR, The New York Times, PRWeek, and The Wall Street Journal.

Named North America’s top PR leader by the World Communication Forum, he serves as Partner of Axia Public Relations — recognized by Forbes as one of America’s Best PR Agencies.

Jason has advised some of the country’s most admired and fastest-growing companies, leading campaigns for iconic brands including American Airlines, Budweiser, Dave & Buster’s, GE, H&R Block, Hilton, HP, Miller Lite, New York Life, Pizza Hut, Southern Comfort, and Verizon.

He’s also a professional public speaker, accredited PR practitioner, published author, entrepreneur, and host of On Top of PR with Jason Mudd — a podcast ranked among the top 2.5% globally by Listen Notes and a top 100 marketing podcast on Apple Podcasts. His guests have included leaders from Disney, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, and Wells Fargo. Learn more about Jason at https://www.axiapr.com/team/jason-mudd and jasonmudd.com. 

Find more On Top of PR episodes on: 

Transcript

Episode Transcript

00:00 - 00:17

Slava Balykov

The first thing every communication team must do is assess the information environment around the organization. They must make sure it's clear, current and credible.

00:18 - 01:40

Jason Mudd:

Hello, and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm your host, Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations. I'm excited to bring you another episode of our show. Thank you for tuning in. We really appreciate it. If you have a moment, don't forget to leave us a review. We'll enter you into a drawing to win some On Top of PR swag and maybe even a personal gift from me.

Today, our guest is Slava Balykov. We're here to talk about whether your brand is PR ready and what communication teams should measure before a crisis. We're going to talk a lot about AI as well, so I'm excited about this episode. Let me welcome Slava.

Slava Balykov, a member of the Public Relations Institute of Ireland, brings 15 years of senior communication and public relations experience across technology, financial services, telecommunications and consumer brands.

He has led global PR programs and guided organizations through crises, reputation challenges and major business transformations. Slava helps organizations get more value from their communication assets. He builds stronger, more consistent reputations and identifies gaps before a crisis or change exposes them, including what AI can reveal about those blind spots.

Slava, welcome to On Top of PR.

01:41 - 01:43

Slava Balykov:

Thanks for having me. I'm really excited.

01:44 - 02:16

Jason Mudd:

Glad to have you.

Today, we're talking about whether your brand is PR ready and what communication teams should measure before a crisis. We'll get into how to audit what AI says about your brand and what to fix first.

We'll talk about how to assess PR readiness before a crisis or transaction tests it. And third, we'll talk about what executives want from PR reporting and why coverage volume rarely answers it. Slava, does that cover everything you want to talk about? Is there anything else we should include?

02:17 - 02:20

Slava Balykov:

I think you covered even more than I expected, so it's good.

02:21 - 02:43

Jason Mudd:

All right, let's do it. You're connecting with us today from Ireland. Thanks for joining us. I'm excited to jump into the question of whether your brand is PR ready and what communication teams should measure before a crisis. When you work with an organization, how do you help them answer whether their brand is PR ready?

02:44 - 03:19

Slava Balykov:

If we're speaking mostly about PR readiness in the AI era, this is really important, because many organizations talk a lot about AI optimization right now. But before optimizing anything, organizations need to understand the information environment that already exists around them: what their own channels say, what credible third parties say, where information is outdated or contradictory and what AI tools currently surface. For me, this is the starting point of PR readiness, especially in the AI era.

03:20 - 03:25

Jason Mudd:

Slava, let me ask you, what should communication teams measure before a crisis?

03:26 - 05:05

Slava Balykov:

For me, the first thing every communication team must do is assess the information environment around the organization. They must make sure it's clear, current and credible. I actually have a five-step PR readiness framework.

The first step is to establish the baseline. What can people and AI tools discover today? Identify gaps, outdated information and contradictions.

The second step is to check owned information. That's websites, corporate pages, even the metadata on your website, leadership profiles and all other controlled touchpoints. They should all clearly explain who the organization is and what it does.

The third step is to look beyond owned channels. You need to map credible third-party sources, like media, industry sources, analysts and other references. These are part of the information environment, even though the PR team has no control over them.

The fourth step is to diagnose divergence. That's where owned and external sources differ. Ask why, because the difference may be a factual problem, an outdated source, legitimate criticism or a narrative displayed incorrectly.

The fifth and final step is to monitor over time. Products, executive coverage and AI outputs change, so treat readiness as an ongoing diagnostic, not a one-off exercise. After you apply all these changes, you have to monitor and check everything, not once, but maybe every month, to see what changed.

05:06 - 05:11

Jason Mudd:

So check it every month to see what changed. Does that include your owned content as well as other moving parts?

