If you’ve ever sent a pitch and heard nothing back, this one’s for you.

We sat down with Carly Martinetti, co-founder of PR agency Notably, to talk about what actually makes a pitch land, and what most people are getting wrong.

Carly has spent years securing coverage in places like CNBC, Fortune, Fast Company, and Gizmodo, and her approach is pretty different from what a lot of digital PR practitioners are used to.

For starters, her media lists top out at 15 to 20 people. Not 100. (Something that you’re probably well aware of if you’ve read our spray and pray study.

In this episode, Carly breaks down how she finds the right journalists, how she structures a pitch, how she creates compelling angles even when there’s no hard news, and why sending the wrong pitch to the right reporter can cost you more than just that one placement.

Whether you’re coming at this from a traditional PR background or a digital PR and SEO angle, there’s a lot to take away here.

Below is a slightly edited transcription (with the help of AI).

Can you tell us about Featured Creature?

Carly: Yes! Blast from the past. Featured Creature is a website I started in college, so it’s been a minute. I have a passion for unique and weird animals that you’ve probably never heard of before.

At the time, no one was really giving the spotlight to animals that deserved it. The publicist in me wanted to promote the animals that needed one. So I started this website — a lot of them were endangered species, very rare, hard to find.

It’s actually where I fell in love with headline writing and coming up with story angles, because oftentimes the animals themselves weren’t traditionally that interesting, and yet I wanted to get the word out about them for conservation’s sake. Quick example: there was a caterpillar that was fuzzy and white with crazy hair.

If I wrote a headline like “White caterpillar lives in the rainforest and helps other animals survive,” it’s okay. But instead I framed it as “the Albert Einstein of caterpillars” because of the wild, crazy hair — and it took off like wildfire.

That framing laid a foundation for everything I do today, where I work with companies that are either not well known or in industries that aren’t traditionally exciting. It’s my job to figure out what story is going to skyrocket them to fame.

Vince: I love it. It’s a fantastic website. I take it it’s not active anymore?

Carly: Not these days — I’m a little busy. But honestly, I’d love to get back to it. I was thinking of launching a Substack version. If anyone listening wants that, let me know.

Vince: Do it! It’s all about the newsletter these days. I’ll put a link in the show notes. I was actually showing my kids some of the animals — they’re really into animals right now. I think it sets a great groundwork for some of what we’re going to talk about today.

Is there a difference between digital PR and traditional PR?

Carly: I think there are more similarities than differences, for sure. The biggest standout difference is that digital PR is often measured by backlinks — the number of backlinks you achieve from a campaign equals success.

That’s not the goal of traditional PR. The goal is more to get coverage in tier-one media that’s going to be brand-building and helpful to the company in some way, whether that’s expert commentary, thought leadership, or a feature story on the company or the person behind it. It’s more about the coverage and the story versus securing a link at volume.

That SEO value is the main delineation, I think — digital PR has that SEO focus, while traditional is more about brand awareness and brand building.

How has AI impacted your workflow?

Carly: It’s a good question. I do think there are elements of digital PR — more specifically around data — that we’re now leaning into more than ever. We’re telling clients: we need original research, we need original data, because that’s what’s going to rank in LLMs as the primary source. That used to be a nice-to-have, and now it’s getting close to a need-to-have. Clients still aren’t asking much for backlinks in my world — it’s more about: did we get our message across? Did we get a story in a major publication that’s going to move the needle on a business goal? So it’s not that different yet, but things are changing quickly.

Have you seen more clients interested in using PR to get into AI citations?

Carly: We still have to tell them this is even a thing. There’s a gap between awareness on the client side and how much PR people recognize that it matters.

People are hearing whispers about it, but they don’t really understand how it all works. We make it part of our story now to say: not only does PR help with brand building, brand awareness, trust, and third-party endorsements — it’s more important than ever to have that LLM through-line so you’re consistently cited and picked up.

It’s going to happen, but it hasn’t reached an inflection point yet.

Vince: That’s really interesting. It makes sense when you consider how traditional PR teams interact with brands versus digital PR teams. In our State of Digital PR report, we ask which areas of the business digital PR interacts with most closely — and it’s almost always the SEO team. The brand team and traditional PR teams are very low on that list.

Carly: We never talk to SEO — like, ever.

Vince: Which I think is a missed opportunity, honestly. The other thing we’re seeing is that because of AI, digital PR practitioners are now more able to say it’s not just about links. There was even leaked Google information a few years ago that solidified the belief that it’s not all about links. Now with AI, there’s correlated data between AI mentions and brand mentions. So people are more confidently saying it’s links and coverage now — not just links.

One of the things you mentioned was this idea of a through-line. In digital PR, success has been tied to keyword rankings. A smaller percentage focus on just brand awareness.

What metrics do you use to measure success?

Carly: We actually link up with the sales team most of the time to figure out what’s going to move the needle for them — what kind of coverage, what headline, would make their lives easier.

We start from the business goals side rather than the traditional PR metrics side. We still count things like number of hits, impressions, and domain authority, but at the end of the day, if you can tie what PR is doing to help the sales team be better at their job, that’s the best outcome.

I end up talking to everyone from the CEO to the CMO to the head of sales to figure out where the gaps are.

Where is the sales team getting pushback? Is there a competitor perceived as more accessible?

If we can get a story that corrects that narrative, that’s a win. That also lets us be very strategic with the types of coverage we secure, the publications, and the audiences we’re targeting.

Always start there — if you’re doing traditional PR, make sure you align on what success looks like early and often, otherwise you’re setting yourself up for failure.

What services do you offer most frequently, and what tends to be most effective?

Carly: Media relations is what we do most frequently and most effectively — that’s number one.

But when I say media relations, I don’t mean the traditional spray-and-pray approach of blasting out press releases and hoping someone bites.

We’re very targeted.

Everything is almost one-to-one.

I’ll spend 30 to 40 minutes writing a single pitch to a single reporter because the hit rate is so much higher when you actually take the time to research them and what they’ve written about.

A lot of firms are still stuck in the blast-everything mode, but I’ve found the targeted approach is more effective even if it takes more time. That’s our reputation — consistently delivering higher-tier coverage because of how we work.

Hero content comes up frequently too, but more as a nice-to-have. There are so many other ways to get commentary and coverage that we don’t always need it.

It often comes down to client budget and whether they want to invest the time and energy, especially for more complex interactive pieces.

We very rarely see that as a core part of our process.

Vince: You brought up spray-and-pray, which is basically why we built List IQ — the research shows hyper-relevant, personalized pitches dramatically outperform blasting to hundreds of journalists.

Can you walk me through how you build a media list?

Carly: I’m pretty old school — I basically just use Google.

What I’ll do is, say I’m working with a client in the biometric authentication space — I’ll look up anyone who has recently written on a topic I want the client to weigh in on.

I put the keywords in quotes along with a specific publication, like “site:publication.com,” to really hone in on which writers within that publication most frequently cover that topic or an adjacent one.

Adjacent topics are actually often more effective — if a reporter just wrote on a topic, they’re not going to write about the same thing the next day. So I look for that Goldilocks zone: interested in the topic, writes about it frequently, and has published within the last month so I know they’re actively on the beat.

I bucket them out and spend the most time on the pitches I think are the best fit, then tier them down to the ones I’m 50-50 on. My lists are short — 15 to 20 contacts maximum per pitch. That keeps me super targeted.

Vince: I love the Goldilocks concept. I see a lot of people operating in the 100-to-200 journalists-per-pitch zone, and it just doesn’t make sense to me.

Carly: Well, it also hurts you in the long run. If you pitch someone something that’s completely wrong for them, and then next time you actually do have a great fit, they’re already turned off. I always think about my future self — is this worth trading on my reputation for, or am I better off going to someone else who’s a better fit right now and saving this person for when it’s a perfect match?

Vince: Yes — you’re ruining your reputation with that reporter.

I think the reason a lot of digital PR agencies fall into that trap is because they’re coming at it from an SEO perspective and it’s very much metrics-based — links and quantity over quality.

On top of that, there’s a huge influx of link builders now positioning themselves as digital PRs, plus all the AI-generated slop pitches flooding journalists’ inboxes. So the ones who can’t get to that Goldilocks zone are just adding to the noise.

Carly: Exactly.

Vince: You mentioned your lists are 15 to 20 for campaigns where you’re creating the angle.

How do you benchmark success?

Carly: It depends on the pitch.

The 15 to 20 is for when there’s no hard news and I’m essentially inventing the angle.

When it’s a larger campaign or broader message, the list might be bigger. But for those smaller, targeted lists, it’s all about making sure those people are genuinely the right people.

Vince: Can you tease out the idea of making news where there is none — pitching a feature angle — versus piggybacking on a trend where the journalist can more easily fit it into their existing coverage?

How do you make news when there is none?

Carly: I actually think it’s a hybrid approach. I’ll read a journalist’s recent work and try to figure out where the gap is — what’s the next iteration of the story they’ve been covering?

During the pandemic, for example, I had a client who ran women’s networking events.

Everyone was talking about remote work in those early days — that was the only conversation. I thought: once they get past the fundamentals of being remote, they’re going to start asking how to do specific things remotely. Networking was one of them.

Within the first week and a half to two weeks of the pandemic, I went out with pitches to CNBC, Fortune, Fast Company — all the tier ones — with “here’s how to network in the age of remote.”

I got hits in all of them because no one was thinking one step ahead yet. If you can put yourself in that mindset — here’s what the news is anchored on today, but what will it be anchored on two weeks from now based on that? — that’s how you find the white space.

And even if you don’t have the answer from your client, you can go to them and say, hypothetically, what do you think will happen?

That’s really all thought leadership is — working in hypotheticals with a strong point of view about where the story goes next.

Vince: How much information do you give the journalist? I’m assuming you’re reaching out to feature writers, not breaking news reporters?

How much information do you give a journalist when trying to set up an interview?

Carly: Right — more advice and thought leadership pieces.

As for the pitch itself, it’s really just: one to two sentences setting up the premise of the story, then an introduction of who the expert is and why they’re relevant with a few proof points, and then three bullet points max of what they could talk about and why it’s relevant to their audience right now.

I try to have mini-headlines within those bullet points.

That way the journalist can see, in their mind’s eye, if I went with this person, here are all the angles that could come out of the interview. It’s no more than 250 words.

Vince: And you’re pitching with the goal of setting up an interview, not handing them everything they need to write the piece themselves?

Carly: Always an interview, yes.

Though it does depend on the situation. I work with a trademark attorney where our play is to have his analysis already written and posted on his blog, and then we bring the news to the reporter with a link to the blog.

I’m pitching breaking news with him, so those reporters don’t always have time to hop on the phone.

In that case, it makes more sense to have everything packaged neatly so they don’t have to interact with me if they don’t want to.

I literally had a story run in Gizmodo today — I pitched the reporter, never heard back from him, never knew if he was going to write anything, and then it showed up in my Google Alerts this morning.

Great feeling.

But it really is a two-way street with the client too.

That trademark attorney will actually do the analysis himself, which gives us great fodder.

If clients don’t have the bandwidth or willingness to do that, it hurts us, because I can’t do that analysis myself.

Vince: That makes sense.

And there’s an important distinction between pitching a breaking news reporter versus a beat reporter.

A lot of people get hung up on this — they might be pitching a tech reporter who covers breaking news, but the client’s story isn’t really news.

What makes something breaking news in your view?

Carly: With the trademark attorney, he’s spotting filings in real time — things that would be of interest to media.

If Tesla files a trademark for something, we’re the first to jump on it with an analysis of what it actually means, with a link to the filing. That’s happening in real time, we’ve got the scoop essentially.

Versus something evergreen like “why brands should prioritize trademarking their logos before they launch” — that’s not breaking news.

Vince: What about the middle ground — like a survey that says 80% of brands don’t have a trademark attorney? Interesting but not timely?

Carly: Those are the hardest pitches to land, honestly.

There’s no real reason to write about it today.

That’s where I’m less excited. The only way they work is if a reporter coincidentally happens to be working on a story and needs a stat to support it.

Honestly, I hate surveys.

I think they did work back in the day, but not anymore — unless you’re surveying 5,000 enterprise leaders on a very specific, timely news hook. Otherwise it’s a tough go.

And the other problem is that clients always want the survey results to basically say “our product is the answer,” which also won’t work.

It’s always a tug of war getting them to understand that the data has to be interesting and tangentially related to what they do, but it can’t be so on the nose that it’s just self-promotion.

What didn’t I ask you that you want to make sure we cover?

Carly: The one thing that’s top of mind for me — I actually read a post on Reddit in the PR subreddit about it this morning — is that client demands seem to be greater than they’ve ever been.

Day one, clients come in and say “I need multiple tier-one pieces within the first month.” There’s just not a lot of acknowledgment of how hard it is to get that level of coverage that quickly with a company that isn’t already well known.

You’re working from square one — you really have to establish that this is a brand worth paying attention to, someone with an interesting point of view.

I think in the age of AI, people are getting accustomed to things being instant. They think: I’m going to pay you and that’s the end of it. And I wish it worked that way.

I wish I could snap my fingers and have Bloomberg write about you.

But it’s just not realistic.

As an industry, we need to talk more about the ins and outs of how securing coverage actually comes about, the effort that goes into it, and that it’s not just about sending out a million emails. Hopefully that leads to clients being a little more grateful when you do get those wins — they should be just as excited as the agency is.

The post How to Pitch Journalists Like a PR Pro appeared first on BuzzStream.

In the wake of AI, I’ve seen numerous agencies begin offering digital PR services.

This is unsurprising, given studies like Ahrefs correlating brand mentions with exposure in AI results or experts like Mike King pushing digital PR as part of his relevance engineering workflow.

Digital PR is primarily seen as a link-building tactic for getting coverage from high-authority news sites, whereas link building is broader in scope.

Many link builders transitioning into digital PR carried over the wrong tactics, infuriating journalists and confounding newcomers.

So, in this post, I’m going to outline the differences and help outline the steps needed to transition from link building to digital PR.

>1. Change your mindset from link quantity to link quality

With digital PR, you will see fewer results as compared to traditional link building, but that’s not a bad thing.

There are fewer journalists to go around due to layoffs, but a lot more people in digital PR right now.

Demand for digital PR services is at an all-time high.

Muck Rack’s State of Journalism has been tracking the increase in pitch numbers yearly, and they just keep going up.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Because typically, with link building in the past it’s just been a numbers game.

With digital PR, it’s all about quality, and fewer links are needed to move the needle.

Relaying this to a client might be tricky, so point them to our study on how many backlinks you need.

Here’s the gist: If you filter competitor link profiles for quality links, you’ll notice that the link totals you are trying to compete with become much more manageable.

For instance, if I wanted to rank for Best TVs, I see that the top-ranking post on Rtings.com has 356 links, but only 16 quality links:

By focusing on quality, not quantity, it should also help prevent burnout from you or your teams.

What I’ve seen typically happen at any agency is that junior employees have link quantity goals they need to hit.

They may even have quality guidelines in place, but when the time crunch inevitably happens or outreach fatigue sets in — and they both always do — so-so sites start to creep in.

The next thing you know, your agency’s reputation is soiled.

Focusing on quality can help avoid this.

With this in mind, you need to reconsider your outreach strategies.

2. Digital PR outreach is hyper-targeted (and harder to scale)

Digital PR requires fewer outreach emails sent than other link building tactics.

Typically, link building is a numbers game: the more emails you send out for things like link exchanges and guest posts, the more likely you are to get some bites.

Do that with PR and you’ll find yourself in spam folders, or, at worst, banned from your email platform (yes, this actually happened to a BuzzStream customer).

We conducted an entire study on the spray-and-pray tactic and found that, with digital PR, the more targeted you are, the more links you get.

But this doesn’t mean you simply cut your list in half and have success; good digital PR requires digging into journalists to see if they are actually a fit.

I’ve outlined a 20-step evaluation process, but it boils down to this: you need to know what industry a journalist covers and what type of content they cover.

You can do this by simply reading their recent content.

For instance, here’s Sammi Caramela from Vice.

I can see here on Sammi’s author page that there is a lot of life and horoscope-related content.

But are these opinions? Are they third-party studies like the ones digital PR typically pitches? Does she use expert commentary in her posts?

I have to click in and read to find out.

Here’s a piece Sammi wrote about starting yoga, where an expert is cited:

But in the 10 posts I scanned, she rarely links to external sources or mentions third-party studies or experts.

So she’s probably not a great fit for digital PR outreach.

(I also did an entire webinar on how to find the right journalists.)

This manual review process does take more time (which is why many try to take shortcuts).

We built our media list building tool ListIQ, to drastically cut down the time.

ListIQ helps extract key information on the journalist right from a Google News SERP.

Instead of manually going through the steps to find all of the information about a journalist, like their email address, bio, recent articles, and others, it pulls it directly into a Google Sheet.

Get started with ListIQ for free.

But once you find the right journalists, you need to pitch them differently.

3. Focus on the story in your email pitch

The best digital PR outreach pitches have a strong hook and contain everything a journalist needs to write a story, whereas a link building outreach email may only contain an ask.

This is another huge mindset shift for link builders.

These kinds of pitches don’t work on journalists:

Journalists don’t care about your useful resources. Ultimately, they care about a good story that their audience and beat will care about.

Why?

Because digital PR requires pitching to journalists who also have traffic goals of their own.

Here’s a pitch I sent to someone at The Press Gazette that landed coverage on our study about publishers blocking AI crawlers.

It has everything a media pitch needs:

• Why they should cover: They covered this topic last year, and I have an update
• Main takeaways: Three bulleted points that are surprising
• A quote from an expert: Harry Clarkson-Bennett was the source of the quote used in the article.

