PR Audit: Where Your Coverage, Social and Messaging Stand, and What to Fix First

A PR audit is a structured review of how your communications are actually performing: the coverage you earn, the share of voice you hold against competitors, the messages that reach your audience, the social and content activity that supports them, and what your stakeholders believe as a result. A good public relations audit ends with a ranked list of what to fix first, ordered by commercial impact rather than by what is easiest to tidy up.

This guide is for the communications or marketing director who has to decide where next year's budget goes and wants an honest picture first. It gives you the full checklist, explains what you get at the end, and shows how we run one at Prohibition as the first stage of our Create, Engage, Convert method.

If your marketing team needs outside help with PR strategy, creative ideas and press office support, an integrated PR agency can cover all three, and the sensible way to start is with an audit rather than a retainer. At Prohibition PR, a Leeds-based integrated agency, we run ours as the first stage of our Create, Engage, Convert method, and the same team then delivers the strategy, the creative campaigns and the day-to-day press office the findings call for.

When you need one

Six situations prompt a PR audit.

1. A new marketing or communications director has arrived

A new comms or marketing lead should audit before they have signed off any new activity, because it is the only time they can report an honest baseline without owning the results.

2. You are reviewing your agency or going out to pitch

Audit before a re-pitch, not after, so every agency pitches against the same evidence rather than its own reading of your problem. The audit becomes the brief, and it stops the incumbent's reporting format from defining what success looks like.

3. You are rebranding or repositioning

A rebrand changes what you say; an audit tells you what people currently hear. Message pull-through analysis shows which existing messages have landed with journalists and customers and which are only alive in your own decks.

4. You have just come through a crisis

After a crisis, an audit measures what the episode did to sentiment, search results and stakeholder trust, and tests whether the response plan worked.

5. Results have plateaued

When coverage volume holds steady but nothing moves commercially, the audit finds out whether the problem is reach, message, audience or measurement. Sometimes the activity is fine and the KPIs are wrong.

6. You need to justify the budget to the board

A board wants to know what communications does for the business, not how many clippings it produced. An audit replaces coverage counts with share of voice, sentiment movement and the commercial measures the board already tracks.

PR audit vs communications audit vs media audit vs reputation audit

The terms overlap and suppliers use them loosely. The practical differences are scope and who commissions them.

In plain terms: a media audit covers coverage; a PR audit covers coverage plus social, content, messaging, AI visibility and readiness; a communications audit adds internal channels; a reputation audit goes deeper on perception. We run the PR audit as the default and extend it into the other two where the brief calls for it.

What a PR audit should include

This is the full checklist. Each item is scored, benchmarked against competitors where possible, and written up with a finding and a recommendation.

Earned media coverage: volume, tier, sentiment and message pull-through

Count the coverage, then weight it. Tier the outlets by relevance to your audience, not by circulation alone: national news and broadcast, national trade and specialist titles, regional press, high-authority online and podcasts. Code sentiment as positive, neutral or negative by hand or with a tool that is checked by hand. Then measure message pull-through: the percentage of pieces that carry at least one of your key messages. A brand with 300 pieces and 15% pull-through has a messaging problem; one with 80 pieces and 70% pull-through has a reach problem. They need different fixes.

Share of voice against three to six competitors

Share of voice is your proportion of total coverage and conversation across a defined competitor set over a defined period. Pick three to six competitors that your customers actually weigh you against, measure across earned media and social separately, and look at quality-weighted share as well as raw share. A competitor with half your coverage but twice your national tier presence is winning on the measure that matters.

Spokesperson and executive visibility

Who is quoted, where, on what topics, and does it match the themes the business wants to own? Map each spokesperson's coverage and social presence against the message framework, and note where a competitor's chief executive is defining a topic yours should be leading. When thin executive visibility is the finding, it is also one of the quickest to fix.

Key messages and consistency across press, web and social

Pull the message framework, if one exists, and test it against what actually appears in press releases, the website, LinkedIn, product pages and sales decks. Expect to find more than one version of the same proposition in circulation. Score consistency per channel and identify the messages journalists repeat unprompted; those are your proven ones.

Social and content performance

Audit social as a reputation channel, not a vanity channel. Follower counts tell you little. Look at engagement rate per post by format, share of conversation in your category, how competitors' content performs on the same platforms, which owned content earns links and mentions, and where your audience discusses the category when you are not in the room. This is the module we run as Prohibition Insight 360, which uses social listening and machine-learning content analysis across your brand and up to six competitors, and it slots into the wider audit as one scored area.

