PR software this week: Oct. 20 to 25, 2026

No. 2 · Oct. 26, 2026

📍 Who we’re tracking

The map has 173 companies this week, up from 143. Most of the new ones are companies people suggested in the LinkedIn comments, so thanks for your help! There’s also a new chart showing how fast 10 of the most common AI features spread, from the first company to ship each one to the companies that followed. I’ll be sharing that in more detail next week.

Next week I’ll send you a quick way to tell me which tools you’re using and what types of news you want to hear about, so that each update email will be tailored to your specific needs. But for now, here are last week’s biggest updates:

🚀 New last week

• Pytch launched an agent for startups, businesses and comms teams. It finds journalists and sends pitches and follow-ups from your connected Gmail account (Oct 19).
• Intelligent Relations added an always-on agent to Preston, the AI PR platform it launched in 2023. The agent watches the news, matches stories to your company and builds campaigns with journalists and drafted pitches. You can adjust each campaign before it sends, and outreach goes from your own email account (Oct 21).
• Featured added three free databases in four days: Substack newsletters (Oct 19), local TV newsrooms inside its newsjacking tool (Oct 20), then independent bookstores for author events (Oct 22).
• Notified opened an MCP beta, so eligible clients in North America can draft GlobeNewswire releases and get reporting from Microsoft Teams and Copilot (Oct 21).
• AI visibility data is moving into the AI assistant. Press Ranger runs its AI visibility reports in Claude, ChatGPT and Codex (Oct 20). Knowatoa’s MCP tools now compare one period with the last, AirOps’s can tell you which pages are losing citations, and RunPR is piloting its research inside Claude Code (all Oct 19).
• Otterly launched Brand Profiling, which shows what AI answers say about your brand (Oct 21). Surfacd’s new Queries report shows the web searches AI platforms run for your prompts (Oct 19).

🔎 What we’re seeing

One form factor we’re seeing more and more is the “always-on” AI agent. Last week it was Intelligent Relations’ new agent in Preston and Pytch’s new AI PR agent. Preston’s watches the news, spots stories your company or clients could be part of, picks the journalists and drafts the pitches. Pytch’s keeps finding journalists as they write about your industry, then pitches them and follows up from your Gmail.

That flow, from trend to opportunity to pitch, isn’t new. Since June, OnePitch, Muck Rack, Medialyst, RunPR and Featured have each shipped a version that spots the story and suggests an angle or drafts the pitch. Preston itself has matched stories daily since July. I expect we’ll see a lot more of these.

Very few tools take people out of it entirely, though. Of the 14 pitching agents on the map, only two say they send with no approval step at all: JournoReach, which answers journalists’ requests for sources, and PodGuestAI, which pitches podcasts. Pytch sends on its own once you approve a strategy, and PRBot runs on autopilot unless you turn on review. Of the other 10, four have you approve every pitch, five let you turn on autopilot, and one asks you to approve once.

That may be for the best. In an interview with HARO’s CEO, the reporter sums up HARO’s own report: human-written pitches were about three times more likely to get featured than AI-written ones. The CEO says 35% of journalists on HARO have opted out of pitches it flags as AI-generated.

I’m curious which one PR teams want: an agent that runs the whole campaign, or one that just brings them better opportunities.