Ultimately, they covered my study and used the quote:

You can check out our full list of media pitch templates for some extra direction on pitching.

There’s another aspect of my pitch that I think made it even more likely to get covered…

4. Focus on timeliness

Most traditional link building occurs in a somewhat of an evergreen bubble, whereas digital PR is all about timeliness; attaching to a trending topic, seasonal trend, holiday, or major event.

The aforementioned pitch from me stemmed from Press Gazette’s ongoing coverage of publishers blocking AI bots.

In a study that I did looking at all of YouGov’s top-performing survey content, timely content outweighed evergreen content.

So if there is a trending topic, holiday, or event, you’re more likely to have success pitching a relevant data point or topic.

The other important piece is that by staying current, you’ll also spot potential coverage overlaps.

For instance, if you go to pitch a story to a writer in Business Insider and they have just covered something similar, you wouldn’t pitch them again because they just covered it.

For instance, here’s a piece by Katie Notopoulos covering a Pew study finding that Snapchat is the number one app for teens.

If I had tried to pitch Katie a similar study on social media usage among teens, TikTok, or any of the same takeaways,I would most likely end up with a response like this:

I’d wait at least 2-3 weeks before pitching this journalist a similar study.

That said, if you are following a trend and have something new to add, a fresh angle, or a controversial alternative take, journalists can sometimes be more open.

Again, to do this, you need to look at their recent coverage to see how often they cover certain topics.

For instance, looking at Katie’s recent articles, I see two stories related Mark Zuckerberg (three if you count Meta) all within 10 days.

But if you look closer, they are very far away from one another. One is about the metaverse and the other is about Mark and tension around the company.

However, if we consider something like reactive PR, these recency rules become less important.

For instance, if I had a proprietary quote from a Meta employee explaining why there is tension within the company, it would add to Sammi’s ongoing coverage of Meta, and I would consider pitching right away.

So, this is where analyzing recent articles is so important.

Many people skip this step because it is time-consuming, but tools like ListIQ can speed things up.

This brings us to our next point: keeping up with current events.

5. Teams must stay plugged into the news and trends

Digital PR is definitely always on, whereas link building is not.

This is because it’s virtually impossible to be successful with digital PR without understanding the news cycle and staying on top of current events.

But it doesn’t stop there.

The best digital PR teams are also locked into social media trends as well.

Successful agencies are doing this in several ways:

• Daily or weekly team chats (Slack or in-person), sharing trending topics, and figuring out how to get a brand/client inserted into the conversation
• Monitoring Google Trends, TikTok Trends, Pinterest Trends, etc

This tool, called Splode, looks at trends on platforms like Google, X, YouTube, and others:

Once a trending topic is identified, digital PR uses strategies such as reactive PR and newsjacking to secure coverage for clients.

Another huge mistake I’ve seen link builders make when transitioning to digital PR is trying to come up with stories that aren’t helpful to journalists.

6. Ditch the guest posts and embrace data-driven content

The most valuable kinds of digital PR assets are data-driven, like city index studies, surveys, and other proprietary data-based content.

Traditional link building tactics are guest posting, blogger outreach, link exchanging, link buying, broken link building, resource page building, and digital PR.

The effectiveness of most of these (excluding digital PR) is waning in 2026.

Journalists typically don’t have time to compile data themselves, or they are looking for data to support their own stories.

This is why data-led content is the number one tactic utilized by digital PRs today:

These data-driven assets typically require much more time and effort than just putting together a guest post.

For instance, in one data-driven study on Blackcircles, a tire company, a digital PR agency called Digitaloft spent weeks gathering data via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to produce the UK Pothole Report.

In addition to FOIA requests, they surveyed 2,000 people to understand how potholes affected them.

This kind of data is something a journalist doesn’t have time to get themselves, making it truly valuable.

Providing value can build trust with journalists, but not following through can quickly erode that trust, bringing us to our next point.

7. Be available for journalists

Along the same lines as the previous two tips, digital PR requires more responsiveness than traditional link building.

Bloggers or guest post sites rarely require deadlines, whereas journalists can sometimes rely on digital PRs for quotes and data immediately.

Expert commentary, which can be responding to journalist requests, or providing quotes as reactive PR is another widely used strategy in digital PR.

It also adds value, as journalists typically want experts to weigh in on topics to make their pieces feel more authoritative.

But with great value comes great responsibility.

Some link builders may already be using Qwoted, Help a Reporter Out (HARO), or Featured to pitch expert quotes and respond to journalist requests, but I’ve already heard from some journalists that unresponsive contacts are starting to really hurt them.

There are the obvious deadlines on pitch platforms like HARO:

But the communication doesn’t always end with a pitch…

Freelance journalist Joni Sweet shared a compelling story with me in our podcast episodeabout what it means when link builders (or PR pros) aren’t responsive:

“I’ve sometimes put out a call for pictures for doctors or dietitians in the health space, and a PR person will email me and say, ‘I have this amazing client. They can speak to X, Y, and Z. Do you want them for your story?’ and I’ll say yes, and then they fall off the face of the earth.

I say ‘hey I need answers by noon on Friday and 4 p.m.’ and if on Friday those answers still haven’t come in, I’m in a real bind now because now I have to find somebody over the weekend and convince them to give me the time of day so that I can meet my deadline on Monday and still make my editor happy and get paid, right?”

With timeliness and quickness in mind, let’s look at what that means for results.

8. Expect potentially quicker impact with digital PR

It takes about 3-6 months to see measurable results from digital PR, according to our State of Digital PR Report.

This is somewhat in line with our findings in our link building trends report (although the timelines are a little different).

However, links from high-authority, highly trafficked sites can yield quicker results in organic traffic and rankings because they are much more likely to be crawled and indexed.

And if your campaigns are adequately internally linked, you can see quicker results.

But with digital PR you may notice some changes in link numbers.

9. You should charge more for digital PR services

Most digital PR agencies don’t charge per link. In fact, about one-third didn’t even know their cost per link when we surveyed them about digital PR costs.

Instead, charge for asset creation (design, web development) and data collection costs, such as survey costs, on a monthly retainer.

This helps reframe the conversation for clients away from the antiquated CPL.

It can also be helpful to convey to clients that with more competition in the space and fewer links to go around, a solid link from a high-authority publication is typically worth a lot more than a standard guest post link.

I analyzed costs from a popular link buying database and here’s how it broke down:

To buy a top-tier link through a vendor costs upwards of $950.

Some sites on the list, like Forbes and Associated Press, cost upwards of $10,000 for a placement.

To give you a sense of the monthly contract size for digital PR, here’s what our respondents told us:

This helps put into perspective how much more value you can bring to the table as a digital PR service offering vs standard link building.

You could also start charging for mentions…

10. Nofollow links and unlinked mentions mean more

For digital PR, nofollow links and unlinked mentions can now factor into your reporting if your clients care about AI citations – which is about 75% of clients, according to our State of Digital PR Report.

As mentioned in the intro, an Ahrefs study found that branded web mentions (not backlinks or DR) were most strongly correlated with brands appearing in AI answers.

This differs from standard link building, where many are on the fence about whether to include nofollow links or unlinked mentions.

But in the AI age, with digital PR, these unlinked mentions and nofollow links suddenly become more valuable.

Some even consider things like social media placements a win because of their strong correlation with AI mentions and their potential to strengthen “entity” relationships.

Now Get Started With Your First Digital PR Campaign

If you’re coming from link building, don’t try to overhaul everything at once. Run one simple digital PR campaign end-to-end:

• Pick a timely topic in your niche (something already in the news)
• Find or create a data point that adds to that conversation
• Turn it into a clear story with 2–3 strong takeaways
• Build a targeted list of ~30 relevant journalists using ListIQ
• Send a tight, story-first pitch (not a link ask) through BuzzStream CRM
• Be ready to respond quickly if someone bites

That’s it.

Don’t worry about scale, tools, or perfection yet. Just focus on executing one campaign correctly.

If you can land even a few pieces of relevant coverage, you’re already doing real digital PR—not just link building with a new label.

And one of the best mindset shifts I’ve heard, repeated a few times on our podcast, is that digital PR’s goal should be a good story, not a link.

If you create a good story, the links and coverage will come.

The post How to Transition From Link Building to Digital PR appeared first on BuzzStream.

We’ve all heard the narrative: news publishers are dying, and it’s Google’s fault. (And if you haven’t, check out this podcast from The Verge.)

The idea of “Google Zero” is frightening for our industry.

But Barry Adams, SEO consultant with Polemic Digital and writer of SEO for Google News Substack, recently wrote a post entitled “Google Zero is a Lie”.

So, I wanted to invite him on our podcast to explain just what is behind this troubling (and potentially misleading) concern about publishers losing traffic to Google.

Below is a slightly-edited podcast.

Can you explain what “Google Zero” is?

Barry: The term was first coined by Nilay Patel at The Verge, who predicted that traffic from Google to news websites would continue declining until it reached zero. He had data and traffic trends to back it up. When I first heard it, I thought it was a useful concept — a way for publishers to understand that Google was becoming a more challenging traffic source, which it genuinely has.

But the term has taken on a life of its own. A lot of publishers now believe Google traffic is going to disappear entirely. The data doesn’t support that.

What’s actually happened is that publishers have coasted on Google’s overall growth rather than building their own share of voice. For years, search as a platform kept growing — more queries, more traffic distributed across the web. That rising tide lifted everyone’s boats. Now that growth has flatlined. Google isn’t shrinking dramatically, but it’s no longer expanding. That means SEO is now a zero-sum game: if you get the click, your competitor doesn’t.

That’s a new dynamic, and publishers have to compete harder for traffic they once took for granted. For many, the traffic line from Google has flatlined, and they’re interpreting that as decline. Add in algorithm updates, spam penalties, and AI-generated answers — suddenly there’s an AI buzzword to attach the panic to.

I won’t deny that AI overviews have accelerated the problem. They do reduce click-through rates for certain types of content. But the idea that Google traffic is vanishing? Publishers are now making the conscious decision to reduce investment in SEO because of that belief — and that’s where it becomes dangerous. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stop investing in search, and your search traffic will fall.

Meanwhile, I work with publishers who are doing the opposite, and they’re growing. Publishers with hard paywalls, niche editorial focuses — by conventional metrics, they “should” be struggling. They’re not, because they keep investing in search.

That’s why I wrote the piece. “Google Zero is a lie” is a deliberately provocative headline, meant to force a more nuanced conversation. The truth is somewhere in the middle: some decline is real, but the apocalyptic version isn’t backed by data. When one extreme dominates, sometimes you need to take the opposite position just to find the middle ground.

Vince: Your article pointed to some specific data problems. The Chartbeat presentation at a recent conference showed a lot of publishers losing Google traffic — but you’ve worked with some of those brands personally and know that’s not what’s happening. What’s going on there?

Why is Chartbeat showing declines?

Barry: A few things. Chartbeat aggregated their data without normalizing for publisher size or context. I also read their Q1 2026 traffic report, and there are some genuinely misleading graphs in it. For example, it showed Facebook traffic to publishers nearly equal to Google search traffic — which bears no resemblance to what I see across my clients.

They also use an internal traffic metric that inflates the internal traffic category, because every internal click gets logged there. I don’t understand why they lump all of that together.

Others have pointed out that the initial graph compares 2024 — a US election year, always a peak news moment — with 2025, a non-election year. That comparison alone will skew results dramatically. Then add in the site reputation abuse penalties Google introduced in 2024, which hit publishers running affiliate content hard. Their news traffic may have been fine, but their product review traffic collapsed — and the aggregate figures reflect that.

There are just too many confounding variables to take that data at face value. It tells a story, but not necessarily the right one.

The publishers feeling the most pain tend to be those who over-indexed on maximizing Google clicks, chasing Evergreen content, affiliate links, product reviews, and lifestyle content alongside their news — moving away from their core purpose. The publishers doing well are the ones who just report the news.

There are two types thriving: national publishers that do pure news, nothing else, and hyperlocal publishers covering specific towns and cities. Neither is being meaningfully hurt. Google can’t replicate breaking news with AI — it can only summarize it after the fact. What AI can replace is Evergreen content, product comparisons, listicles — the stuff publishers layered on top of their journalism to chase traffic. That content is losing visibility to AI overviews across every platform.

And I want to make one broader point: this is not new. Before AI overviews, there were featured snippets. Google Maps disrupted local search. Sports score sites were gutted when Google started showing live match results directly on the results page. Google has always enriched its search results with direct answers. The publishers most upset now are the ones who built their strategies around exploiting those gaps — and the gaps are closing.

Vince: That makes sense. The New York Times is a good case study here — they’ve grown their journalist headcount significantly, but partly through acquisitions like The Athletic and Wirecutter, and diversified revenue through games, podcasts, newsletters, and subscriptions. That seems like a smarter approach than trying to be everything to everyone.

Barry: Absolutely. And I do think the paywall model will become increasingly important. It’s a far more reliable revenue stream than one built on page views and ad impressions. The publishers that have figured out how to convert readers — rather than just attract them — are the ones who will survive the transition.

Is this a global issue, or is it different in different markets?

Barry: Broadly global, with some exceptions. France, for example, doesn’t have AI overviews in Google search for legal reasons. Some countries are shielded from certain features that are standard in English-speaking markets.

But the underlying trend — Google’s growth flatlining — is universal. English-language markets tend to feel it first because that’s where Google rolls out new features and where most of the web is indexed. Elsewhere, the same dynamics play out, just on a slight delay.

One variable worth noting: in South America and Southeast Asia, Android has a 95%-plus market share, which means Discover feed traffic plays a much larger role for publishers in those regions. That’s a separate conversation, but it’s worth being aware of.

Do you think platform diversification is a major driver of the perceived decline?

Barry: Yes, and I have a longer-term perspective on this. Every generation appears to consume news differently when they’re young — and then, as they age, they tend to drift toward more traditional formats. The “young people don’t read news” narrative is actually as old as newspapers. It tends to look more alarming in the moment than it proves to be over time.

That said, the underlying mechanics have genuinely changed. Facebook was once a massive traffic driver for publishers — until they deprioritized external links in the feed. Twitter/X was meaningful for news until it shifted away from link-sharing culture. Now, visual-first platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts dominate — and those platforms don’t drive traffic in any traditional sense. They drive views and brand awareness. If your business model depends on clicks, that’s a problem.

But I think there’s still a case for publishers being present on those platforms — not as traffic drivers, but as top-of-funnel brand building. Someone who’s been watching your journalists on TikTok for a year is much more likely to pay for a subscription when they eventually encounter your paywall. The goal isn’t a direct click — it’s an eventual conversion. Publishers who understand that are using social media strategically. Those who are chasing views as a substitute for traffic are burning resources without a return.

Newsletters, paid YouTube, podcasts — these are real revenue streams for publishers willing to invest in them. And the smartest content strategies treat a single piece of journalism as raw material: you write the article, you record a short video, you splice it for social, you release a podcast episode. One story, multiple distribution channels, multiple monetization paths.

Vince: That sounds obvious to anyone in digital marketing — but it seems like news organizations, especially the legacy ones, have been slow to embrace it.

Barry: “Marketing” has historically been a dirty word in newsrooms. It’s been associated with the commercial side of the house, selling advertising — not something editors want to think about. But marketing at its core is just understanding your audience and delivering what they value. That’s exactly what news publishers need to do right now.

The institutions that struggle most are the ones that see this as a departure from journalism, rather than a complement to it.

What happens if news publishers continue to decline?

Barry: We’d be in a better position than you might expect, actually.

First, I don’t think most publishers are going to disappear. There will be casualties and restructuring. But news as a product has a durable audience — people want more news, not less. The business model needs to evolve, but the underlying demand is there.

More importantly for digital PR: the value of a news mention has actually increased in the AI era. Brands increasingly care about being cited in AI-generated answers — product recommendations, research summaries, comparison lists. And one consistent signal that appears to increase your citation rate in those answers is being mentioned on high-authority sites, including publishers.

What’s changed is that you no longer necessarily need the link. A mention in the right context, on the right site, is already a win — because it feeds the signals that AI systems use when deciding what to recommend. The direct link → ranking correlation matters less than it used to; the mention → authority → AI citation chain matters more.

So digital PR is actually becoming more strategically valuable, even if the tactics need to evolve. It’s less about blasting press releases to journalists and more about crafting narratives that tie into the news cycle, providing data that journalists can genuinely use, and being creative about the angles that earn coverage. The floor is higher, but so is the ceiling.

Any final thoughts?

Barry: Just this: whenever someone gives you a blanket statement — “X is dying,” “Y will change everything” — look for the nuance. Don’t take it at face value. Search has gotten harder. AI has accelerated some changes. Those are real. But we’ve been here before. Every new feature Google rolls out has caused a version of this panic. The industry adapts.

GEO, AEO, whatever the latest acronym is — at its core, it’s SEO thinking repackaged for a new context. The fundamentals still apply: deliver value, earn authority, serve your audience. And stay willing to change your mind when new data comes in. I’ve been wrong plenty of times in 25 years, and I’ll be wrong again. The practitioners who stay adaptable are the ones who last.

The post Google Zero: Is the News Industry’s Decline Really Google’s Fault? appeared first on BuzzStream.

And even if you are doing what you are hired for —building links for link’s sake—if you’re not impacting the bottom line, you’re not going to have a job for very long.

Our guest for this podcast, Garrett French, founder of Citation Labs, ZipSprout, and Xofu, is one of the best in the business at thinking through this problem. And he does this by placing a strong focus on answering audience questions and user problems.