Stakeholder and audience perception

Coverage tells you what was published; perception tells you what landed. Interview a cross-section of stakeholders, which depending on your sector might mean customers, retail buyers, journalists, investors, partners, employees, councillors or commissioners. Ask what they associate with the brand, what they would say to a peer, and where they get their information. Score each group for influence and current sentiment. The gap between what you say and what they repeat back is the single most useful finding in the audit.

AI search visibility

Brand research now also happens in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, and those answers are built from the coverage, content and third-party sources you have already earned. The audit checks whether you are named, cited and described accurately for category, problem-led and competitor queries, and which sources the assistants draw on. We run this as a dedicated AI Overview Visibility Audit, which produces its own scorecard and feeds the PR audit's fix list because the remedies span earned coverage, clearer owned content and technical fixes such as structured data and internal linking.

Crisis and issues readiness

Is there a current risk register, a crisis plan that names people rather than roles, a holding statement bank, trained spokespeople and monitoring that would catch an issue out of hours? Test it with a short tabletop scenario rather than reading the document. Our founder Chris Norton leads our crisis work personally, and the findings usually go straight into a Reputation Guardian playbook if the gaps are serious.

Measurement set-up against AMEC principles and commercial KPIs

Finally, audit how you measure. The benchmark is the Barcelona Principles 3.0 from AMEC, the international body for communications measurement, and its Integrated Evaluation Framework, which traces activity through outputs and out-takes to outcomes and business impact. Two findings to look for. First, advertising value equivalents are still being reported: AVEs price coverage as if it were ad space, AMEC rejects them outright, and we never report them. Second, the public relations KPIs in use are output measures (pieces, reach, impressions) with nothing tied to the commercial outcomes the board tracks. The audit replaces them with a short set of outcome KPIs, which we build using our AMEC-aligned proINSIGHTS measurement framework.

Can you do it yourself?

Partly, and you should. An in-house team can honestly audit coverage volume and tier, message consistency across owned channels, the state of the crisis plan and the measurement set-up, provided it has monitoring data and a few days of focused time. Public relations auditing of this kind costs nothing but attention.

Three things are hard to do from inside. Stakeholder interviews lose candour when the person asking is the person being judged; a journalist or a retail buyer will tell an outsider what they will not tell your head of comms. Competitor benchmarking needs listening and media intelligence tools licensed across the whole competitor set, which most in-house teams only hold for their own brand. And nobody can score their own past work without an attachment to it; the audit is partly a verdict on decisions that someone in the room made. An outside audit is worth paying for when you need those three things, which in practice means every trigger listed above except a routine annual check.

What you get at the end

The deliverable should be something a director can take into a board meeting and a team can work from the following Monday. Ours contains five parts:

• Scorecard. Each of the nine areas above scored on a consistent scale, with the evidence behind the score and a one-line verdict.
• Competitor benchmark. Share of voice, sentiment, tier mix and executive visibility for you and the agreed competitor set, for earned media and social separately.
• Message map. What you say, what the media repeats, what stakeholders say back, and the gaps between the three, with a recommended message hierarchy.
• Prioritised fix list. Split into quick wins that can be done with existing budget and people, and longer plays that need a plan and investment. Each item is ranked by expected commercial impact against effort, so you know what to fix first.
• Recommended KPIs. A short set of outcome measures mapped to the AMEC framework and to the commercial numbers you already report: sales, leads, footfall, listings, sign-ups, sentiment shift or behaviour change, depending on the business.

The fix list is the part worth arguing over, because that conversation is where budget decisions get made.

How Prohibition runs a public relations audit

Prohibition PR is a Leeds-based integrated agency that combines PR, social media, content, creative and video in one team. Our PR audit covers earned media, social, content, messaging, stakeholder perception and AI search visibility, and it is the Create stage of our Create, Engage, Convert method delivered as a standalone project. Once the audit is complete, the same team can go on to provide the PR strategy, the creative campaign ideas and the ongoing press office support that the findings recommend, so nothing is lost between diagnosis and delivery.

