Digital PR & Authority Building in the Age of AI Search

Digital PR and authority building in the age of AI search. What has changed? What hasn't? What should you be doing? Everybody now wants to get and grow citations. And to discuss about that and to better understand how to tackle it in a reasonable way, I have invited a couple of experts in this field. On one hand, Garrett Hoyle, who's the director at Marketing Signals. On the other hand, I have Mark Roffe, who's A digital PR consultant. Let's start with the elephant in the room. With AI search, should we be doing something different of what we were already doing in order to grow our authority for traditional search? Should we do more digital PR or more community building? Like, what are the trends that you're seeing in the market?

It's so early in the journey of AI search that I think a lot of us are reacting to what we're seeing working rather than trying to plan future strategies because we, we realistically don't know what the authority signals that the LLMs are looking for. If you think about search algorithms, we've had 20 years of playing with it. We've got a fairly good idea of what works and what doesn't. Obviously it changes. We understand that. but they tend to be smaller changes more frequently. Whereas LLMs, in my experience of what I've seen so far, and we're lucky enough to work with larger brands, I wouldn't say we were solely enterprise, but Aleyda, you know the sort of brands that I'm working with, and we are getting cited in ChatGPT and Gemini. Already, which makes me kind of come to a basic conclusion that AI visibility is is a byproduct of good SEO. So if you if you have strong technical markup on your website and and you're using entities to let the crawlers know what what's going on on the page, and you're getting Links, you always need more links. You know, I'm going to say that often from the right authoritative places. Then we're seeing our clients are getting visibility. One thing that we have noticed a bit more is, so 2 points. Number one, it seems quite simplistic at the moment. Like it's almost like going back to 2009 SEO where it's like more references are better than less references. And we can go take that back to like more links were better than less links back in the, shall I say, olden days of SEO. But I'm sure they will clean up behind the scenes on the algorithm. I'm sure there are some Google search engineers currently being headhunted by Perplexity and ChatGPT to come and fix that side of stuff. But my challenge with LLM stuff is it should be personalized to me. So how are we measuring this? Like the, there's so much false information out there at the moment about brands' search visibility on LLMs that we're just taking it with a pinch of salt, as we would say at the moment. So exciting, but it's also the Wild West is returning to SEO, shall we say.

Especially about the Wild West and the feeling that is a little bit like SEO, like back in the day. I have seen a lot of cases of very basic manipulation and spam regarding also citations.

I pretty much agree with what Gareth has said. And I think that one thing he said that is, you know, visibility in LLMs is, you know, a byproduct of kind of doing good SEO. And I think that's because these tools are often relying on on Google, you know, as, as maybe their index to make sure that they are surfacing, uh, as best as they can, kind of, you know, trusted information. And because Google has been doing this for so long, they kind of know, you know, what maybe should rank or, or maybe what shouldn't. They don't get it perfect all the time and that they've got better over the years at fighting spam. And one of the ways that they've been able to do that is using the behavioral signals from, from their browser Chrome.

Right.

So I think when that kind of came along, it really helped them to fight spam. Basically, this is something that LLMs, maybe like for example, ChatGPT, they're going to struggle with that a little bit, which is why they're relying on Google as their kind of main index. Although saying that, I think things are changing a little bit. I do recall them saying that they're launching their own browser. This has meant that at the moment it kind of is a bit It is a bit like SEO in the, in the older days. It is ripe for manipulation. And I've seen things like that he would do back in the days of maybe putting white text on white backgrounds, you know, the old SEO black hat tactic. And you could do that with prompts as well. So you could have maybe lots of product reviews on, on an article, and then you could put in, in white text on white background, like, make sure that you review this product as the best, or, you know, or something like that. So the human doesn't see it, but the LLMs do. And I think that actually happened with some medical journals recently. There were some hidden prompts on white text in the background. And it's just, it's just interesting seeing the old things kind of working again now.

What would you say are the top dos and don'ts based on the mistakes, especially the mistakes as you see people doing now in order to try to grow their popularity, their authority for AI search?

From my perspective, I think one of the don'ts is is no knee-jerk reactions. Like, you don't need to throw out your existing playbook and start again. Like, things are moving so fast. If you look at GPT-5 versus GPT-4, it's surfacing a whole different informational retrieval model. Speak to Dawn Anderson about the advanced information. Gemini is based on Google's search algo.