In this podcast, we discussed his thoughts, theories, and strategies for building links that impact the bottom line.

Can you explain the concept of citable elements?

Garrett French 
To go way, way back — and I love doing that, probably a little too much, I hope we have plenty of time. So really, we wanted our client sales pages to be as linkable as a resource page. So when I say ‘resource page,’ I’m taking us all the way back to 2003 or 2004, when we would make these incredible, detailed guides that we would then try to get links to from other pages.

And so we realized that there were — what, at the time — now go with me back in time to, like, probably 2006, 2007 — linker-valued audiences. The linkers would be publishers with resource pages, and they were gonna link to content that served their valued audiences. A lot of times it would be seniors, for example.

So we really started to ask the question, not so much how do we make sure we talk to seniors as an audience on every page of the website — because obviously that’s gonna not really fit or work very well — but we said, what made this type of content valued by linkers? And then how do we bring components of this, or the values that this type of content enabled the linker to link to, and how do we put that onto a sales page? How do we make sales pages actually worth linking to? And this really cracked open the whole journey for us since then.

And some of this journey has been — gosh — we really keep our clients longer when we build links directly to the sales pages and we show how the rankings of the sales pages go up. It’s taken us out of conversations that are more like pure digital PR, or like, you know, big brand — how do we get lots of visibility for brands?

But we’ve stayed really focused on how do we make sure that this unit of offering from the client grows its visibility. And it’s very complicated in enterprise, where we have a brand, but then within the brand there are all these offerings, and each one operates as a business unit. Within the business unit, there are different offerings, and then within the offerings there are different pages that reflect different benefits or subsets of the — it gets so complicated so fast. When you really try to just increase brand visibility, you end up not really having anything to put into a report for the person you report to, to tell their boss where all the money went that they spent on visibility or link building, right? You have to stay focused in that place.

Right? Like, you have to stay focused in that place of, as an agency owner — you have to stay focused in that place of enabling the person you report to to explain why they should have, why they need to spend more money using Citation Labs or Zip Sprout or Xofu, whichever flavor they came in on, for visibility.

So that’s — I think I either over-explained or under-explained, I’m not sure which. Ask me more questions, though, so I make sure I’m being useful.

What kind of customer research do you do for clients?

Garrett French
Yeah, this is a very, very fun part. We were calling this “decisioning efficiency,” right? Like, you’re trying to enable a more efficient decision on behalf of your prospective clients, whether they go with you or not. And so I think that’s a really important starting point. It’s a scary starting point for marketers — we need to make it easier for people to say no.

That’s terrifying, but we need to start there.

Okay, you don’t have to tell your boss that’s what you’re doing, and we don’t usually talk about it like that, but you really do need to say: what information on this page would be most useful to someone that’s in the decisioning phase about whether to do or not do this — the transition or the activity that relates to this purchase, right?

So a lot of our initial work is like locating — in the context of the buyer — what are they doing? Why are they in the market? What problems are they trying to solve? Have they diagnosed their problems accurately? Do we have a way to help them diagnose that more efficiently or effectively that we can provide?

These are the types of questions that we’re really starting with.

This is much easier in a B2B space, okay? Because there’s a lot more specialization — role-specific specialization of the purchase decisioning committee. So if you’re in a smaller — so we’ve been looking a lot at nationwide service providers, local service providers, home service providers. This has been a special — we’ve been working with these folks for a decade-plus, but lately we’ve been getting more of these types of inquiries in.

So we’re really starting, even there, though the decisioning committee isn’t quite as complex for a B2C purchase. We’re still seeing a lot of very particular intent around things like people with very particular allergies or health-related concerns, for example, when it comes to cleaning.

Or people that — maybe there’s another kind of layer of people that is a B2B layer for cleaning services — that would be the person whose job it is to turn the apartment over for rental for someone else, right?

And so the questions that each one of these roles or types of folks would have are just very different one from another, right? And you do the same service, you use the same chemicals, but how you’re positioning on your page is gonna be very different. And the decisioning efficiencies — the information that’s needed by the people that are making the decision — can be very, very different.

Now, what do we do with all this?

And that was a long way of describing the simpler decisioning arena of a cleaning service versus, you know, enterprise computers — actual hardware — where the complexities are quite varied.

Vince Nero

So the idea is, like, you’re identifying the types of customers within each segment of your business, for each product, and also the decision-makers and the types of problems or questions they might ask that will lead them to your service. Right?

—

Garrett French
The questions that — let me reframe that a little bit.

Number one, we’re rarely asked to come in and do everything for the entire company.

It’s usually a division, a business division person, and we’re gonna do one — yeah, yeah, exactly. “Garrett, we’re not ready for all this yet, okay?” Like, I come in pretty — I don’t know if you know — I bring a lot of intensity with me wherever I go. But…

So one of the ways we’re looking at constructing how we think of information needs — right, like what’s the ideal amount of information that someone would have — is we think about what a seasoned veteran who has solved this problem a number of times before would ask. What questions would they have? What would they be asking?

And so this isn’t — you know — it’s a thousand times easier with LLMs, okay?

But it’s not a crazy thing to ask. It’s not a wild thing to kind of use as a starting point. And so we’ve done a lot of thinking. We’ve coined the notion of “friction-inducing, latent, unasked questions.” But we realized that another way to spin that or flip that around was: all right, well, what would the seasoned expert ask that basically no one else would know to ask? And that’s going to give you a better sense of what types of information to put on the page.

Let me give an example from your life, Vince, if you don’t mind. You just shared how you hosted Thanksgiving, but this was after you hosted your mother’s birthday. So this was the second big family hosting event you had, and it went much smoother — because you knew what questions to ask. You knew how to do things differently, right?

And so, Vince, going into his third big family event — well, you would have — if you went to go prompt an LLM about how to best take care of your family, you’d have a much different array of types of questions you would ask.

And so what we’re really trying to land on is: what is the array of inquiries that a very seasoned professional would have if they were the one buying the service?

Like, the person that’s been running a cleaning business for 20 years and wants to hire somebody to clean their house — what would they ask?

What would a used car salesperson who’s been doing it for 20-plus years ask when they went to go buy a used car?

And so that’s the level of informational inquiry that I think starts to define what — can you put all that on one page of your website? No, of course not. But you’re trying to come up with tables and representations of this kind of information.

Does it all live on — this is where we have a lot of nuance and we have to figure things out — because usually you can’t really mess with an enterprise’s sales page.

You’re not invited into that particular…Thanksgiving table. You’re not asked to eat at those tables.

But there are ways to address that if you can’t just actively make additions to a page or add FAQs.

And we really are — part of our starting point for what content should we add to a page, which then is building into where do we go to build links or drive visibility — comes from this place of what does an ideal amount of information look like for making the best possible decision.

There’s gotta be a faster way to say that, Vince. But that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.

Does traditional keyword-based SEO research have a place in this?

Garrett French

For sure, for sure.

Yeah, we still use as a starting point what we call link gap analysis. So we built out a tool called Link Launch. And so we’re looking at potential target pages to build links to, looking at what keywords these are ranking for, who’s ranking against these.

Now, obviously that surface — the SEO surface, the organic 10 links, the 10 blue links type of results — those are gonna be the phone book. They’re going away. It’s sad; I love them. That’s where I feel the most at home, right? But they’re going away for sure.

We still use that as a component of understanding relative competition in a given space — what does the link graph look like for this body of keywords or body of information need?

But really, then there’s this hard kind of gap — like, hey, as SEOs, we’ve really limited ourselves based on where we see keyword demand right now, which isn’t always the information that’s needed to make a great decision.

Because a lot of the keyword demand is driven by a problem I would like to solve and a belief I have that maybe this thing is the way to solve that.

And so we’re really trying to crack that place open. And there’s not a lot of good language to describe that — we haven’t found it. I don’t know what the KPIs are for it. And then frankly, we’ve gotten pushback — recently it was a pitch we were doing with a CMO, and they’re just like, “Hey, GTFO the bottom of the funnel. You don’t know our space. We just want top-of-funnel visibility.”

And so that’s the other piece — we really do start at the bottom of the funnel and kind of work up. But we do find that when we do that, it can be a lot. I already bring a lot to the table, as I mentioned, but then especially if you have a CMO at a big company that doesn’t actually understand — no offense, I’m not calling anybody out — doesn’t understand the bottom of the funnel for all the various service lines.

All of a sudden you’re talking about things that you need an SME to give you feedback on, and the CMO is like, “No, no — get back up to leads. We gotta come back up to leads.”

And we are trying to live and die by leads —visibility and impact—but it can be tough to close those gaps.

I personally find it very difficult to close those gaps. I know other people are very good at those things, but explaining myself has never been my strong suit — oddly enough, as a marketer. But anyway, keep going.

How does your customer decision-making research get used in link building or PR efforts?

Garrett French

One of my favorite examples here is an industrial computer manufacturer — or actually I think they’re an OEM, it doesn’t matter.

We worked with their customer service logs.

They put them into a Notebook LM so we could query against those, and we were able to isolate — this is where, we’re just the link builders, we really like to have an SME internally who can say “yes, this is actually a thing or it isn’t” — but we’re still able to get much closer to this place of useful things to say.

Like, genuinely useful.

But we found that there was a big disconnect between engineers and the in-house procurement team. The engineers weren’t doing all their homework.

They would just say, “Hey, we need five or ten of these,” or whatever — and they’d send that to procurement. And they left procurement with a lot of questions still. So there were a lot of inquiries from procurement to the client, and the client didn’t know this information — they kind of needed more from their engineers.

So we didn’t do any studies here, but it begs a study, right — around when there are slowdowns.

We don’t want to point fingers, but gosh, it sure seems like the engineers aren’t quite doing as much as they could. You wouldn’t say it like that — please, nobody take marketing advice from me. Don’t say it like that.

But we found the problem, and it was in this place where the engineers weren’t explaining themselves.

So what do you do as a business?

Well, you ask how do we help solve this problem, because it’s clearly a problem.

And so you’re going to work a little harder with the engineers and give the procurement team a better sense of what we know as the OEM provider of these products, and then what they’re going to have to ask the engineers.

But here’s how you talk to the engineers. Here’s how you ask them. Because if you don’t ask an engineer, right — what happens? Nothing. That’s the answer you’re not going to get. You’re not going to get anything valuable out of that.

So where we landed was: gosh, we need to have more — almost an API, or like a language translator — on our pages.

So if you’re on our website and you’re curious about these things, well, it’s probably because you need to ask your engineers these things.

So we’re better able to isolate the types of information in our decision makers — and these are past the decision point, the decision has been made, right?

We’re just trying to get money at this point, but it’s still in-funnel. Technically we haven’t made money yet.

But when we have this participant in the purchase, how do we reduce friction?

How do we make their job easier?

And it isn’t about explaining topically what an XYZ is.

And this is the thing that kills me about SEO — I love SEO, don’t get me wrong.

But when we focus on topical relevance, we lose the plot.

Nothing against that, right?

Like, we want to rank for these big topics and these big keywords and we want the traffic, rah rah rah — but also if we’re not reducing frictions for the people that are actually trying to solve the problems with our services or our products, on the pages where they buy them, I think we’re not doing our jobs.

And we can build links to that stuff too, Vince.

Like, that stuff becomes a very citable element around — okay, this is a very specific table that helps the procurement team talk to engineering.

Maybe that’s part of a bigger study we’ve done, and then we’re going to have a little chunk that goes on each individual product page. B

ut you can still build links to that much more readily than just the product itself, right?

Because this is the stuff that you see in Reddit — these are the complaints you see in Reddit, this friction between procurement and engineering, right? So you want to live in that place where you’re helping reduce these frictions, helping both sides understand each other.

I’ll let you talk now. I’m so sorry.

Vince Nero

No, no. I think the kind of creative spark then becomes how — presenting those problems in a way that, yeah, you can get links. Like, to your point, is it a big study or is it just a table, and you’re reaching out to — and I would assume when you get this niche, for lack of a better word, or this descriptive with the problems you’re solving, you probably limit the amount of outreach you can do, right?

The amount of websites you’re getting links from.

But the ones you’re getting links from are the super relevant links that are probably really going to move the needle.

And at the end of the day, you could probably point to those to your CMO and say, “Look, our audience is probably spending a lot of time on these two sites that we got links from.” So to me, I mean — good.

Garrett French

And like, if there are engineering coaching firms, right — if that happens to be a thing, or procurement coaching — maybe there isn’t, I don’t know.

But you would look for those types of publishers, potentially.

You would look immediately to your existing people that send you business, and who are your allies in the verticals that you work in.

And is there a way to kind of cross-promote with those folks? You would be sponsoring the procurement webinars, the niche-specific procurement and engineering conventions and webinars and publications and trade magazines for visibility there as well.

But yeah, absolutely — the opportunity pool is quite small.

But when you are — yeah, it’s preferred. It’s much easier. Sometimes constraints are nice to have.

How do you report on link impact?

Garrett French

That is 100% why we said — yeah, we could talk literally all day long about metrics of the linking page, the linking website, and there are good ones and there are bad ones. But what happens after you build the link?

And so it’s that specific place where we really try to move the conversation and move the focus, because that’s what we found helps us keep our jobs and helps the people that we report to keep their jobs, right?

Because we’re focused on impact, as opposed to getting granular about the DA or whatever of a given website.

Does that close the deal?

No — a lot of our more traditional, steeped-in-SEO folks have a tough time making that leap into impact.

And we don’t talk about impact very much, very particularly, or with a lot of specificity.

But when we can say, “Hey, here’s the page we built links to, and here’s the control group of pages on your website that are similar but didn’t get any links — and you can see them trending flat while our visibility is going up for the page we built links to” — when you can isolate impact that way, and say it was these links that we built, these 17 —

From, you didn’t like the DA of this one — remember, you got really upset with that one?

You asked us to do another link because this DA was so low? Well, guess what — it didn’t matter. A

nd that’s not what we should be looking at.

I’m not saying give us carte blanche — we’re not trying to get shitty links out here, we’re not trying to get PBNs.

But let’s really look at what happens after we build the links, what happens on the pages we built links to.

And when we track a control group on a site, and a control group of competitors as well — “hey, here’s how we’re trending against our control group, on-site control group plus competitive control group” — the whole conversation shifts. You all of a sudden have a narrative, a compelling story to tell the CMO.

This is the game. I mean, this is where you have to live. You’re not like, “Hey, we got a link from a DA 99.”

What does the CMO care about that?

What are you giving the CMO there to help them keep their job? Because they’re under attack too.

Don’t quote me on this — don’t call me out based on my made-up statistics here — but CMOs are the C-suite individual that loses their job the most frequently.

And if you’re not contributing to the stability of their job continuity, then you’re not contributing to your own job continuity either.

And so you need to be very clear about the ROI of link building. And this is something we learned over 15 years of being an agency — we’re into our 15th year now.

And this is why we started focusing on impact reporting, link impact reporting: here are the pages in our campaign, here’s how they’re doing versus your control group. I mean, it seems like it should have been a thing all along — it just hasn’t really been. We’ve seen some examples in the wild of folks doing this, and it’s not outlandish, it’s not crazy.

But when you focus this way rather than —And I’m not saying you don’t do digital PR — you’ve got to keep taking those big swings, you’ve got to keep taking those medium swings.

Don’t worry, you can’t always build links directly to sales pages — you shouldn’t.

But if you’re doing all of these things together, you are cooking with gas.

That’s when the magic really happens — when you put all these pieces together, for sure.

Vince Nero

And just to clarify — the upward trajectory you’re talking about, when you’re talking link impact score — that’s traffic?

Garrett French

Correct, it’s rankings that align with keyword demand for keywords that we know the traffic for.

So yeah, it is visits to the page, relevant to a specific keyword.

Now, let’s talk about the elephant though — AI overviews and LLMs — because has everything shifted?

Yes, it has. Is it just link building?

Kind of not, but kind of, right?

So we could push there, but you’re running things, Vince.

What else should we talk about?

What are some of the characteristics of good content?

Garrett French

Utility — or helpfulness.

We’re taught by Google to make helpful content, and yet we’re given no formulas or rubrics or guidance around what helpful actually means. And so we’ve really pushed heavily into that space, trying to formulate what does helpful look like, what does it mean.

And for us it’s a lot of decisioning efficiencies — reducing a sense of risk, increasing or decreasing the time it takes to arrive at a decision. And honestly, this is what a lot of LLMs are already doing, right?

Like, they don’t need us. They can speculate a lot into these places.

But when you get granular about a very particular offering that a client has, there are still going to be a lot of areas that LLMs end up hallucinating into, or best-guessing over, or not really having detailed knowledge about.

And so that’s kind of where we feel like the most bang for the buck comes from — what can we add to the page to make it appear higher in, or get cited more frequently in, LLMs? Hopefully get the brand mentioned more. And then also what can we build links to directly, and what’s gonna be genuinely useful.

I do think there’s some opportunity, depending on the size of the client, to be looking across a division that, let’s say, has three business units.

They all kind of work with the same client or type of ICP.

Doing a study that really does look across all of these, but then trying to come up with formulas that could be extensible — decisioning formulas, like how do you make decisions about what to do when this happens — and then getting those formulas and working them all the way down to the page level, where you’re not necessarily starting from the bottom up.

That’s my favorite way to do it, because bottom-up you really start in the soil — the context of this thing that’s for sale, right?

We’re SEOs, and we think top-down: topic, and then everything else is kind of like noise.

But it’s that place of noise — the edge case — that’s where the real value a lot of times comes from, when we are looking for specific types of content that are gonna be citable by humans and not just LLMs, but citable and put on a particular sales page. It has to be useful, though. It has to be helpful. And that could mean you’re telling people not to buy this thing.