The sequence runs as follows:

1. Discovery call and scoping. We agree the competitor set, the stakeholder groups to interview, the period to analyse and which of the modules you need. Pricing is scoped at this stage, because an audit for a single-brand consumer business and one for a multi-brand group with a public affairs dimension are different jobs.
2. Data collection. Coverage data from your monitoring provider or ours, social listening across your brand and competitors through Insight 360, AI assistant checks through the AI Overview Visibility Audit, and your existing plans, message frameworks and reports.
3. Stakeholder interviews. Conversations across the groups agreed at scoping, conducted by a senior member of our team.
4. Analysis and scoring. Coding, benchmarking and message pull-through analysis against the competitor set.
5. Presentation and fix list. The five-part deliverable above, presented to you and, where useful, to your leadership team.

A full audit with stakeholder interviews typically runs four to six weeks from discovery call to presentation, and we confirm the dates at scoping. The length is set mostly by interview scheduling, not analysis: the Insight 360 social module alone is delivered in 7 to 12 working days depending on package, and a coverage, social and messaging review without interviews can be turned around in two to three weeks.

The point of the audit is what happens next. When we started working with Keystone Brewing Group, the state of trade coverage was the first finding: media fixated on private equity ownership, closures and job losses while the business was trying to be seen as a stable, credible acquirer. That finding set the programme: a corporate press office for acquisition news, profiling of the chief executive in trade media and on LinkedIn, and brand PR running alongside. Negative sentiment fell from 16% to 8.7%, with 95% of coverage positive or neutral. The audit did not deliver that result; it told us which problem to work on first.

Where the audit points to a sustained growth challenge for a consumer brand rather than a reputation one, it usually becomes the Create stage of Growth Catalyst, our integrated programme for FMCG and consumer brands. Either way, the PR services that follow are delivered by the same people who ran the audit.

A shorter version for public sector teams

A public sector communications audit covers the same ground with three changes. Stakeholder mapping is wider and more formal: residents, service users, elected members, commissioners, regulators, partner bodies and staff, each scored for influence and sentiment. Objectives are framed as behaviour change rather than awareness, so the audit tests whether communications has moved uptake, compliance or participation, and whether the evidence would satisfy the attitudinal and behavioural indicators a public body is expected to report. And accountability reporting matters more: the deliverable has to show how communications spend served the community, in a form that stands up in a scrutiny committee. Our public sector PR work for organisations including NHS Leeds and Housing 21 is built around stakeholder assurance and showing how funding serves a community purpose, and our Behaviour Shift programme supplies the behavioural measurement framework.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost in the UK?

As of October 2026 we scope the price of a full PR audit after a discovery call, because cost depends on the number of competitors benchmarked, the number of stakeholder interviews, the period analysed and whether the AI visibility and social listening modules are included. A media-and-social-only audit sits at the lower end; a multi-brand audit with a long interview list and public affairs stakeholders sits at the upper end.

How long does it take?

Typically four to six weeks from discovery call to presentation for a full audit with stakeholder interviews, with dates confirmed at scoping. A coverage, social and messaging review without interviews can be completed in two to three weeks. Interview scheduling, not analysis, is what sets the timescale.

How often should you audit your PR?

Rerun the full audit whenever one of the six triggers above occurs, and at minimum once the KPI set it produced has been reported for a full year. In between, report those KPIs quarterly, so the next audit is a check on direction rather than a rediscovery of the baseline.

What data do we need to provide?

Access to your media monitoring and social analytics for the period under review, your current message framework and crisis plan if they exist, recent coverage and campaign reports, and a list of stakeholders willing to be interviewed. If you have no monitoring in place, we pull the coverage and social data ourselves, which adds a little time to data collection.

Is an audit worth it if we already have an agency?

Yes, and it is often most valuable then. An independent audit gives you a view of your agency's work that is not produced by your agency, benchmarks it against competitors using the same method, and tests whether the KPIs it reports connect to anything commercial. If the agency is performing well, the audit will say so and give it a sharper brief.

How do you measure share of voice and coverage quality beyond counting clippings?

Share of voice is your proportion of total coverage and conversation across an agreed competitor set, measured separately for earned media and social. Quality is layered on top by weighting each piece for outlet tier, sentiment and whether it carries a key message, so a quality-weighted share of voice can look very different from a raw count. The AMEC framework then takes that through to outcomes and business impact.

Where to start

If you are about to set next year's communications budget, read our reputation management guide for the stakeholder-insight method in more depth, and how we work in plain terms to decide whether an integrated team suits you. Then book a discovery call and we will scope a PR audit around your competitors, your stakeholders and the decision you need it to inform.