05:12 - 05:55

Slava Balykov:

Everything. Especially in big organizations, you work with a lot of different departments, and sometimes communication between departments can struggle. So you need to always keep an eye on what's happening with your own sources. At the same time, you need to ask AI about your organization. Use different AI tools. Ask Claude and ChatGPT what they know about your organization. Ask about crisis situations around your organization. You need to make sure the information moves after you apply changes. Of course, PR isn't a magic tool. You can't snap your fingers and change everything.

05:56 - 05:56

Jason Mudd:

Right.

05:56 - 06:14

Slava Balykov:

This requires constant monitoring. It's like news coverage. You monitor it every day to see what's happening in your market, with your competitors and with your business. I think it's a pretty similar exercise.

06:15 - 06:28

Jason Mudd:

Right. So who owns this in an organization? Does the leader do it, or do they delegate it? Obviously, the leader is always responsible, but who do they delegate it to?

06:29 - 07:09

Slava Balykov:

If it's a big organization with an agency, the agency can do that as part of its day-to-day routine. They monitor news coverage using third-party tools or Google. Of course, someone from the team must be involved in this process. If the agency spots any divergence, or anything good or bad about how the company appears in AI tools, they can flag it to the PR person. But I think the communication team must own the process.

07:10 - 07:15

Jason Mudd:

OK. And when they don't like what AI says about them, how would you prescribe they fix it?

07:16 - 07:41

Slava Balykov:

It all depends, because critical doesn't mean incorrect. If the facts are wrong, seek a correction where appropriate. If the facts are correct and the criticism is accurate, the main job of the comms team is to understand it, make the company's position available where appropriate and address the underlying issue rather than trying to erase the criticism.

07:42 - 07:51

Jason Mudd:

Right. OK. The next thing we want to talk about is how to assess PR readiness before a crisis or transaction tests it.

07:52 - 08:34

Slava Balykov:

The approach is pretty similar. You have to start with analysis. You have to see where your company is now and where you have gaps. You can use the five-step PR readiness framework I mentioned to understand your company's position. If your company has significant gaps across its own sources, or if information about your company is incorrect somewhere, you need to fix it before it snowballs and potentially becomes a crisis, which everyone wants to avoid, of course.

08:35 - 08:47

Jason Mudd:

Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense, and I like how your framework applies to this as well. Let's talk about the other thing you mentioned, which is what executives want from PR reporting and why coverage volume rarely answers that.

08:48 - 10:09

Slava Balykov:

It's a really nice topic, because executives need to see the value of the coverage the company receives. To be honest, executives have no obligation to know every media outlet that exists. They rely on the PR and communication team. They want to see the result: not just that something was published somewhere, but that it actually reached their specific target audience.

With coverage volume, counting the pieces of coverage you receive sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense. For example, when you distribute a press release across the wire, you'll get tons of coverage. But is this the coverage you want? Will it bring value to your organization? So it's important to show executives why a specific piece of coverage matters to the organization and what value it brings. Showing the numbers is fine, and seeing hundreds of publications is really lovely. But as I said, quality is much more important than quantity.

10:10 - 10:46

Jason Mudd:

I absolutely agree. I don't know many CEOs who are asking how many media clips we acquired this week, this month or this quarter. They're truly interested in how that coverage impacted the organization. Measuring impressions or the number of appearances feels like what people call vanity metrics, as opposed to true business impact. What did that media coverage, visibility or number of news stories actually do for our business? How has it made our company more successful? Did it generate more leads, generate more revenue, shift perception or shift support?

10:47 - 10:47

Slava Balykov:

Yeah, exactly.

10:48 - 10:54

Jason Mudd:

Very good. Well, this was very helpful. I think you shared some interesting insights with our audience. Do you want to cover anything else while we're together today?

10:55 - 11:26

Slava Balykov:

One more thing I'd like to cover briefly. Right now, a lot of people focus on adopting different AI tools and optimization tools before checking the fundamentals. I want to highlight it one more time: The information environment is key. If you don't understand what's happening around your organization, you'll probably run into a lot of problems when you start AI optimization or launch any big campaign.

11:27 - END

Jason Mudd:

Yes, I completely agree. You've got to stay ahead of it for sure. Very helpful.

Well, Slava, this has been a great episode. I really appreciate the insights you shared today.

To our audience, thank you for tuning in to On Top of PR and giving us the privilege and the pleasure of helping you stay on top of PR. If you found this episode beneficial, please take a moment to share it with a friend or colleague in the profession who would benefit from hearing these insights. Again, we appreciate all that you do, and thanks for your support of On Top of PR.