That’s what helpful means.

That’s what actually helpful means.

It’s scary — it’s scary for us as marketers.

And don’t tell your CMO that I said that. Please. I’ll never have a chance to speak with them.

But that’s where the genuinely useful kinds of information comes from — if you’re enabling someone to not choose this thing.

Now, you could suggest other things on your website, right?

But you’re saying, “Hey, don’t click here now, because you need to do these things before you click here. You’re gonna waste your time.”

Acknowledging that, I think, is where trust really comes from — really trying to take that role in the life of your market, in the context of your market, for people that are visiting your website. That’s where I want my marketing to live.

I mean, nobody’s asking me for that, Vince, right?

Like, “Hey, put more friction on my sales pages, please.”

Nobody says that.

Nobody really wants that.

But it is the place where probably the most useful things to say — the most citation-worthy content — is going to likely be.

And you can spin it so that it’s like, “Hey, we’re best for” or “best win.” So it’s not just like, “Don’t do it if—” I just say things the wrong way because I’m — I’m just a terrible marketer. That’s not my strong suit. Figuring out where the frictions are — that’s what I love.

And I think that’s one of the things that LLMs have enabled us to do at scale more easily.

Certainly, the more we can ground what we would say on a particular page from the complaints and issues that our customers have with this specific offering, the better we’re doing at creating citation-worthy content and serving our market. And I think that’s what Will Reynolds landed on in the example you gave, right? “This page on the IRS website is very difficult. We don’t understand what it means. So let’s make it easier to understand. Let’s build a tool to make that easier to work with.”

But now LLMs can do that much more quickly too.

So we’re still in this era where — are we really solving a problem that needs to be solved anymore?

And so it’s still a fun — it’s still just a delightful place to work. I love my job.

The last two years of LLMs and AI’s ascent has been absolutely breathtaking and wonderful. I feel more excited than ever about coming into work.

But it’s definitely a challenge around what do we say, what do we put on client pages that is gonna be useful and seen as relevant? Like, have entities in it that an LLM would expect, but then also be uniquely useful, uniquely valuable.

You kind of have to solve it fresh each time — but LLMs make it much easier to solve that type of thing now.

It’s just getting SMEs on board to get granular down to the specific page, and that can be tricky. We’re still solving for that, frankly, Vince. But go ahead.

Are you looking at AI-generated answers to make sure you’re filling in those gaps?

Garrett French

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So when we’re building out — we call them “tracking-worthy prompts.”

When we’re building a tracking-worthy prompt, it’s from the perspective of an expert user who’s really trying to — and we use AI to make these too.

So this is why the more insight we can get from an SME, the better. Anyway, so when we have this kind of expert-level prompting, you can take the output and then put it in front of an actual, real SME and say, “What is wrong here? What is inaccurate?”

And calling it a hallucination — it’s more like: what is it glossing over?

What is it still not really understanding, that it’s not speaking to?

And I think that’s a key distinction to make — it could be, but it’s really more like where is it inadequate?

And sometimes it’s a pure hallucination — not super often, especially not with Gemini, which is just coming out kicking a lot of ass. I do see it making mistakes — I’m not trying to say it’s the best in the whole world.

I do think it is, but I’m not trying to say that. I’m just kidding.

I’m being silly.

But I do like it, I do really like it.

But those outputs from Gemini, from the AI overviews — those are what you really want to be examining.

But almost more specifically, what are the citations when it’s saying these things? Because that’s the second layer of work here. We’re calling it “citation optimization,” but we’re really trying to say: what are the documents that are being called up? And then how do we interact with the publishers of such documents — whether it’s us or a publisher that we could engage with potentially — so that what they’re saying is more favorable, or more full in its expression of information needed?

So there’s some missing information on these pages, and we know that from having validated the absence with an SME. So now we can go to this organization, this publisher, and say, “Hey, you missed something. You didn’t realize this, and so you’re leaving this out, and your page is deficient in some way.”

Now, you’re usually gonna have to knock — people aren’t updating their websites that much anymore — so you’re often getting people who are — so you’re moving into the gray area of link building, or you’re buying at this point.

Yeah, we haven’t really traditionally done that, so we’re kind of starting to have to lean into that space.

We’ve really tried to be link earners. But when you can see exactly who’s being cited, and you know the types of pages, you know what they’re saying, and you need to be visible on those pages — you gotta do what you gotta do, Vince.

The post Building Links That Impact the Bottom Line with Garrett French appeared first on BuzzStream.

There is an ongoing narrative that listicles are your only in-road to AI citations, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Last week, I published a massive study on news citations that appeared in ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini.

Using Xofu, the AI citation-tracking tool from Citation Labs, I analyzed over 4 million citations across ~4k prompts.

I also broke our prompts into three types: informational queries, decision-making queries, and brand awareness queries, because the questions customers ask VASTLY change how AI citations occur.

I focused on news citations first because we are a digital PR-focused tool, but there are massive takeaways when you look at the data outside of just news publications.

So, in this follow-up, I wanted to take a more macro look at the data and understand how AI platforms cite our sources by prompt type.

You can jump down to takeaways, but you’ll also find some scattered throughout from Garrett French, founder of Citation Labs and Xofu.

Here’s what we found:

Reddit and Wikipedia are the Most Cited Sites in AI (But This is Very Misleading)

Let’s start where everyone starts: the top-cited site from our entire dataset was Reddit.

But, as you’ll soon see, that starts to mean less and less as we go through the data.

First off, the fact that Reddit accounts for only 3.49% of the dataset suggests the dataset is incredibly fragmented.

You shouldn’t rely on one site to rule your AI strategies.

Then, the type of question that you ask an LLM drastically changes the citation set.

Top Sites By Prompt Type Changes Things Again

When we look at the top sites by prompt type, the picture changes.

Wikipedia becomes the go-to source for brand awareness queries, while Reddit is more for head-to-head brand comparison queries.

But again, there is incredible fragmentation. This tells me that LLMs are getting much better at showing a wide variety of sources (probably due to query fan-out).

But not all LLMs behave the same way.

Let’s look at site slices by platform.

ChatGPT and Google’s AI Platform’s Top Cited Sites Are Very Different

When we look at ChatGPT, we see next to no overlap with Google’s platforms except for Wikipedia.

Then, to break it down one more time, we can look at the top five sites for each platform and prompt type.

You get the picture; there is no one universal list to rule them all, and the type of prompts you ask drastically changes where the information comes from.

Keep that in mind as we go through the remaining takeaways.

Content is King

As you can see, blog/content is easily the most cited type of content by AI models, making up over half of the citations (53.46%).

As we saw in our previous study, news publications are in (far) second place with 14.09%, followed by citations from social media (8.71%).

Now we still need to look at this by prompt type to understand the breakdown.

Blog/Content is Less Dominant in Brand Awareness Queries

As we can see, while Blog/Content still appears most frequently across all prompt types, it is less dominant in citations for Brand Awareness queries.

So, when a user is searching to learn more about a brand, prompting something like “What products or services does United Airlines offer?” Google Gemini is pulling information and citing from a product page on the United Airlines website.

Other times, it may just cite the homepage, which I rolled into my “About” categorization.

For instance, when prompted “What is Booking.com known for?” it simply cited the homepage.

For now, I want to dive into the Blog/Content, given that it is the largest chunk.

Most of what was categorized as Blog/Content is actual blog content, but it can also include reports, data studies, calculators, reviews, analyses, and virtually any website content that isn’t selling something or expressly any of the other categories listed above.

To further clarify what we were looking at, I broke these down again into subcategories:

With that in place, we can look at the type of content that shows up most frequently.

Comparative Content Rules, But Mainly for Evaluative Prompts

Comparative content is clearly the most cited type at 26.92%, followed by what I called Market Analysis/Insights (23.06%) and Definition/Explainer content (20.57%).

For example, here is a Homevy blog post comparing Airbnb vs. Booking.com:

And while this may lead you to think that you should jump on the comparison content bandwagon, our evaluative prompts were exclusively head-to-head, bottom-funnel comparison queries, like:

• Netflix vs Disney+: which is the better option?
• Is Hilton better than Hyatt?
• How much does Coursera cost compared to edX?

So, it makes sense that they show up.

And when we break it down, we can see that comparison content appears most prominently in the evaluative prompts.

And with this lens, we start to see how cleanly the type of content generated by LLMs is influenced by the prompts themselves.

Next, let’s leave Blog/Content and look at some other citation groups to see if the patterns hold.

About Pages and Product Pages Get Cited for Brand Awareness Queries Over One-Third of the Time

Blog/Content accounts for the most brand awareness queries (33.78%), but here’s where things start getting interesting, because About and Product/Service pages combine for 35.13% of the citations.

Meaning, when users ask about a brand, about a third of the time, AI shows content from the brand’s website.

For instance, if we ask “What products or services does Harvard University offer?”, we see citations from blog content like this post from Spark Finance:

But we also see owned media from the Harvard Campus Services page appearing in the citations:

But as we saw with the domain lists, different AI platforms act differently. In this next section, you can see how Google platforms differ in content type from ChatGPT.

ChatGPT prefers a broader mix of content types than Google

Based on the overall breakdown, Google has a heavier focus on Blog/Content citations, whereas ChatGPT is more spread out across Product/Service pages (24.56%), Internal Newsrooms (18.71%), About pages (9.15%), and even Support/Help (7.72%).

This again shows how differently these platforms behave when they pull insights for the same questions.

Next, let’s look at news content, as it’s the second-most-cited type in our dataset.

News Publisher Content Made Up 14.09% of all Citations

I already published a comprehensive breakdown of this content in our news citations analysis, so I won’t go into it too deeply here.

When we broke it down by prompt type, we saw that news citations appear most frequently in evaluative queries.

For instance, when we asked “Is Delta better than United?” we saw a publication called The Travel with a story covering a survey from Compare the Market, which compared both brands.

Two other quick pieces to cover with news that stood out to me.

• News citations weren’t coming from syndicated sources like MSN or Yahoo. (Syndicated news only made up 6.2% of the news citations).
• News citations weren’t coming from press releases. (Press releases only accounted for 0.32% of the news citations.)
• Newswire content only made up 0.21% of the entire analysis.

Newsroom content, however, was calculated separately.

These are essentially internal newsrooms where brands post press releases and company news, as shown below.

These accounted for 3% of the entire analysis—and on ChatGPT, they accounted for 18% of citations (compared to about 2% on Google’s platforms).

So, there may be some potential to influence citations with your own content.

But before I can look at that fully, let’s look at social media to understand how and where they come from, so we can distinguish between owned and earned.

Social Citations Appeared in 8.71% of the Citations

Overall, social media appeared in just 8.71% of the citations, making it the third-most cited in our study.

Based on the breakdown, Reddit is the most cited (39.87%), followed by YouTube (25.88%), and then LinkedIn (8.96%).

As you can see, I also included some lesser-known social platforms like Fish Bowl App, and even rolled in Substack and Medium into the mix.

Next, we also need to look at the prompt type.

Social Shows Up Most for Bottom Funnel Prompts

Social citations come mainly from evaluative, decision-making prompts (18%) compared to just 5% from informational prompts and 2.5% from brand awareness prompts.

And remember, when we talk about evaluative prompts, it’s always those head-to-head comparisons.

For instance, if we were to ask, “How much does Udemy cost compared to Pluralsight?”, we saw the citation coming from this Reddit thread:

Another nuance we haven’t looked at is how the platforms differ.

60% of ChatGPT Citations Come From Facebook

ChatGPT and Google have very different preferences for social platforms, according to our dataset.

ChatGPT has no Reddit citations; instead, 60% of the social citations in our study came from Facebook.

About half of the social citations from Google AI Mode come from Reddit; AI Overviews have 36.62%, and Google Gemini has 23.71%.

But on social, there’s a chance that posting your own content can lead to citations.

So, I needed to categorize all the social citations according to the prompts.

LinkedIn Accounts for Roughly All of the Owned Social Citations

Only LinkedIn had a meaningful share of owned media at 37.27%.

To get this breakdown, if the prompt mentioned a brand and the citation was from a social source owned by the brand, it was categorized as owned.

For instance, on Reddit, I dug deep to see whether any subreddits claimed to be owned by brands or had company members as moderators.

Most, if not all, expressly said they weren’t owned or supported by the real brand:

I repeated that process across all social platforms.

As you’d expect, LinkedIn company profiles are the main source for Brand Awareness queries.

For instance, one citation from Google AI Overviews for the query: “What is MGM Resorts known for?” returned MGM Resorts’ company profile page:

Now, what happens if we expand this owned vs earned to the entire dataset to answer : how well can you effectively influence LLMs with your own content?

Earned Media Citations Account for About 80% of Citations

Citations from all earned media sources, like news, social media, wikis/forums, account for 47.70% of the dataset.

But when we excluded informational queries that didn’t mention brands in the prompts, earned jumped to about 80%.

True owned content (blogs written by the site, product pages, and service pages) accounted for only 20.7% when informational prompts were excluded.

So, we may be tempted yet again to say that no, we can’t influence LLMs with our own content, but, again, with AI, everything is prompt-dependent.

When we look at this breakdown by prompt type, I do see a path for owned content to influence LLM output.

About 40% of Brand Awareness Citations Came From Owned Content

Earned content still accounts for almost all citations from evaluative queries (93.75%), but, as we saw in social, only 60.15% of citations from brand awareness queries are earned.

So about 40% of the time, for queries about or comparing your brand to someone else, AI will cite content from your own site.

Expert Opinions

Pull up your About page and your top product or service page right now.

Garrett French
Founder, Citation Labs

“

Read it and ask yourself: Is every claim you’d want an AI to repeat actually on the page, in plain language, as a provable and complete logical statement?

“We’re the leader in X” isn’t a claim AI can evaluate.

“We’re the only [category] vendor that [specific proof]” is.

If they’re written for a human skimming a hero section, you’re leaving that window mostly closed.

A useful 30-minute exercise: type “[your brand name] is known for” into ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Compare what comes back to a list of your UVPs, your brand identity, and what you want your ICPs to understand first and foremost.

The gap between those two things is your About Page and Sales Page editing queue – and something you could address with your next PR campaign.

This tracks with a test last year coming from Will Reynolds and the Seer Interactive team, where they simply changed some wording in their site’s footer and saw how easily it surfaced in AI.

Traditional SEO Metrics Don’t Correlate Directly With Citations

There is no correlation between Domain Rating, Domain Authority, Links, or Organic Traffic to sites that get cited in LLMs.

However, this doesn’t mean SEO is irrelevant; there is an important nuance: we aren’t measuring query fan-out.

LLMs don’t pull from the whole internet.

They pull from a retrieved set of documents, based on how the prompt gets expanded into different variations (often called query fan-out).

This is why we see so many citations from niche blogs and long-tail comparison pages.

Those kinds of pages might not dominate traditional search metrics, but they rank well for specific variations (and probably contain content that’s easier for LLMs to extract, compare, and synthesize).

What this tells me is that how and why LLMs decide to cite something is still a metric we simply don’t have yet.

Expert Opinions

Stop measuring only WHETHER you appear — start measuring HOW you appear.

Garrett French
Founder, Citation Labs

“

Run these two prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude — week over week:
“What are the main alternatives to [your brand] in [category]? Once you’ve listed them, compare [your brand] against those alternatives for [use case] and tell me what you’re basing that on.”
“Based on that comparison, what is [your brand] most specifically known for that its alternatives are not? What source are you drawing on for that?”
For each result, note three things:
(1) Verdict: Were you recommended, ranked, filtered on fit, warned against, or omitted entirely?
(2) Sourcing: Did the AI cite a specific URL, or is it drawing on training data with nothing attached?
(3) Language: What exact words did it use to describe your advantage — and do they match what your best content actually says?
What you’re building with this log is a gap register. Each gap has a different fix — and closing them systematically is exactly what Citation Optimization is for.
Start here with our Citation Optimization Framework.

Takeaways and Tactics to Consider

Although there are still many more ways to slice this data, I want to stop here and give some takeaways from what I’ve learned.

1. Stop Thinking in Keywords and Start Mapping to Prompts

The biggest takeaway for me is how much the citations differ across prompt types.

If you want to appear as the “best auto rentals in NYC,” you need to understand how users might search for that term, because they don’t just answer the queries; they expand on them.

For instance, if you use a tool like Otterly’s Query Fan Out Generator, you’ll see the ways that Google AI Mode expands on a normal keyword-driven search.

Instead of a simple takeaway like, “you need to get your brand mentioned in listicles,” you can see that it’s actually important to focus on things like:

• Comparisons between brands
• Location-based queries
• Reviews
• Supportive articles like toll policies for rental cars
• Discounts
• Pricing

So the real strategy isn’t just ranking for a keyword, it’s showing up across the fan-out ecosystem of the prompts.

In one study by the Citation Labs team, they tested building third-party comparison microsites to see if it would influence ranking.

Instances in which the microsites were cited helped the client rank better, outperforming instances in which they were not.

So, these LLM models may often favor sources that have already done the comparison work, because that structure makes it easier to reuse when generating recommendations.

Then you can work backward to influence those either through owned or earned channels.

2. You Do Have Some Control Over How You Appear

Although 80% of the citations overall are earned, there are nooks and crannies where you can own your own messaging.

Remember, about 35% of brand awareness citations came from About/Product Pages.

We also saw this with internal newsrooms, where brands published press releases about themselves.

This owned content even extends into social…

3. Your LinkedIn Company Page is a Free Brand Awareness Asset

Building off the previous, when it comes to social, LinkedIn company profiles were virtually the only owned social platforms surfaced.

