The second crisis is the version of a company's crisis that search engines and AI summaries repeat after the news cycle ends, and the company often does not write it. In March 2025, Pew Research Center found that Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit supplied 15% of the sources in Google AI summaries, and government websites supplied 6%. A company statement competes with documents the company does not control.
What Is the Second Crisis Hypothesis?
The Second Crisis Hypothesis is 5WPR's name for the idea that, within about 90 days of a major incident, most of the documents search systems cite about a brand are written by other parties, such as regulators, courts, legislators, unions and reporters.
The first crisis is the event and the company's response to it. The second crisis is the record that forms around the brand name afterward, which is what a person meets when searching for what happened to that company weeks or months later.
This is a hypothesis, not a measured law. Pew's figures describe how Google cites sources across all searches, not crisis searches specifically, and the 90-day window is 5WPR's working period, long enough for hearings, investigations and lawsuits to start producing documents.
Who Writes the Record in the First 90 Days?
Outside parties start writing the record within weeks, and the Southwest Airlines meltdown shows how. Southwest canceled 16,900 flights and stranded more than two million passengers over the 2022 Christmas holiday, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
On February 9, 2023, about six weeks after the meltdown, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on it. CEO Bob Jordan did not attend because of a scheduling conflict, the company said, and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson testified and apologized, CNBC reported.
Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, told the committee that his union and others had warned for years that the airline's IT systems needed upgrades, according to CNN reporting. Southwest's apology and a union's account of the cause now sit in the same public record. The Department of Transportation later issued a $140 million civil penalty and said Southwest would pay more than $750 million in total for the meltdown.
What Did Delta and CrowdStrike Put on the Record?
Delta Air Lines sued CrowdStrike on October 25, 2024, 98 days after the July 19 outage, and CrowdStrike said it had filed its own action seeking a declaratory judgment. Delta's suit, filed in Fulton County Superior Court in Georgia, claimed more than $500 million in lost revenue and extra expenses, the Associated Press reported.
The same Associated Press report says CrowdStrike called Delta's account misinformation and pointed to its lawyer's statement that its liability was less than $10 million.
Each side's version now exists as a long, dated legal document with named parties and dollar figures, written for a judge instead of a news cycle. A search system looking for specifics about the outage can retrieve those documents and the reporting on them next to each company's statements. Delta's handling of the outage is covered in 5W's Delta CrowdStrike crisis case study.
Why Would AI Summaries Favor Documents Over Statements?
Pew's March 2025 data shows that Google AI summaries cite government sites and Wikipedia more often than standard results do. Pew analyzed 68,879 Google searches by 900 U.S. adults. Government sites were 6% of AI summary sources versus 2% of standard results, and Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit together supplied 15% of AI summary sources.
Eighteen percent of those searches produced an AI summary, and 60% of searches that began with a question word did. A person asking what happened to a brand is asking a question, the search shape most likely to get a summary.
When a summary appeared, users clicked a regular result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% when none appeared, and ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with a summary, compared with 16% without one. For many readers, the summary may be the whole answer. Pew measured Google only, in March 2025, and noted that a summary for a given search can change over time.
How Can a Company Audit Who Wrote Its Second Crisis?
A company can audit its second crisis by running the same question-style searches at day 7, day 30 and day 90 and labeling every cited source by who wrote it.
| Day | Actions | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Day 7 | Run 10 to 15 question searches about the brand name in Google and in AI products, such as "what happened to [brand]", "is [brand] safe" and "[brand] lawsuit". Record every cited URL and label it company, regulator or court, news outlet, reference site, or forum and video. | Baseline authorship share |
| Day 30 | Repeat the same searches word for word. Add any new hearings, filings or agency actions to the source list. | Change in authorship share and a list of new outside documents |
| Day 90 | Repeat once more and compare all three runs. Note which outside documents carry claims the company disputes or has since resolved. | Gap list: disputed or outdated claims and the document that carries each |
Authorship share is the percentage of cited sources the company wrote itself. If that share falls between day 7 and day 90 while regulator, court and forum sources rise, the second crisis is forming without the company's input. 5W's guide to crisis communications in AI search covers how to log each prompt, answer and citation.
What Can a Company Add to the Record Itself?
A company can add dated documents about what changed and who confirmed it, because outside sources need something to cite after the lawsuit and the hearing.
The most useful additions are the resolution documents the outside record already contains: a regulator's closing order, a settlement summary, an independent audit. The Department of Transportation release on Southwest lists the compensation the airline must provide, so a company page that links it puts the remedy and the regulator's account side by side.
A company cannot remove a lawsuit or a hearing transcript. It can make sure the newest documents describe the fix. A company that publishes only a day-one statement leaves a 90-day record that holds the accusation and not the repair. That page belongs in the plan described in 5W's crisis communications plan guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is the Second Crisis in PR?
The second crisis is the record that forms around a brand name after the first crisis, made up of documents such as regulator orders, court filings, hearing transcripts, news reports and forum threads. 5WPR names this the Second Crisis Hypothesis and treats it as testable, not proven.
How Long Does the Second Crisis Last?
No study has measured its length. 5WPR uses 90 days as a working window for the period when hearings, investigations and lawsuits start producing documents, and public documents do not expire when the news cycle ends.
Can a Company Control What AI Summaries Say About a Crisis?
No. Retrieval systems select sources, and Pew found that summaries can change over time. A company can publish dated, specific facts, link the official documents, and check the answers on a schedule.
Conclusion
Search repeats the documents that are most specific and most official, not the statement that came first. A company that publishes its resolution record and measures authorship share at day 7, day 30 and day 90 decides whether its second crisis includes the fix.
The first-hour playbook that comes before all of this is in 5W's guide to crisis PR.