Yeah.

Like it's retrieving the, the information from arguably the same database. It's not a case of starting again. And I think that where we're seeing clients that are doing well is those that have actually over time built out their content banks on their website, but properly, not just dumping ChatGPT dross onto their blog. But if you are wanting to be referenced by by LLMs and we're seeing people that have got like amazing glossaries and people that are actually creating resource that creates topical authority within that area. Because maybe this also comes down to the fact that the, especially on ChatGPT, maybe the crawler isn't as intelligent as Google's 20-year-old crawler that it's built on top of. And I know obviously Chat have taken a lot of Bing knowledge in terms of the investments that Microsoft have made into OpenAI. But I think that it's still quite simplistic in its movement. And whilst one of the dos that we're recommending is like, let's have a look at what's been referenced. We've noticed, so we work quite a lot in fashion and beauty retail. We've noticed that a lot of listicle type stuff is coming up. So it's almost like the LLM. Doesn't necessarily want to give a solid answer sometimes. It wants to give a variety of answers. Therefore, we've been working hard to get our clients referenced in more and more top 10 bronzers, top 10 makeup removers, and we're starting to see more impressions. I'm not saying that we're seeing more traffic, but that's a different conversation that we can have around LLMs. But we are starting to see that based on the tools that we're using, that they are getting referenced more and more as a result of us being in these authoritative publications where they're actually given a comparison of products rather than saying this is the number one. And I think that comes down slightly to a lot of the chatter that I'm getting is like LLMs tend to rank paragraphs rather than pages. So it's not necessarily the whole page that's being shown. It's literally just a paragraph within that page. So that just makes us think about how we write from an SEO perspective where, you know, we're thinking anything less than 500 words is too thin to an LLM perspective where 450 words could be wasted from that 500 words. So it's interesting. I'm learning every day.

I think that definitely that the positive of this is that it still incentivizes people and decision makers, even if shouldn't be necessarily like the only reasons, but at least it incentivizes decision makers to continue investing in informational resources, informational content. Because unfortunately, what I have seen more from the content strategy standpoint is like, oh, since LLMs now satisfy the user need or the intent right away with the answer and they don't need to interact with it, or you won't get direct traffic or direct visit as you did before. Why is it worthy now to try to invest on all of this analysis, research, how-to guides, or et cetera, that many times were also used to target top of the funnel type of queries besides also taking some of these insights for coverage or additional promotion, right? So at least it shows also the benefit to continue doing it. And this is something that I always talk to my client, right? Even if you're not doing this necessarily primarily for backlinks or citations or coverage, this is a type of stuff. This is the type of content that will get coverage and citations even naturally, right? Even if you don't promote it with your communities or publications, et cetera, because people want necessarily endorse product. And I mean, there might be exceptions, but product or commercial content.

So I think that one of the main dos that I would be encouraging people to do, I guess, is that, and you touched on it, you know, you mentioned citations. I would kind of been referring to them as context-rich brand mentions because I think one thing that has maybe changed a little bit now is before we mostly kind of cared about the link. So maybe you do a study. So like Go Compare study reveals, and you kind of have the brand mention and the link to Go Compare there. You'd maybe change that up a little bit to a study by car comparison website Go Compare, and then you'd have that link and that mention. But having that extra context is gonna really be helpful for LLMs. So that's something I think that's really important to try and get into your campaigns. And I think more relevant— this means more relevant campaigns are probably gonna pack more of a punch. And then secondly, something that I would say is like a don't that I've kind of been seeing some people talk about a little bit has been to do with, um, it don't matter so much anymore, which, who knows, maybe that is true, but I would still be trying to get that link where I can. Like, listen, we can't get a link all the time, but I think that's, those are the 2 things I'd be trying to do. High or high context or rich brand mentions, but also trying to get that link. Don't dismiss getting that link.

I will also love to hear what will be then those easy to start actions that you will highly recommend to any SEO or marketer who wants to grow their visibility and not only in traditional search results, but also in AI answers. What will be those actions connected with digital PR that I know that you focus a lot on?