Meaning, if someone asks AI, “What does [your company] do?”, optimizing your LinkedIn page is a free space to potentially influence LLMs.

I’m also singling out LinkedIn here because there have been numerous recent reports about how often it appears in citations.

Make sure your description, specialties, and about section are written the way you’d want AI to answer that question, not the way a recruiter would read it.

4. ChatGPT is the Most Controllable Platform Through Owned Content

Speaking of control, although ChatGPT may be used way less than Google as a search platform, it is still a very controllable platform.

68.9% of ChatGPT citations in our dataset came from owned content, compared to 35–41% on Google’s platforms.

So, again, the tactical move is to prioritize getting your own site content, like product pages, about pages, and internal newsrooms, optimized for how you want LLMs to present your brand.

5. Citations Aren’t Everything

Although I realize I’m probably undermining the value of this whole study, it’s very important to note that citations are clicked on very little (despite what Google tells us).

But it’s the same argument I’ve always made for featured snippets: even if no one clicks the links shown, you would still rather your brand appear instead of a competitor’s.

Methodology

Using XOFU, an AI citation monitoring tool powered by Citation Labs, we analyzed 4 million citations from across 10 industries and 3,600 prompts (which you can see here) to understand how prompt type influences AI citations in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, and Google Gemini.

We broke our prompts into three distinct categories:

• exploratory/informative (aka top funnel queries)
• evaluative/decision-making (aka bottom funnel)
• general brand awareness

The industries we looked at were:

• Business
• Education
• Energy
• Entertainment
• Finance
• Healthcare
• Hospitality
• Retail
• Technology
• Travel

We collected data for a week starting in January. 27, 2026.

You can see all of the citation data here.

The post What Kind of Content Does AI Cite (Based on Prompt Type)? appeared first on BuzzStream.

We’re entering unknown territory with AI.

And every time a new study comes out around LLMs and AI citations, I feel like SEOs panic and upend their strategies.

Amanda Milligan is the content and growth manager with Semrush, founder of Brand Authority Club, and, most importantly for this podcast, author of the Backlinko article titled “LLM Sources Shifted 80% in 2 Months: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Panic.“

After I read it, I immediately thought I needed to have her on the podcast.

So, relax, stick to your guns, and listen as Amanda walks us through why you shouldn’t panic over the rapid changes in AI.

Can you give a quick synopsis of your Backlinko piece?

Amanda: I think what you’re describing is correct. When there’s a lot of change and volatility, people want a quick solution and jump on the next shiny thing.

In the SEO world, the equivalent is an algorithm update — and while sometimes a pivot is merited, these moments are always a good opportunity to pause and ask: is what we’re doing working? Is it going to keep working?

In this case, LLM marketing is an emerging space. We know some things, we’re learning others. The Semrush study showing changes in the sources ChatGPT was using — that’s essentially what the piece was commenting on. Going from a few months ago, ChatGPT changed how much it was using sites like Reddit, for example.

People see that and think, “Oh my God, everything I was doing is wrong. Do I pivot? How do I fix this?”

The point of the article was: I hear that it’s scary, but that’s not really the right approach. What we should be doing anyway — especially digital PR folks who already know how to get authoritative pickups — that foundation is still what matters most. A drop in Reddit? A lot of us don’t think that’ll last.

There are certain places that people trust, and Reddit happens to be one of them — even in Google, for about a year now — because there are only so many places consumers trust to get information these days.

If you as a practitioner know your audience goes to a source and respects it, stick with it.

Don’t abandon it just because a study says it’s being used a little less right now. All of these things interplay.

The real takeaway from seeing this kind of volatility is: LLMs are changing, nothing is static.

If we stick to what’s core to what we’re trying to do — almost the common sense of it all — with some fine-tuning on the specifics, we don’t need a complete overhaul of strategy. It is good to have that adaptive mindset, but the overall strategy is going to stay the same.

Vince: Yeah, this idea of chasing Reddit citations concerns me a bit — that’s where you’re seeing a lot of the spam tactics emerge. And it feels like AI has just turned back the clock on all of it.

Amanda: It’s muddled everything, yeah.

Vince: Yeah, all the old spam tactics are coming out. It’s the “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation. People are ruining it, and for every one person doing it correctly, there are five people trying to game the system.

Amanda: It’s funny — I’m an avid Redditor and I was on yesterday and saw two examples of people calling out, “Hey, I know you made this thread to promote this brand.”

People are already catching it, and that’s so Reddit. They are the savviest at catching marketing.

And honestly, I was encouraged by that. At least the spammy stuff isn’t going to work. That’s what we’re talking about — the fundamentals of PR. It always happens because there’s this panic of “we’ve got to get in there, now, fast.” And there are people doing it really well. It’s not about spamming links or chiming in inauthentically.

The example I saw yesterday — I was in a women’s fashion over 35 subreddit — and the comment was immediately called out: “We know this is trying to promote Rent the Runway. Don’t even bother.” That ends up being a negative. So yeah, Reddit is powerful because it’s supposed to be an authentic community space. You can engage with it as a brand, but it takes a lot more effort.

What are some tips for people who want to influence LLMs the “right” way?

Amanda: What’s exciting — and this doesn’t even answer your question yet, but I’ll get there — is that LLMs are giving people more permission and buy-in to go after niche sites, even if they’re not the big flashy publications.

Because those niche sites are appearing in citations. So I think it’s great to seize that opportunity and say, “I know our audience listens to that podcast, but it’s been hard to measure the impact.”

Well, now one way to measure it is to see if it’s showing up in LLM citations.

In terms of actual tips — a lot of it is about audience research.

The core of your question is: how do you find out where your audience is online? And that’s marketing basics.

Tools like SparkToro allow you to do it faster than more manual strategies, but those manual strategies — talking to customers, immersing yourself in the community — are still invaluable.

If you join a company and you’re starting from scratch, you really do have to ask your customers directly: where do you go for information? What do you trust?

I’ve done this for my own consulting.

I’m in a CMO Slack channel that’s phenomenal — people share incredible insights.

I went in and just asked, “Where do you guys trust anymore?” And they told me.

Not because I was going to go spam it — I was genuinely curious.

So literally getting into community spaces and asking people, networking, using tools like SparkToro, even asking LLMs themselves — “Where are the sources people trust?” — and then reviewing the sources they pull from. There’s a whole cycle here. A lot of it is manual, and that’s what’s hard for people.

Can you explain a little bit about the retrieval layer versus the knowledge base?

Amanda: I can explain the basics — I’m not a super technical person, so if you want to dig into the nitty gritty, go watch Mike King’s content.

But on a basic level, every LLM operates differently, so keep in mind that when we say “LLMs” in general, if you’re really trying to optimize for a specific one, that matters. You probably care most about ChatGPT and AI Overviews — you might not care what Perplexity is doing if your audience never uses it.

Every LLM has two main components.

There’s the knowledge base — information that was input into the model from the get-go.

That’s for facts you don’t need to search for in real time, like “how fast can a cheetah run?” Then there’s the retrieval component — the model is literally going out and finding pages that answer a query, where recency and relevancy matter more. That’s where we’re seeing the most development, because just like Google constantly updates its algorithm, LLMs are figuring out the best way to surface information.

There’s a concept called “query fan-out” that gets more technical, but the basics are visible even in ChatGPT — it’ll tell you at the top how many searches it ran to synthesize its answer.

That’s why so many studies have been able to come out: you can actually see those inputs.

And that’s why SEO and digital PR are so parallel right now. You have to appear in Google at all for LLMs to even consider you — you don’t necessarily need to be in the top few positions, but you have to be appearing and covering those basics just to stand a chance in LLM answers.

What a lot of our strategy is really about is: how do we give LLMs the fodder they need in the retrieval process to understand our brands, make accurate comparisons, and provide an answer we like? That’s where the narrative strategy comes in.

Have your strategies changed in the past six months?

Amanda: It’s a little different, but links still matter. What I’ve done — and what I encourage everyone to do — is leverage this opportunity.

A lot of PR practitioners have always believed brand mentions matter, and yet it’s always been a fight to prove that.

And finally, they’re winning that fight because of this moment with AI.

So it’s not that I’ve changed the way I think about marketing — it’s that I have more leeway now to do the things I’ve always wanted to do, that I’ve pushed for but couldn’t always measure well enough. There’s an appetite now for building visibility because people see what happens. AI is the big example of: even if you can’t know for sure exactly how you’re appearing in every prompt, it’s still happening.

People are still seeing your competitor instead of you if you’re not putting in the effort.

I left to start Brand Authority Club because I was obsessed with authority and visibility — things that are so difficult to measure and yet critically matter. This isn’t how I expected it to come to the forefront, but it has. So I’m excited about that. PRs now have the buy-in for brand mentions, for going after those niche placements and pointing to a specific LLM citation and saying, “We did that. We got that placement.”

Marketing will never be perfectly measurable, but having even a little more leeway to experiment and do things you can’t measure perfectly is going to make a huge difference for brands trying to grow sustainably.

Vince: Yeah, the brand mention thing is interesting. In our State of Digital PR survey, digital PR has been way more effective for people and I think it’s all due to that. Potential clients are now coming in asking to be mentioned in AI as a KPI. But I still feel like it’s muddy — agencies are measuring this stuff way differently.

How do you think about KPIs in this AI world?

Amanda: It really is a nuanced conversation depending on who you’re talking to. For a lot of businesses, this honestly may not matter much at all right now.

And being a consultant means being honest about that. If someone comes to you saying they’re excited about AI, you need to do a little research first — does it make sense to pivot investment that way? Are you getting all your business through social? That honest conversation is important.

Still, it’s worth thinking about now because AI’s share of search is going to increase — it’s still very small overall. So the balance is: let’s start putting the fundamentals in place. If we’re thinking about how we’ll eventually appear in LLMs, what do we not have now that will hinder that?

And a lot of those fundamentals will be beneficial regardless.

A lot of what I do now is refine brand messaging. If you don’t have your messaging right on your own website — and then on every third-party site you have control over — that’s the first thing to fix. It increases the chances that third-party mentions will describe you the way you want, and increases the chances that LLMs will mention you the way you want. A lot of businesses are just running, running, running and haven’t taken a beat to ask: does our messaging need an update?

We start there.

Get the messaging right, update it everywhere you have control, and then build the investment in PR — going where your audience actually is — from there.

Do you look at entities and cosine similarity?

Amanda: Sometimes, depending on who I’m talking to. The conversation is really different with a solopreneur versus an enterprise client.

A solopreneur doesn’t care about entities — they just want to know what to do to show up.

But for those who are more SEO-savvy, yes, we’ll have those conversations about entities and experiment with how you’re currently appearing.

One simple thing I love showing people: use Reddit Answers — Reddit has a beta feature where you can type in your brand and it summarizes how Reddit is talking about you.

You can see very quickly what needs to be adjusted in terms of your messaging and brand perception.

And same thing with LLMs — search for “best [your category],” comparisons with competitors, and see what’s being pulled.

You need a pulse check of where you stand. It also signals other problems that need to be fixed outside of just your AI appearance — if you don’t like how you’re appearing there, something is off on your site or in your third-party signals, and that’s exactly what PR can fix.

Vince: To bring it full circle — back to your article about LLM sources shifting — when should we actually tune in?

When is it important to pay attention when we see, say, Reddit or Wikipedia dominating LLM citations?

When is it important to care about reports of LLM sources shifting?

Amanda: It’s a balance. Rather than ignoring it or panicking and overhauling your strategy, the middle ground is: do those searches yourself and see what’s showing up. There’s a good article coming out on Backlinko about what they’re calling “Citation Core” — basically an exercise for going through and identifying, for your niche, the sites that appear frequently in LLM results.

You could do this manually or with a tool — type in searches you’d expect your audience to use and get a sense of what sites keep coming up, what type of content keeps appearing. Video is becoming a much bigger part of Gemini results, for example. If a site has a bunch of blog posts that keep getting mentioned in your topic area, maybe you should pitch a guest post there.

It’s really just audience research with a new input.

Maybe there’s a site you’ve never considered that suddenly keeps appearing — it’s fodder for your strategy. But you still need a layer of human critical thinking on top of all of this. You decide, based on what you’re seeing, if it’s worth pursuing.

Is there anything I didn’t ask that you wish we’d covered?

Amanda: I just want to reinforce the opportunity here for PR folks.

I think social and PR got the biggest boon from this transition, because there’s so much more validation now that what you do impacts all discovery.

There’s a bigger conversation about brand visibility and brand discovery outside of just SEO — we can’t be in silos anymore. It’s not enough to optimize for search algorithms; you have to appear in these other places too.

And the change in how people search is still happening — TikTok and YouTube being huge search engines is still a thing. The number one question remains: where is your audience? If you don’t know where to start, that’s where you start. Because a modern buyer might see you on social, do a Google search, ask an LLM to compare you to competitors, go back to Google, and then head to Reddit to confirm their decision.

You have to be present in all of those places.

This is an opportunity for all of us to say: all of this matters. Let’s invest in where our audience is and just do it. I know it’s been tumultuous and scary, but let’s lean into the benefits and the opportunities. Even if you can’t measure it perfectly, this stuff still matters.

The post Why LLM Volatility Shouldn’t Change Your Digital PR Strategy with Amanda Milligan appeared first on BuzzStream.

At BuzzStream, we often talk about the importance of building relationships and trust with journalists.

And that makes sense in theory: if a journalist knows and trusts the PR pro emailing them, they’ll be more likely to open the email.

But I wanted to test this theory in real life.

Using over 1 million emails, I examined sending patterns over a two-year period from 17 different agencies to determine whether journalists are more likely to open and reply to emails from PR pros who have already responded.

I’ll fully admit this isn’t a foolproof method, and the idea of warm leads vs. cold leads isn’t new, but running through this exercise with actual outreach from PR pros confirmed my theories about the power of relationship building.

However, what may be even more important is looking into how long these relationships last.

Here are all the findings from our studies on how building relationships affects journalist outreach.

Methodology

We analyzed 1,321,232 anonymized emails sent by PR teams across 17 agencies, focusing primarily on digital PR across a two-year time period.

For each email, we looked at a simple question:

Had this journalist replied to the anonymized sender before this email was sent?

That allowed us to split outreach into two groups:

• Cold outreach (no prior reply)
• Warm outreach (at least one prior reply)

From there, I went on to slice and dice the data.

Relationships Led to 1.5x More Opens

Journalists who replied to an initial email were 1.5 times more likely to open a second email from the same sender.

But even though the BuzzStream data I use for this (and all of my studies) excludes auto-opens, many PRs remain reasonably skeptical of open rates.

So, let’s also look at reply rates, because that’s where we see the biggest impact anyway.

Relationships Lead to 19x More Responses

Journalists who replied to an initial email were about 19 times more likely to respond to a second email from the same sender.

Here’s the look side by side:

This is clearly the bigger impact.

And even if you consider that replies from a journalist aren’t always saying they would cover, they can still provide invaluable insight and feedback for your future pitch.

For instance, a reply from a friendly journalist helped me understand why they don’t normally cover product launches:

Not only that, but as we’ll see, a response almost acts as a relationship touchpoint, which is key.

Journalists who replied in the last 90 days are about 30 times more likely to reply again than those reached via cold outreach.

But after 90 days, there is a steep drop off, so the good times won’t last forever.

Then there is an even larger decrease after 6 months. (Although previously engaged journalists are still 8x more likely to respond than cold outreach.)

And if there is any concern that these trends are a one-off phenomenon, they are not.

This pattern was consistent with all of the digital PR agencies we looked at.

All Digital PR Agencies Felt a Lift in Reply Rates From Journalists Who Recognized Them

As you can see, the lift in reply rates from 11 times up to as high as 20 times (one agency that was especially adept at managing relationships saw a reply rate 40x higher).

Here’s a look at four random, anonymized agencies from our dataset:

So there is clearly an advantage to developing media relations.

What are some ways to do it?

How to Develop and Maintain Relationships with Journalists

We covered our 10 tips for building relationships with journalists, but here are some highlights.

There are some proactive approaches and reactive approaches.

1. Reach Out to Journalists With No Ask

One simple suggestion that keeps coming up is to email a journalist with no specific ask.

Grace Tranter, a digital PR strategist with Digitaloft, told me,

“It’s really nice for a journalist to see your name appear a few times before a pitch lands, it makes that future outreach feel much more natural.

Plus, when they recognise your name and who you represent in a busy inbox, it instantly builds familiarity and credibility. You’re no longer just another unknown sender, they already know what kind of stories or experts you can provide.”

This totally tracks with the journalists I’ve spoken to.

But Grace is based in the UK, and we know that digital PR practices vary between the US and the UK.

So, I reached out to the Director of Public Relations with Journey Further, Domenica D’Ottavia, who is based here in the US.

She told me: “We do media intros fairly often.

Almost for every client actually once we begin a new client relationship. Introducing yourself to a journalist without pitching is one of the best long-term relationship builders in PR.

It’s not to sell a story, but to say hello, show we understand their vertical, and let them know we can be a helpful resource when the right story comes up.”

“It humanizes the relationship before you ever need anything.

When a relevant story opportunity does come up, you’re already on their radar, and if not, they can search their inbox any keywords that you might have mentioned and use you for a source.

It also capitalizes on the mere exposure effect – the next time you do email them they will be more likely to remember your name in their inbox, and thus more likely to open it and respond.”

In terms of what to put in your email, here’s what Grace told me:

“My outreach email usually includes a short introduction to me and the brand, what the brand does, and any useful context, especially if they’re not a household name.

