How do PR firms and reputation firms split responsibilities?

The split follows the mechanics of each discipline. PR firms own the earned-media layer: messaging and positioning, story development, journalist relationships, and the placements that come out of them. That is their expertise and it does not transfer cleanly to anyone else. Reputation firms own the layers earned media flows into and the channels PR was not built to reach: the Google result page, the Wikipedia article through disclosed conflict-of-interest editing, the AI narrative across the major engines, the entity signals and structured data that drive the Knowledge Panel, and the proprietary technology that tracks all of it. In a joint engagement these are not handed off in sequence; they are coordinated against common goals from the start. A placement is planned with its search and AI afterlife in mind, and the reputation work is briefed with the messaging it needs to support. The boundary is clear enough to avoid overlap and porous enough that the two halves actually reinforce each other.