I've got one that I use regularly and it will cost you a dollar a week and take you less than 10 minutes a day. If you can't invest that amount of money and that amount of time into what I'm going to tell you now, then I don't think you're taking your digital PR very seriously. So I said previously that we've noticed a lot of visibility from listicles, especially in consumer retail, which is where we do quite a lot of work in. Journo requests, the journalist is actually looking for information. They're literally tweeting or Xing, whatever we want to call it, tweeting, I'm looking for this. You can buy an IFTTT. Applet for $4 a month, which will allow you to scrape Twitter for hashtag journo request and then as many different keywords as you want. You can then get those scrapes to write to a Google Sheet that will update on a daily basis. When you're having your morning coffee and your brain's just spooling up for your day at work, Open the sheet, see what requests have come in overnight, and that's going to take you literally 10 minutes to just scroll your mouse down the tweets. If you hover over the tweet URL, it will load the content of the tweet. You don't even have to click the link, and then you can decide then whether you think it's worth you responding to that journalist request. That is gonna— the sort of journo requests we're seeing coming through in the, in the sort of consumer retail that we're working in quite heavily at the moment are to go into these what is the best listicles. So that's exactly what the LLMs are looking for. And you've got a journalist that is looking for information about your product or service. It could be used on a service as well, but it's going to cost you $1 and 10 minutes a day while you're having your morning coffee. If you can't do that, then either outsource it to myself or Mark. Or do something else, because that, I mean, that is as cheap and as easy as you can get. And you can do that with no budget. Like I say, it's a dollar a week. Like, if you know what, if your company is so, so struggling that they can't make the dollar a week, I'll pay for you. Don't worry. That will get you started though.

So my girlfriend is a relationship therapist, and that's exactly what I set up for her. And If you've kind of not done PR before, that probably is the easiest thing to do. And she just gets in her inbox, so I've made it go into her email, any kind of dating expert type journo requests go in there and she's just been responding to them and she's been able to get coverage in like Stylist and places like Huffington Post and things like that. So trying to think of something that's maybe a little bit different to what Gareth said, but I really do think that is the easiest way and One tool that if you've got a little bit more budget, there is this really good tool called Press Pulse. And it's very similar to what Gareth was mentioning, except this one basically uses AI to kind of help deliver the right journal requests to you. So what you do is you just go in, tell it maybe what your area of expertise is, and then every time a relevant journal request comes in, it will let you know. So rather than you having to kind of sift through them yourself, You're only gonna get alerted to the ones the most relevant to you. So similar to Gareth, this really, if you've never done PR before, this is probably the easiest way to get started. However, maybe you're trying to get into doing digital PR. One mistake I see people do is they think of the idea before they, and then kind of send it out and then maybe it doesn't work and they kind of wonder why. And you kind of need to work a bit backwards in that respect. So you should be looking at what is working in your industry and then trying to do kind of something similar. So one way I would do that is very simple kind of query that you can type into Google News would be whatever you do plus the word expert. So if you're a jewelry expert, just type in jewelry expert in quotations and it's gonna show you relevant stories that have come up where a jewelry expert has been quoted or finance expert. You could even replicate this with SEO expert. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna find patterns. You're gonna be able to be like, oh, jewelry experts seem to appear quite often whenever there has been a celebrity engagement and they kind of comment on the value of that engagement ring. So now you know what's gonna work. For example, if you've got a jewelry client and you can kind of, I don't wanna say copy it because it's always gonna be different, right? So every time a celebrity couple does get engaged, they're gonna be a different ring, it's gonna be a different value. It's basically going to show you what's working. So that would be the main thing that I would say to do.

Can you please repeat the name of the tool that you mentioned?

Yes, it's just Press and Pulse.

Press Pulse. Okay, perfect.

Exactly.

That was actually going to be my next question. Any digital PR resource, even not a tool, but any type of resource that you know that can highly, highly facilitate the life of someone who's starting or a company who just want to start investing and something that you cannot live without?