For e-commerce clients, I’ll often include bestsellers, USPs (like being made in the UK), or what they can offer, whether that’s expert commentary, insights, or internal data. If there are any upcoming events or product launches, I’ll add those too.”

Domenica added:

“It’s short, personal, and service-minded.

Typically, it’s personalized. We don’t send out loads and loads of media intros, we only select for the most relevant journalists. This sets a tone of helpfulness, and ensures we know their beat inside and out. We’re hoping to create a natural way to follow up later with a relevant story.

Also, be human.

Polite, brief, relevant, and conversational wins every time. I will always recommend a personalized approach, but I know that it’s not always possible.”

Here’s a template from Grace:

She told me she’s used this and gotten replies from journalists at pubs like Grazia, Harpers, Bazaar, Vogue, and others.

2. Pitch Relevant Content

The quickest way to endear yourself to a journalist is to pitch them relevant content.

This may sound obvious, but Muck Rack reported that about 50% of journalists seldom or never receive pitches relevant to their beats.

Our State of Digital PR Report found similar takeaways, with about 48% of digital PR pros always personalizing their emails. And when we asked what “personalization” means, most agree that it means pitching relevant content.

This comes down to spending more time on building highly relevant media lists.

In one study on the effectiveness of highly targeted outreach lists, we found that coverage rates skyrocketed when digital PRs spent time building better media lists.

The spray and pray era of PR pitching is over.

3. Be Quick

Another tip that comes up frequently in our podcast is the need to respond quickly — especially when you say you can deliver.

As journalist Joni Sweet told me in our podcast about media pitching, “I’ve sometimes put out a call for pictures for someone in the health space, and a PR person will email me saying, ‘I have this amazing client who can speak to X, Y, and Z for your story. Do you want to set up an interview?”

I’ll say, ‘yes, I need answers by noon on Friday.’

Then it’s 4 p.m. on Friday and those answers still haven’t come in, I’m in a real bind because I have to find somebody over the weekend and convince them to give me the time of day so I can meet my deadline on Monday, make my editor happy, and get paid, right?”

If you commit to helping a journalist, you need to come through.

4. Be Truthful and Transparent

Again, another obvious-sounding tip, but considering how much negative press is out there around fake experts, like this report by Rob Waugh at PressGazette, this can seriously come back to haunt you.

I asked Rob about this issue of transparency in providing commentary for journalists:

“Since before I started reporting on fake experts, I was aware there was a big gulf between experts who deliver quotes via email which smell strongly of corporate messaging, and experts who actually deliver quirky and interesting copy.

Today, thanks to AI, that problem is far bigger than it’s ever been, with fake experts and fake expertise everywhere.”

Things have gotten so bad that journalists are looking for alternative ways to get comments rather than relying solely on what’s written in an email.

“I always think if you’re dealing with a real expert, they’ll surprise you with some of their answers, because they inhabit a world you don’t fully know.

In my day-to-day work, I’ll accept email answers from people I know, but if it’s someone new, I tend to go for phone or video interviews – firstly, you can be sure there’s someone real at the end of the line, and secondly, the answers tend to feel a lot more real.”

My takeaway here is that you should try to make yourself (or your client) available for phone or video calls whenever possible—especially on the first contact with a new journalist.

5. Track Your Relationships

When I started my career in digital PR, I was tracking journalist relationships on a Google spreadsheet.

In fact, here’s what my very first PR outreach campaign looked like (yes, I thought I could get CNN to cover my infographic about holiday-themed shots.)

One of the top reasons users switch from sending outreach emails in Gmail to a CRM like BuzzStream is to track relationships across campaigns and clients.

The ability to see contact history across clients and teams is one of the things that makes BuzzStream different than any competitor tool.

I see email conversations, relationship stage changes, notes, links, and more.

I can see the same info in BuzzStream’s Chrome Extension, BuzzMarker, which lets me view contact history, add people to lists, and find their contact information without leaving the web page.

More importantly, you can also add journalists to a DO NOT CONTACT list so no one from you or your team bothers them again.

Seeing all of the information at a glance allows me to make easy decisions about whether or not I should reach out to someone.

For instance, in the agency realm, you may want to slow your outreach to ensure the same journalist isn’t hit multiple times per day.

Final Note

I’ll be the first to admit that this study is far from iron-clad. It’s tough to measure relationships based solely on open and reply rates.

And just because you have a relationship doesn’t mean you are guaranteed coverage.

Yet, seeing and recognizing a name in an inbox has proven to be a game changers. That’s why relationship building is still one of the most-recommended practices from digital PRs and journalists alike.

The post How Do Journalist Relationships Impact Email Performance? appeared first on BuzzStream.

If you want to know how to pitch a journalist, why not ask a journalist?

Joni Sweet is a journalist, writer, PR consultant, and coach who’s been featured in publications like Forbes, Time, Travel + Leisure, and many others. She also has a fantastic newsletter, where she shares upcoming stories she’s working on and offers some great tips for pitching.

She also has a workshop coming up called The Pitch Fix, which is “a 75-minute journalist-led workshop where you’ll test, refine, and perfect your media pitch with real-time feedback and connect with a supportive group of peers.”

Listeners can use code BUZZSTREAMVIP to get $25 off a ticket to The Pitch Fix Live through April 3.

(Also big shoutout to former podcast guest Britt Klontz, who recommended I reach out to Joni.)

I had a fantastic time chatting with Joni, and think this is a must listen for anyone in digital PR.

Here is a slightly-edited transcript.

What does a typical day look like for you these days?

Joni

Yeah, so no day is exactly the same, which I think is one of the nice things about being self-employed and being a freelancer, is that every day looks a little different.

Lately, I’ve been in a really solid morning routine, taking my mornings really slow.

I’m not a morning person at all.

So I’ve been really trying to lean into that instead of fighting it and trying to be like on this, you know, rigid nine-to-five schedule.

So yeah, usually my mornings have some red light therapy. I have a red light on my desk over there and I blast my face with it, which makes me feel really good. And I’ll do a guided meditation simultaneously. Lately, I’ve been liking the app Insight Timer.

I’ll do some meditation, then some journaling, and breakfast and coffee, of course. And then usually by like mid-morning, I’m kind of ready to roll.

So that’s usually my time of checking emails or doing small tasks like sending an invoice, that kind of thing. And then I’ll break for lunch. And then my afternoons are my focused hours. So that’s where I will schedule interviews. I will write my newsletter. I’ll work on any assignments I have for magazines or brands that I’m working with.

Yeah, I think I said I’ll work on my newsletter.

And then I’ll also schedule my consulting calls then too, because I feel like that’s when my brain is really on and fired up and ready to give my best ideas.

And then I usually wrap around five, six o’clock, maybe a little later, depending on what’s going on.

What does your inbox look like?

Joni

Okay, so I used to say I get about 150 pictures a day. Now it’s skewing like 200 or more. The balance between journalists and people in public relations has kept…the gap keeps widening.

There are more and more people in PR and fewer and fewer journalists. So that means those of us who are still doing this work get more and more pictures. So I do go through my inbox and I read most of the pictures I get, not all of them, but I actually do read most of them.

With that said, most of my stories right now are actually coming from assignments from editors. So I found in my business, I do really well building long-term relationships with editors and becoming the person they lean on again and again for high-quality work.

So often, the ideas are coming directly from my editors, and then I’m just looking for the right people or products to talk about in those stories or to interview.

So that’s a big chunk of it.

Some of it’s, you know, some of the pictures I receive are reactive based on my calls for pictures in my newsletter or just generally talking about what I’m working on and the types of sources or products I might need. And I’m still getting a lot of cold pitches. So I still occasionally pitch ideas to editors.

And I have a couple of platforms, like Forbes and Yahoo, where I can write about whatever I think is important or interesting.

So I am still very open to pictures for those platforms.

And I’m always scouring my inbox to see what is happening, who has an interesting story to tell, something that I could write up for one of those publications kind of on my own with my own spin.

What stands out in your inbox?

Joni

Yeah, so I will say, like most journalists, my inbox is indeed a mess right now. Like 450 unread messages because last week I didn’t last late last week I was on deadline for something and I didn’t have time to keep up with my inbox I usually do trying to get to inbox zero at the end of every day.

I use my inbox like a personal database of sources and story ideas so I rarely delete an email unless I’m really trying to make space in my inbox.

I already pay Google extra money for storage. I don’t want to pay them more than I already am. So, you know, occasionally I’ll delete emails, but generally they live in that inbox for a really long time. So,

There have been times when I’ve searched my own inbox for a relevant source or a brand that I need to get in touch with.

And I’ll pull emails from 2016 and start emailing those folks who emailed me and say, ” Are you still working with this brand, or can you connect me with someone who is? So it’s sort of a managed chaos, I would say, in the inbox.

But yeah, with that said, I get a lot of irrelevant pictures too.

You know, one of the biggest mistakes I think people make is not knowing who they’re picturing and what they’re writing about.

They’re trying to use a spray-and-pray method of picturing, and I really don’t think it works.

So, you know, two areas I don’t cover are baby products, child care stories, and anything related to dogs. I’m a cat person. I like dogs too, but I’ve never had one, and it’s not a lifestyle I’m really familiar with. Being a dog mom isn’t a lifestyle I’m really familiar with. So I, I don’t, I’ve never written about dogs. I’ve never written about babies, and yet people pitch me dog and baby products all the time.

As much as there are great pictures in there that really do help me do my work and stay informed about what’s going on in the industries I care about, there’s also a lot of junk in there that isn’t relevant to me.

How closely should you PRs track relevance?

Joni

Yeah, I mean, look, I don’t fault any PR person who’s trying to do their job and get in touch with the right people. I think, you know, not to criticize my colleagues too much, but I think people can be really precious about this work and not recognize there’s a whole business behind it.

And I don’t get mad when I get pictures of babies or dogs, especially when they are kind of, like, not quite aligned but adjacent, like you were talking about.

I’ve actually covered cat litter boxes before, so why not cover like donkey bags? I mean, there is sort of a relationship there. But I generally think you get better results from being more specific, but you know.

If you really think you have something that might be adjacent to what I cover, don’t mind the pitch. know, the worst that can happen is I read it, it’s not relevant, and I don’t respond.

That’s it. So, you know, to that end, don’t think, you know, you’re right.

There is a difference between like straight spray and prey, about like, just have this list of 1,500 journalists, I’m going to send it to all of them, versus I have a targeted list of about 50 that I think maybe might be interested in this.

Can you explain pitching to an editor?

Joni

Yeah, so if I’m gonna pitch a story to an editor, the first thing I do is, like, let’s say I have some great idea for a story.

The first thing I’m gonna do is see which editors I’ve already worked with who might be interested in it.

They’re the ones I’m going to go to first because we have a warm relationship.

Anybody who sent a pitch knows that a warm pitch is better than a cold pitch, right?

The chances of success are much higher when you’re pitching to somebody who already knows you and likes your work and what you’re up to than if you’re reaching out of the blue.

So that’s the first thing I do.

The second thing I would do is if all of those editors said no, thank you, I would start researching other editors who might be interested. So, I might have a couple of public ideas off the top of my head.

Like if I had a travel story, I might be going to Conde Nast Traveler, Travel and Leisure, Afar, those, you know, the core kind of brands that are in this space and introduce myself, right?

So, my cold-pitch emails are usually three paragraphs.

The first one is extremely short, just like, hey, I have an idea for you.

And I might even get a little bit more specific and say, possibly for this section or this feature that you usually run.

And then I will pitch my idea. This is like the most important part of my email. It will include a sample headline of how I think, or a sample headline of what I think could possibly appear at the top of the story, and maybe a three to five-sentence description of what the story is.

You know, the basics. Who, what, where, when, why.

That’s what they teach you in journalism school: that every story needs to cover.

I’ll also include some potential sources that I think could be a fit. Either people I’ve already kind of lined up interviews with or thought of, or am in discussions with, or people who I’ve come across in the course of my research, who I think could be relevant, but I haven’t talked to yet.

And then any other core details I think are important, such as proposed length or access to images, just kind of logistical stuff. And then my last paragraph is a mini about me. So what you see on my website is a very long biography about me. Nobody has time to read that, even on my website, but especially not in your inbox, right?

So I pull out my, you know, the core basics about me, like I’ve been doing this work for more than 15 years.

I’ve been published in X, Y, and Z publications, and I’ll name-drop the biggest ones that are in the beat that I’m pitching for right now.

Joni

And that’s kind of it, right? Because they just think, basically, I’m trying to prove to them that I’m qualified to write this story. And that’s it.

Then I send it, and I wait, and usually get no response because editors are even busier and have even busier inboxes than I do. And then, you know, there’s the art of the follow-up.

So it’s actually like, I think there’s a lot of synergy between the way PR people pitch and the way freelance journalists pitch. And I think the more that PR folks can align their pictures with how journalists need to pitch their editors, and the more success they’ll have.

What are the things that will make a pitch get through an editor?

Joni 

Yeah, so I think we’re talking about two different things here, and they’re both important.

The first is like, how do know what the editor might even possibly be interested in?

Editorial calendars are historically a way that journalists and PR folks could look ahead for the year at what the themes of a magazine are, and usually those carry over to digital as well, a little bit more loosely, but if publications covering farms in August, you might see more farm-related content on their website that time of year as well.

So that’s something you can use to look ahead and start playing with story ideas for your clients and pitching journalists.

For a print magazine, we’re usually talking six months ahead of time, sometimes a little longer.

In addition to the editorial calendars, sometimes editors will also let either the general public or a core group of writers know the types of stories they’re looking for right now.

So if you can spot one of those calls for pictures that go out to writers, you can sometimes backdoor it and go to the writer directly and be like, “Hey, editor at Business Insider is looking for these types of stories. I actually have one that you could potentially write about.”

But then, when I’m working for places like Forbes and Yahoo, I’m almost working in an editor role.

I’m not an editor at either of those publications, to be clear.

But what I mean by that is I am selecting what I want to write about. I don’t have a gatekeeper giving me the green light to write about something or not.

So I do put on my editor hat when I’m thinking about stories for those publications, and I get paid based on traffic.

So I want to look for stories that will drive traffic, and for things people have done to be successful pitching me are looking at Google Trends data.

For example, somebody representing a chocolate company pitched me in late August, saying that searches for advent calendars were spiking in late August, which is far earlier than I would think, but that piqued my interest.

And then his pitch included a few advent calendars that were already available from his client, and he was basically like, “hey, the stats are there, like, let me know if you want to work on a story.”

And I immediately picked it up, and I did a roundup of Advent calendars, and it was pretty successful.

Even my, my edit, that was for Yahoo! and my editors reached out to me. like, hey, do you want to consider pulling this story down?

It’s actually, it feels too early to us.

And I told, I replied, yeah, I replied to them. I was like, yeah, it feels early to me too, but here’s the data.

I said, I totally respect it if you want me to pull it down and wait a couple of months to republish it, that would be fine.

And they said, ” Nope, actually, you have good instincts here. This is good. Leave it up.”

So yeah, any sort of data that you can pull in that shows me, there might be like strong reader interest in this, is compelling.

Is it better to have one piece of targeted coverage or a lot more general coverage?

Joni

Mm-hmm. There’s always a balance between quality and quantity, and I think one thing I’ve learned from consulting with so many PR folks is that clients have different goals, right?

Like some really want that breadth of coverage.

They want their link and their story in 10-20 publications.

Obviously, the better the publication, the happier they are, but they just wanna be out there.

And others care a lot more about, like, one really high-quality story in one prestigious publication. And for them, that would be a mega win.

So I think the strategies are very different for each approach.

If you had to do PR for a cat food brand, what is more important?

Joni

I think for something as commodified as like cat food, I would want to be everywhere, right?

I’d want that brand recognition.

I’d want to be building that with my customers.

I think, a lot of times, customers don’t care much about the background of commodity products.

They just want to know what the product is. Does it work? Is it better than what else is on the shelf, right?

So the more you can prove that, the better. And I also don’t think any, I think there’s such a low likelihood of any reader wanting to read 500, 1,000 words about a cat food, like one specific brand, that I think like it’s just impossible.

But like, perhaps if there’s like a really compelling backstory of the founders, like, let’s say I founded a cat food company because I was feeding my cat commercial food and it made my cat really sick or something like that.

Okay, that all of a sudden gets a little more interesting. maybe I can’t, maybe because this cause is so passionate for me, I want that story told and I’m willing to wait for the right publication to tell it.

Now again, let’s be realistic, we’re talking about cat food.

I don’t know if this has exact application in this context, but I think you get what I mean. It depends on what the story is and what the brand and the product, if there is one, what are we even talking about?

You know, I stayed at a really amazing resort in Dominica, a great island in the Caribbean. It’s called the Nature Island.

That’s its name.

And I wrote some, I wrote a few stories about the experience, but the one that this particular resort was very excited about was this in-depth hotel review I did for Travel and Leisure.

They felt that I really captured the heart of what they were trying to do.

I interviewed the owner and how his wife’s father was an architect and that he gave them designs for these bungalows for their wedding.

It was such a beautiful backstory. They were so happy with that. Now, obviously, that’s also a very prestigious publication and wonderful brand recognition for them.

And while I can’t speak for them, I think, I feel in my gut that they would be happier with that one in-depth review that really tells their story in a great publication rather than me putting it in five different roundups and writing just a short blurb.

I think they would be happier with the coverage in the first place.

Should you always be pushing your clients?

Joni

Yeah, I mean, I think clients are hiring you because they have a particular goal in mind, whether it is those backlinks that they think are really important for the SEO, whether it is like we want to increase sales and we know that PR is part of that, or whether they are like we have a strong story to tell and no one’s telling it and we want your help making that happen, right?

Then your job as a publicist is to go in and advise on like, hey, what’s possible, right?

Do we have the best approach to meet that goal, whether it is strong storytelling, sales, or whatever?

And then what can we do to increase the chances of hitting this goal? Like, what are some strategies that you, the client, haven’t thought of or haven’t tried yourself yet?

Is building relationships with journalists helpful?

Joni

I think that statement-“I see that floating around on LinkedIn a lot “-like, the relationship is great, but it’s not a guarantee.” Like, yes, I agree with that, but I think it’s a huge door opening for you that people without that relationship don’t have.

And for a few reasons.

The first is, like I said, I’m getting 200 plus pictures a day, right?

Which ones am I actually gonna give my time and attention to?

Like, obviously a subject line matters, right? And that might encourage me to open and read the email.

But if I, you know, let’s say the subject line is whatever, I’m looking at who’s sending it to me and thinking, do I know this person?

Do I recognize their name?

Like, do we have a relationship that warrants me giving them attention?

Right?

And if I have limited hours in the day, who’s getting my attention?

It’s the, I’m going to prioritize the people I do have relationships with. It doesn’t mean I’m ignoring emails from everybody else, but it means like, this is where my attention is going first.

It bumps you up the list.

And then, you talked about trust, right? It is about trust. There’s so, so much in this industry that is out of all of our control, including our editors, right?

That knowing who you’re working with and knowing you can trust them is so, so critical to, you know, maintaining that mindset that everybody’s operating in good faith and that we can, we’ll work together really effectively.

I’ve sometimes, you know, put out a call for pictures for doctors or dietitians or something in the health space and a PR person will email me who I don’t know, but he or she will say, I have this amazing client.

They can speak to X, Y, and Z.

them for your story and I’ll say yes and then they fall off the face of the earth they don’t even respond with like possible interview times or like I will send interview times and I cannot get them to like respond at that point or if we’re doing an email interview and I say hey I need answers by noon on Friday and 4 p.m. on Friday those answers still haven’t come in, I’m in a real bind now because now I have to find somebody over the weekend and convince them to give me the time of day so that I can meet my deadline on Monday and still make my editor happy and get paid, right?

So, you know, if let’s say, let’s say I’m looking at two potential sources and they’re both pretty compelling, but one is coming from somebody I’ve worked with a million times and she always delivers and, you know, when her client flakes out, she’s found me backups and gone above and beyond to make sure I can do my job versus somebody I’ve never worked with before, I’m going to choose the person I know is reliable because it means I know I can get my job done.

So I think in that sense, the relationship matters a whole lot, even though it, no, it doesn’t guarantee you coverage. Even if we’re friends, like, I wish I could cover everything my friends’ clients were doing. I mean, that would be great. Like, everybody would be so happy.

Everybody would love me. Like, what would be better than that? But it’s just not the way the industry…

Vince Nero 

You probably have a lot more “friends” too.

Joni (31:29)
That is true, friends.

But it’s not the way the industry works. So, you know, I think that it’s a very nuanced discussion, and I think it often gets really glazed over in these like viral LinkedIn posts about this.

Have you encountered “fake” experts?

Joni (32:14)
This has been going on a very long time, like well before generative AI became available to the public.

I remember writing some personal finance articles for a loan company I did content marketing for, but they expected me to act like a journalist, vet sources, and interview them. People would, or like companies, I don’t even know who these entities were.

I would get pictures about people and I would say, okay, this person sounds good.

Let me just like do a quick background check on them, look up their LinkedIn or whatever. And like all of a sudden, like everything starts falling apart.

Like, this person doesn’t seem to exist or like not in this context. So this has been going on a really, really long time.

And you know again I think that goes back to the relationships that you know there are certain people I know aren’t gonna do that to me. I would be absolutely mortified if I wrote a story that ended up having a fake expert in it. I would be so mortified.

So I am pretty careful about vetting people.

And now, with generative AI, I don’t mind people using it as a tool, but some of my editors have included clauses in my contracts that say I cannot submit AI-generated content. So if one of my sources is doing an email interview with me and sends me an AI-generated answer, it could put me in hot water with my client.

And this is a hard industry.

I need to maintain my relationships with editors in order to make a living. So it’s something I’m so careful about. I’ve always preferred phone and video interviews. I’ve always done them instead of email interviews whenever possible.

But even now, so many people are using generative AI for all their writing.

I’m even more insistent on like let’s meet face to face and have a conversation.

Like, not only will the answers be more compelling because they’re, you know, generated through a conversation, but I know for sure that they are not written by a chatbot.

Do you care about AI-written pitches?

Joni 

If they’re not saying anything, they’re pretty easy for me to just ignore as a bad pitch.

I don’t really care, but I will say when you use AI a lot, and I do, I use it as a tool a lot for my own purposes, I can see AI-generated content right away. Yeah, so it just doesn’t connect with me very well.

Do you think PR pros should send and or paste a press release right in a pitch email or is that overkill?

Joni

I think it should have a mini pitch up top, like an actual good quality, like quick pitch, and then you can put the rest of the press release, like at the bottom for more background information, but I probably won’t read it.

Should people include images in their pitches?

Joni

No, for the most part. I think if you’re going to include images, I think include them as a Google Drive or Dropbox folder that I can just click into and make sure that the permissions are set that anyone with the link can view them.

Does it matter what time you get a pitch?

Joni

No, it does not matter to me at all.

Well, mean, timing matters if you’re pitching breaking news, right? Like timing matters a lot.

Or if you’re pitching for a newspaper and you want a daily newspaper and you want it out in tomorrow’s issue, well, you better send that pitch as early in the day as possible so they have time to consider it and then cover it. But for me, go pitch me at 4 AM on a Sunday. I don’t care. Like, I’ll read it when I get to my inbox and it makes no difference, positive or negative, when you send it to me.

Vince Nero 

Right, so journalists aren’t sitting there looking at their inboxes and be like, this one just came in. This one looks great, right? It’s not like that.

If you if you have 250 unread emails like you’re saying, yeah, I don’t see that being an issue.

Should you or should a PR professional ever pitch via social media?

No, don’t pitch me over social media.

One, it’s annoying and kind of like violating, but more importantly, it’s not where you want your pitch to be.

It caught my attention in a bad way, but also I can’t search my Instagram inbox for a source. I’m gonna go to my email inbox. So really like get your pitch in my inbox, my email inbox, and that’s the best place for me to go to find it. I’m not searching Instagram for product pitches or a source pictures.

The post Mastering Media Pitches with Joni Sweet appeared first on BuzzStream.

On Tuesday, March 24, I invited some of the top minds in digital PR to discuss the takeaways from our news in AI citations study —which I conducted with the help of the AI citation-tracking tool Xofu from the team at Citation Labs— and how to get cited in AI using digital PR.

This fantastic conversation featured Kelsey Libert, co-founder of Fractl; Beth Nunnington, founder and global VP of Digital PR at Journey Further; and Will Hobson, VP of PR at Rise at Seven.

Each brings a different background and skill set to the digital PR space and the burgeoning world of AI, so I thought they would be great for a roundtable discussion on the topic.

Video/Audio

If you’ve missed the webinar, you can watch or listen to the conversation below:

Full Deck

Here is the full deck for your reading pleasure.

Transcript

Vince: Thank you all for being here. If you have questions as we go through this, please just throw them in the chat and we’ll address them at the end.

I’m Vince Nero from BuzzStream, the Director of Content Marketing. Today I’m joined by Kelsey Libert, co-founder at Fractl. Thank you, Kelsey, for joining. Beth Nunnington is the founder and global VP of Digital PR at Journey Further. And Will Hobson is the VP of PR at Rise at Seven.

Thank you all so much for being here early on a Tuesday.

Today we’re going to be talking about AI, news citations, and digital PR.

I prepared a little deck to go through some of this stuff. Here’s the rough agenda: we’ll talk about the data, then discuss, and then do some Q&A. I know some people have already submitted questions, so we’ll go through those, and then I’ll open it up for live Q&A as well.

Let’s jump right in and get into what the data is saying.

I need to caveat all of this because I worked on this a lot. We did this study, and we’re talking about this stuff to help us all understand a little more about how it all works. I think everybody in the industry is still learning. So take this stuff directionally, take it with a grain of salt. Not every study has reached the same conclusions, and the methodology really, really impacts all of these studies that you see.

I specifically broke our study up into different prompt types because I hadn’t seen many, and I think the type of prompt you ask AI Overviews or ChatGPT really influences the citations that come back. Another important thing to understand is that AI rarely cites the same sources consistently. The benefit of doing a large-scale study like this is that you get directional ideas about how it all works, but realistically, that’s all it is — directional. So keep that in mind.

I wanted to set the stage with a couple of quick stats from our State of Digital PR report. AI in general has been a great addition to digital PR, drawing more people into the field. There are many more clients and stakeholders pushing digital PR teams to appear in AI citations. And on the other side, agencies, freelancers, and consultants in the digital PR space are pushing to understand the impact of AI visibility.

I’ve talked to a lot of different agencies, and everybody has their own unique ways of tracking this and thinking about it, which I think we’ll get into today.

For our AI news citations study, I used the Xofu tool and analyzed 10 industries.

Each industry had about 350 prompt sets, which I broke into: informational or top-of-funnel questions; brand awareness questions (what a brand is about, what they’re known for); and what I’m calling comparative or evaluative prompts — more bottom-funnel, like if someone was ready to buy and wanted to compare two brands.

What I’ve categorized as news publications made up about 14% of the roughly 4 million citations that came through.

What I’m calling blog and content made up the majority. There’s important nuance here around how I defined news versus blog content, because that makes a big impact on how we look at this as a digital PR team.

What I’m calling “news” is a site that primarily reports news — they might have reviews and comparisons, but most of their content is industry-related news.

So Yahoo Finance, for example, I’d classify as news, whereas NerdWallet I’d classify more as a blog or general content site because they do a lot of affiliate comparisons and informational content. That doesn’t mean digital PR should exclude NerdWallets and Motley Fools of the world — it’s just how I categorized them in this study.

Now, the top news sites — I want to caveat this, as I do with everything here. Anytime you see a list like this, it is highly dependent on the prompt and starts to vary a lot. So anytime you see lists in the wild that say “these are the top sites showing up in AI,” know that this changes a lot based on the prompt.

That’s the whole reason I tried to structure the study the way I did. As you can see, depending on whether you’re asking an informational, brand awareness, or evaluative prompt, the types of sites start to vary.

My first big takeaway was that news citations in my study came primarily from evaluative prompts — the comparative type, like “Is Sony better than Bose?” or “Is Nike better than Adidas?” That was surprising to me because I thought brand awareness prompts (“What is Chase known for?” “What role does HBO play?”) would be a lot higher. But those were actually the lowest.

Another takeaway was that it was primarily true news articles rather than affiliate-driven content. AP News delivering news about something is different from a GamesRadar piece that has news in name but is really a comparative affiliate listicle.

The takeaway is that true news dominates, but the evaluative prompts are where you see more of the affiliate-review-style listicle content from news publications — which makes sense, but is worth calling out.

I also looked at syndicated versus non-syndicated news, and saw a lot more non-syndicated content appearing. To clarify: non-syndicated means the primary author’s version; syndicated is when the content has been republished from another source. I looked at canonical tags to identify these cases, though there’s some SEO nuance there.

Lastly, I looked at press releases — using the author name to identify when a publication was a newswire or press release source. Press releases made up just under 1% of citations. My takeaway: you can’t just release a press release, do nothing else with it, and expect it to show up in AI citations.

Similarly, publishing on a newswire without any additional promotion is probably not going to get you very far.

One more thing worth noting, which Beth brought to my attention, is that the percentage of news citations varies a lot by industry. I only looked at 10 industries, and there were many news citations in the energy space, for instance, while business had fewer. So the industry you’re in matters.

Let’s get into the discussion.

Will, I know you had something to say about that last point.

Will Hobson (Rise at Seven): Yeah, I really liked the breakdown across industries.

When I think about LLMs and how to feature in them, freshness of content is definitely key. I think why entertainment is so high in terms of the percentage of news citations is because what’s trending changes constantly. With entertainment, you think about something like a trending TV show — we just had The Traitors air in the US, which is big for some of our clients in the gambling space, looking at odds and that sort of thing.

Creating content on multiple platforms around that show is what drives freshness. So I think there are certain industries where news citations will naturally be higher, and entertainment is a really important one.

Vince: Yeah, for sure. And Beth, I think you mentioned fashion?

Beth Nunnington (Journey Further): Yeah, fashion. A lot of our fashion clients also have affiliates. This is a whole other topic, but affiliate links were previously seen as not passing any SEO value. Now we’re seeing that affiliates are getting featured in LLMs.

I asked Vince if fashion had been included in the study — it hadn’t — and I think it could be really interesting to look at, given the affiliate angle.

Will: I love that. And it goes back to what you’re trying to accomplish. With fashion, we’re usually trying to push a product. Historically from a search perspective, affiliate links were a big no-no. But now everything we were told wasn’t a thing is becoming a thing. It feels great. I totally agree.

Vince: Kelsey, you brought up some methodology questions earlier. I think it’s so important to understand how any of these studies are constructed — if I had thrown in gambling, gaming, or sports, the frequency of news changes so quickly that it might have skewed the whole dataset. Maybe instead of 14%, it would have been 30%.

Can you speak to your overall thoughts on the breakdown and categorization?

Kelsey: What I’ve seen a lot in the industry is how SEOs categorize different publishers very differently from one another, which can create claims that clients cling to, and then we all have to clarify in our own ways.

For our digital PR team, mainstream news — CNBC, Reuters, Wall Street Journal — is a major focus. But we also target niche relevant publishers. To me, The Motley Fool is really good in investment and finance, for example. Those are the caveats when looking at this type of data, and how open you were with sharing your raw data is really helpful in understanding those narratives.

The biggest takeaway for digital PR teams right now is that it’s not about going all in on just mainstream news. It’s about getting a broad representation of authority — both authoritative mainstream sites with the recency of publishing that AI favors, and also industry-relevant publications, whether those technically qualify as affiliate sites or not. A Motley Fool might look like an affiliate site to an SEO, but a digital PR team would see it as a very relevant finance publication.

It’s never been about getting a large volume of links or chasing one type of link. It’s about getting brand mentions on the sites most relevant to you across a wide portfolio — .govs, .edus, mainstream news, association publishers, all of it.

Vince: Yeah. Beth, how important is tracking citations in this way? I feel like getting too caught up in the minutia could be tough for brands and agencies.

Beth: Exactly. I agreed with everything Kelsey just said. We need to be careful not to get too fixated on certain stats and studies. At the end of the day, it comes down to your target audience and their search behavior — how they’re discovering brands, what platforms they’re using, whether they over-index on ChatGPT versus Claude or Google Search, and so on.

We do a lot of work looking at the landscape, seeing how a brand is already showing up in LLMs, where the gaps are, and then tracking from there. We use Ahrefs Brand Radar and Peak AI. But yeah, it can get risky if you become too fixated.

On the news point — I was surprised by the relatively low percentage. Just to clarify: was that just purely news sites, or did it include lifestyle press like TechCrunch or People Magazine?

Vince: Yeah, I did include those. The ones I excluded are the more SEO-focused sites — NerdWallet, Motley Fool, that type of thing. But TechCrunch, those industry pubs — for the most part those are all counted as news publications.

Beth: Okay, that’s good to know. I would have thought it would be higher then.

Vince: Will, why do you think news citations might be lower than people expect? Is there something about the methodology, or the prompts themselves?

Will: I think the most successful LLM strategies we’ve seen are when we treat it more like a broader organic search strategy — not just PR and news in isolation, but thinking about how that fits within the wider topic. Using entertainment as an example: with The Traitors, we increased LLM visibility by doing PR stories around the show with past contestants, but we also did on-site content guides, social media, and a lot more.

So for me, this study shows what we’ve always been saying about organic search strategy — it’s about relevant storytelling across multiple platforms, not trying to game an algorithm.

If you’ve got an interesting story, you need to get it out in the right ways. That cemented my feeling that we should be focused on great storytelling rather than targeting certain sites.

Beth: I’d add to that — and this is something I’ll stand by firmly — the search landscape is changing, but good PR has always been about relevant content, strong storytelling, and engaging with your target audience. As long as we continue to do that, LLMs will reward us for it, because they want to give the best results.

They’re in competition with other platforms, just like Google always was.

Will: Yeah, it feels like the same strategy, just faster and executed in different ways.

Kelsey: And Vince, in a way, what you found gives people a lot of hope — you don’t need to just go after the most authoritative, hardest-to-break-into sites. It’s really about who has become the most authoritative, influential publisher in your niche. That could even be a brand — you see Adobe pop up a lot, for example.

I was also reading a study from Air Ops and the Growth Memo newsletter that talked about finding gaps where your competitor appears but you don’t, and then building the most robust page on that topic. Instead of doing 10 pages on one topic, you’re building one 10x pillar page.

These are phrases we’ve heard for over a decade, but they’re coming back — it’s not about creating massive amounts of content, it’s about creating the most robust content with the most subject matter expertise, the freshest data. That’s what all of these systems value.

If you’re getting mentions from other sites in a similar niche, you’re building entity authority and establishing your brand within the knowledge graph as a go-to source.

Vince: Yeah. There’s a part two to this study I’m working on right now.

What I did was categorize everything as owned versus earned. If a prompt like “What headphones are better, Bose or Sony?” surfaced something from Sony’s own social media, I called that owned. Everything else — external blog posts, industry sites, listicles mentioning you — I called earned.

Earned made up about 80% of all citations. There’s a lot of potential there, though I worry it opens the door to spammy link building again, which is actually one of the submitted questions we’ll get to.

Kelsey, on syndication — it made up about 6% of news citations in the study. I know syndication is a topic you’ve looked at a lot. How do you think about the value of syndicated pickups?

Kelsey: It’s two-pronged. AI is prioritizing credible original sources, so in the example you showed, if something is published originally on Bloomberg and then syndicates to Yahoo, AI will more often pull the Bloomberg link by default.

However, from a broader PR and SEO perspective, if you get coverage on USA Today — and BuzzSumo did a really good study on which publishers have the largest syndication networks — yes, syndicated links may be less valuable technically, but you’re accessing a different target market.

Some people read Yahoo instead of Bloomberg.

Also, when you’re thinking about the knowledge graph and repeated brand exposure across many authoritative sites, you’re potentially increasing entity authority and the contextual relevance of what you want to be known for. At Fractl, we always prioritize when one story can go dozens of places — why wouldn’t we?

Time might pick something up because they saw it on Business Insider.

So yes, pursue both.

Vince Agreed. I saw something this morning from Tamara Sykes at Stacker about syndication networks versus earned distribution — someone picks it up because they saw it and want to write about it, versus a network that just automatically republishes content.

One has a lot more momentum to it.

Vince: Beth, how do you approach syndication at Journey Further?

Beth: Very similarly. We talk about building a brand’s online entity and digital footprint, and positive mentions in volume can only be a good thing.

We’ve seen cases where we got coverage on USA Today, it syndicated, and then other publications picked it up because they saw the story gaining momentum and wanted a piece of it.

We would never not contact USA Today over syndication concerns — if it syndicates, that’s a bonus.

We’ve also seen campaigns with a lot of syndication and social signals lead to measurable uplifts in visibility, and I think there’s correlation there.

Will: Totally agree. And for me, if someone’s reading it, I want to be in it.

USA Today specifically is great because it always seems to ripple out to other publications. I think the hesitation around syndication comes from an older quantity-over-quality mindset. These days it’s more about positive sentiment and brand awareness, and the sheer size of the USA Today network means real audiences are reading it.

Why would you turn that down?

Kelsey: I’d also add — especially when it comes to AI systems — we should be building entity authority across platforms.

It’s one thing to be an authority in the SERPs; it’s another to be an authority in the SERPs, on YouTube, on Reddit, on TikTok, in news publications, in industry associations, on radio. The more platforms you’re represented on within your niche, the more authoritative you’ll appear in these larger AI ecosystems.

I wouldn’t discount a radio station syndication in the eyes of AI, because those brand mentions are being ingested and learned from — both through training data and RAG. Long term, what does AI understand about your brand across numerous platforms?

That’s what shapes how your brand appears six to twelve months from now.

Beth: I remember overseeing our UK team when we got some syndication and a client asked, “What’s this boom in traffic?” When we looked at the source, it was from a syndicated regional publication in the UK. That was proof enough.

Will: We had the same experience. For one of our beauty clients, a small regional UK publication turned out to be our biggest traffic and sales driver.

It drove hundreds of thousands of visits, sold the product out, and generated six figures in revenue. Don’t overlook smaller publications just because they seem less significant on the surface.

And it goes back to understanding your audience — where they are and what they read.

Just because you’ve featured somewhere once doesn’t mean you move on to find a new publication next time; if your audience is there, go back with a new story.

Vince: Yeah, and I think we’re missing some metrics at this point.

I took my whole dataset and ran it against DR, DA, organic traffic, and links, and found no correlation between how often sites show up in AI citations and those traditional metrics. There probably are relevance metrics and entity mapping signals — cosine similarity, that kind of thing — that matter more.

As an industry, we need new metrics for this, and the tools aren’t fully there yet. But what you’re all preaching is true: you need a wider net now. It’s not just about getting into one key publication.

You need to be on social, everywhere.

That’s a good segue into social.

Will, Rise at Seven has this as part of your strategy — can you talk about the role of social in AI?

Will: Yeah, it’s super important. It’s really about everyone saying a similar thing across channels and pulling in the same direction. We often use meme sites and similar platforms to push our stories because a lot of journalists go there to pick up stories in the first place.

If we can get there first, we can push the story further from a press perspective.

But the key is that these channels aren’t siloed — they’re all telling a consistent story. It still comes back to storytelling. You just do it on different platforms in different ways. For us, social is a major part, but it has to work as a social story. We’ll take our top-performing on-site content and reformat it for each platform. What I love about LLMs is that they’re pulling all these channels together faster and breaking down the silos — and that’s something we’ve all wanted for a long time.

Vince: Beth, Journey Further has a social team — how do your digital PR campaigns interact with social?

Beth: Similar to what Will said.

It’s about thinking about the client’s goals and audience and connecting everything together, because we know AI is synthesizing all mentions across the web. The messaging needs to be consistent and distinctive. Influencer is also a big part of this — we recently acquired Solderson Media, an influencer agency, and we’ve been working on integrated strategies.

AI can read YouTube transcripts and LinkedIn content, so content creators on those platforms sharing similar stories can amplify each other’s work.

It all comes down to running a consistent thread through everything you do, so that LLMs understand what the brand is about and what it wants to be known for.

Vince: Kelsey, Fractl doesn’t have a social team per se — how do you approach that?

Kelsey: What’s been interesting over the years is that by focusing on creating newsworthy, data-driven content, we tend to get coverage on places like the Today Show or CNBC, and then social influencers will see that and pick it up. We never prioritized that as much because the SEO industry was very focused on authoritative links.

But as we noticed the shift over the last three to five years toward brand mentions, relevance, and authority, we started repurposing our campaigns into social assets and partnering with influencer platforms like Influencer.co. A tool I love for this is SparkToro — you can drill into which social platforms your specific target market is most engaged on.

We’ve actually moved part of our PR team into content repurposing for social. Because again, back to AI — all these channels matter.

When you already have great content and great PR teams, why wouldn’t you take that content and repurpose it across channels? It’s the easiest step to take.

Vince: The message that keeps coming through from all of you is this idea of brand ubiquity across platforms — having a great story and getting your message out broadly.

The more you get caught up in “I want this publication versus that one,” the more you might be doing yourself a disservice. Am I capturing the sentiment?

Kelsey: We were all aggressively nodding on that one.

Beth: Yes. I always say to clients: focus your energies on building a brand that’s worth finding, and the rest will follow.

Vince: Okay, I wanted to address a couple of myths I’ve looked into using this data.

First: AI partnerships with publisher platforms. Google has a data partnership with Associated Press, OpenAI has its own deals, and I’ve seen a lot of people say, “If you want to show up in Google AI, get a link from AP.”

But I found very little data to back up the claim that just because a platform has a partnership with a news outlet, it will cite that outlet more readily. Was that surprising to any of you?

Will: The thing that always comes to mind is — there are always partnerships across everything, and if you get too worried about all those little things you can get lost.

There’s been a lot of UK media coverage about various partnerships and whether that means more coverage, but if you get too caught up in that, you go down a road you don’t need to go down.

Just focus on building relevant, interesting stories and everything else will shine through.

Beth: I agree. At first glance, it feels a little surprising, but when you think about how AI is working — they want to put forward the most relevant results to remain the best platform — it’s actually not surprising that they continue to surface what they think is genuinely the best content.

And that’s the right way, because otherwise, if it were all commercially backed, it would become very advertorial.

Kelsey: Yeah, and those data partnerships are used for training the models — that’s where the confusion in the industry comes from.

It’s valuable for training because it provides your brand with more exposure, but what we’re talking about with citations is source relevance based on the prompt. It’s live retrieval, data recency, and source relevance to the topic — not who has a data deal with whom.

Both are valuable, but they’re talking about separate parts of the ecosystem.

Vince: Exactly. And speaking of that, the other myth I wanted to address is around blocking AI crawlers and how that influences citations.

There are different types of crawlers — ones used for training data, and ones used for live retrieval inside ChatGPT or AI Overviews. But even accounting for that distinction: just because a site blocks a retrieval or training bot does not mean it’s less likely to show up in citations.

That’s at least what our data shows.

This comes back to looking at two different things — someone might block training data crawlers but still show up in citations because they’re separate flows.

Beyond that, there’s a lot of evidence that blocking robots.txt doesn’t reliably work anyway, since crawlers have ways around it.

And in many cases, these models are extracting information from the SERP itself, not necessarily crawling the actual site — so blocking a crawler is irrelevant if they’re just pulling from the search results page.

There’s some genuine misinformation around this, and if you take things you see on social media at face value, you’ll do yourself a disservice.

Okay, before we get to Q&A, I wanted to give each of you a quick sound bite on the question everyone’s asking:

Will, how do you recommend a brand show up in AI? 

Will: It depends on what you want, but broadly: it’s still about following the same strategy we’ve always used — just working in tandem across all services rather than looking at PR in isolation. I’d still focus on storytelling. I’d still commit to finding an interesting brand story and telling it well. The difference now is thinking about optimization a bit differently.

But if you’ve got an interesting story, it’s going to be featured in LLMs. If you don’t, then the problem is the story.

Vince: Beth, how do you recommend a brand show up in AI? 

Beth: Do your analysis and insight work upfront. Understand the brand’s goals, look at the full 360 media landscape, analyze competitors, find the gaps both from a Google and AI perspective, and then use that insight to inform a strategy that tells a story containing the brand messaging you want to be known for.

But equally, it has to be interesting and engaging — it can’t be too self-promotional. The foundations of PR are still the same.

Be relevant, be engaging to your audience. Tools like SparkToro and SimilarWeb are great for understanding what publications your audience actually reads.

Get as much data and insight upfront as possible, then use it to inform your strategy.

Vince: Kelsey, how do you recommend a brand show up in AI? 

Kelsey: It’s about building your brand out as the authority in your industry. You do that by demonstrating subject matter expertise — going on podcasts like this one, weaving expert quotes into your on-site content, providing first-party knowledge that AI can’t replicate on its own.

That means AI has to source you as the expert because you’re giving it fresh data and unique expertise — not the AI-generated slop that a lot of people are going to start producing. Unique data insights are especially powerful because they keep you relevant by feeding these systems fresh information.

Build your authority through data, subject matter expertise, expert quotes, and getting it all onto as many different platforms as you can — publishers, social media, .govs, .edus, the entire media landscape. SEOs really need to stop thinking narrowly about any type of link and focus on brand mentions across lots of different types of sites and platforms, wherever your community engages. All these systems — Google, AI, social — will rank you higher as a result.

Vince: Love it. Let’s jump to questions.

One question is around AI citations being easily manipulated, at least early on. There are studies showing that publishing a lot of listicles can get you featured quickly, and there are spammy tactics like hiding text on pages. The question is really about longevity.

And have you seen showing up in AI citations happen quickly, or is it still more like a six-month SEO timeline?

Will: It can be a lot faster. Going back to the entertainment case study — we created on-site content and did PR, and increased our visibility within a day. That’s incredible compared to traditional search tactics. On the spammy side: it’s the same as always.

That type of activity will catch up with you. Focusing on sustainable, brand-building efforts will have longer-term benefits. You might be able to game the system faster with shady tactics, but it won’t build a brand.

We’d rather put in the foundational work — you can still get results quickly, but they’ll also have lasting brand benefits.

Beth: Will nailed it. And what you said, Vince, about longevity — I’d be cautious. It might work now, but it’s probably not going to sustain long term. Don’t waste your time and energy on something that isn’t sustainable.

Kelsey: Agreed. It also depends on how saturated your niche is.

In entertainment, Will, it sounds like you can move quickly. We work more in finance, technology, and health — in those verticals you can’t just race out every new story and suddenly dominate. You have to bring a lot of E-E-A-T signals and authority.

Regardless of the platform, everyone will eventually crack down on shady tactics. The foundation we all stand on is building long-term brand authority in credible ways.

Vince: Okay, next: tools. I’ve heard PEEC AI, SparkToro for audience research, and I should mention Xofu — that’s what I used as our citation tracker for this study, built by Garrett French and the Citation Labs team.

Kelsey, I know you have your own AI agents for tracking citations — can you talk about that?

Kelsey: Six months ago, a lot of products launched claiming to track AI visibility in a quantified way, but it’s not the SERPs — we can’t track rankings.

We’re talking about visibility, and that changes across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others, because each has different training systems and different RAG setups.

We have around 20 to 30 different agents — some public, some private. One of the things we’re doing is tracking clusters of keywords and questions related to our clients across the buyer’s journey in their vertical, and looking at that across all the AI platforms out there to identify gaps in brand visibility.

Then we figure out how to support that with on-site content and how to create data-driven content we can pitch to earn authoritative brand mentions.

We also use Ahrefs Brand Radar, SEMrush, and more.

Each tool shows you something completely different, which is the most important thing for everyone to understand. You should be using a lot of different sources because nobody really has the crystal ball — nobody ever did with Google’s algorithm either.

The more data you come in with, the better informed you’ll be. Our agents are free at the moment because we’re using it as a sandbox to explore. Come with data, ask good questions about methodology, and stay curious.

Beth: I use Peec AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar.

We also have our own proprietary technology suite, Salient, which includes a query fan-out tool that helps us look at specific queries to inform SEO and digital PR content. Similar to Kelsey, we’ve tested a lot of tools — Profound is another one. It’s definitely a case of keeping an eye on what’s out there, because this is so new and so fast-moving. We don’t have a single source of truth yet.

All right, that’s our time. I appreciate you all staying on a little longer. Kelsey, Beth, Will — thank you so much.

The post How to Get Cited By AI Using Digital PR – Roundtable Webinar appeared first on BuzzStream.

Let’s debunk something.

I’ve heard that because AI is entering into data partnerships with news platforms, you should prioritize those for outreach.

I myself jumped to this conclusion when the news about these partnerships first started dropping.

But since then, I’ve been documenting confirmed AI news publisher partnerships and now have access to a vast array of citations I gathered with the help of Xofu, an AI citation tracker from Citation Labs.

(This is part two of a several-part breakdown of that data. You can see the first study on the role of news publications in AI citations.)

To recap, among the ~4 million citations we studied from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini, about 14% were to news publisher sites.

But now, we need to look at the connections, which we’ve covered in our AI partnerships study.

Overall News Citations With AI Partnerships

Overall, just 2.94% of news citations came from publishers who have confirmed data partnerships with OpenAI or Google.

However, we need to break it down by partner share because it does look very different based on the platforms.

Do OpenAI Partners Appear More on ChatGPT?

ChatGPT cites partner publishers much more frequently (28.5%) than other platforms.

But hold your horses, folks.

There’s a lot more correlation between the two than there is causation.

First off, OpenAI, which powers ChatGPT, simply has more partnerships than Google.

Our count as of March 2026 shows OpenAI outnumbering Google 17 to one.

Further, the sites ChatGPT partners with are among the most widely cited news outlets on the web.

Among the top 10 cited news domains in our entire study, 7 are OpenAI partner publishers .

Most of the citations come from Axel Springer—specifically Business Insider—followed by News Corp, Future PLC, etc.

(Note, this analysis occurred before Axel Springer acquired Telegraph, though Telegraph never showed up in our data.)

So what about Google?

Do Google Partners Appear More on Gemini, AI Mode, or AI Overviews?

Just 0.77% of the citations from Gemini, AI Mode, or AI Overviews come from the only confirmed true publishing data partnership Google has, with the Associated Press.

Interestingly, though, is that Google announced in a blog post their partnership with AP “will now deliver a feed of real-time information to help further enhance the usefulness of results displayed in the Gemini app.”

So, one may think that Associated Press will show up more in Gemini results because of this.

However, based on our dataset, Associated Press appeared in NONE of the Gemini results.

Is this a limited dataset?

Sure, but one would still think there would be at least one citation from AP?

So What the Heck is Going on Here?

Here’s the thing, as far as we understand, the partnerships announcements typically say the data is being used to help train models.

Typically, citations that these models pull come from live search and retrieval, not from training data.

So, if that is the case, it makes sense that one (news partnerships with AI) wouldn’t lead to another (more exposure in citations).

Why even do the study, you might ask?

For one, I’ve seen claims that connect these dots even though it doesn’t seem to be the case.

And secondly, because we are still so in the dark about all of this, getting as much data as possible to support your strategies is just about the best we can do right now.

How Should This Impact Your Digital PR Strategies?

If appearing in AI citations is your goal and you are using partnerships as a guide for how/where to prioritize, you are chasing the wrong thread.

Realistically, the news of partnerships shouldn’t impact how you think about digital PR because the focus should always be on the story.

Rather than seeking links from specific publishers, look for specific kinds of stories to tell that will support your brand story, key news, and positioning.

The broader takeaways from our larger study saw different, unique kinds of news content getting surfaced by AI models:

• Head-to-Head Comparisons, like: Adidas Targets Larger U.S. Market Share as Nike Struggles
• Cost / Price Analysis, like: How Much Does HBO Max Cost Per Month?
• Market Share Shifts, like: Apple Leads in Smartphone Resale Value
• Performance Rankings, like: Most On-Time US Airline for 2025
• Investment or Business Updates: Walgreens Preps for New Owner, CVS Health Tries Smaller Drugstores
• Price Hikes & Pricing Transparency: Spotify Just Announced Another Price Hike — Here’s What’s Really Driving It

These partnerships will most likely become more and more common, and as you’ll see in another study of ours, the alternative that publishers have—blocking AI models—doesn’t seem to keep anything out.

Stay tuned for more.

The post Do AI Data Partnerships with News Platforms Influence Citations? appeared first on BuzzStream.