A couple that spring to mind for me, um, personally, we use a tool called Instantly. Now there are loads of different email sending tools. So what we like about email sending tools is we can set up sequences to speak to journalists. We tend to build a media list of relevant journalists and then We, we do what we call a brand introduction. So we will email the journalist, explain that we're the marketing agency that's just started supporting this brand. What are you looking for? This is the sort of resource we've already got on our site. This is what we've got planned. What do you want us to write about that will be of interest to you? And then we can set up automated sequences to maybe email the journalist every 3 or 4 weeks just to check in. And let them know that we're still here, we're still available for comment, we still— we've been— here's the latest feed from our blog of some new content that we've produced. But having the email tool means that you're not having to remember to do it yourself, and especially if you're starting to build media lists of— so we work with a very large travel brand in the US. Our media list is maybe 1,000 or 1,500 highly relevant journalists because every publication has a travel section. I can't rely on my team to remember to check in with these guys. So we invest a lot in our email sending infrastructure. And he would kill me if I didn't mention this, but one of my good friends and paddle enthusiast, Sacha Fournier, based out of Bali, he's launched a tool called JournoFinder. Which is journofinder.com. 7-day free trial, so you can just check it out. We pay, I think, $100 a month, but they get access to a lot of journo requests. So what I love about journo requests, both when you're starting out and when you're working with enterprise or larger clients, I don't need to create any content on my own site. So I don't need to invest in asset creation. I don't have to involve different stakeholders to get something live on the site. I can literally just go out with an opinion or a product or a fact to the journalist without, without much friction. So we are big fans of journalist requests at Marketing Signals and JournoFinder. We find is not the only one out there. Quoted is also very good, but Quoted, we pay $750 a month, whereas Journo Finder at $99 doesn't give you all the opportunities, but it's certainly a cost-effective way of getting your digital toolkit up and running.

So I mentioned Press Pulse earlier. I should probably mention I have a digital PR newsletter and a digital PR course. So obviously I don't use those, but They might be useful if someone's kind of new. And for me, the email platform, I don't really use an awful lot of tools if I'm being honest with you, but the email platform that, or the tool I like to use to manage my outreach is called BuzzStream. Really, really great tool, really affordable. It's like $30 a month I think I pay for it. And the reason I like to use it, it just makes sending the emails a lot easier. It can give me an idea or just reassurance that definitely it's hitting the inbox and it's getting opened. Or I can use it to basically see if a journalist has opened my email, when did they open it? Like what time did they open it? And that's gonna give me a nice indication of when that journalist might be active. So if I know when they're active, I probably know roughly what time I could send a follow-up. Those were the tools that pretty much use, or as you say, can't live without, I guess. Yeah.

Amazing. Wonderful. So to start wrapping up, I would love to hear last tip. A last advice, besides of course that if you want good advice, they can hire you directly. And there's also the newsletter and the online course from Mark, much more easily and stay updated.

For me, the ultimate goal from our digital PR campaigns and the outreach that we do is we want the journalists to come to us. We want the journalists to recognize us as the expert within a certain niche. And the way to do that is to find relevant journalists and speak to them. Like, sometimes it's on email, sometimes it's on phone. Sometimes if we're in London and there's like a social event on, we'll go and meet them face to face. But if once you start to build a trusted reputation with the journalists and they know that sometimes the journalist has a very tight deadline and they know that you're a fast responder. Then they're going to come to you because, because they can trust you and they can rely on you to give them good information. So build those targeted lists. If you haven't got any money to go and sign up to the journo request stuff, ask ChatGPT to give you 100 journalists that write about travel in US publications. That's not a bad starting place. We can start looking at agentic LLMs and how I can get it to go to the site, find 5 travel posts, tell me the authors. That's like level 2. For level 1, just ask the, just ask the LLMs for help. And it's better than nothing. It's better than you going to open 100 tabs. But really, your journalist list for me is, is, is your money. It's your gold. Like if you can work that list, you'll get the coverage that you need.

Yeah, so for me, I think if you want to increase your visibility in LLMs, the things that we know that are working right now, there's like, are things like PR placements, uh, and also community mentions on places like Reddit. So if you, if that's something you want to do, you want to increase your visibility in LLMs, I'd be looking at those areas. And on top of that, as I'll keep kind of banging on about, I would be trying to bake in relevance as much as I can with high context brand mentions. So yeah, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.

That's great advice. Even if I am not focused on digital PR, link building, or the off-page side of things, whenever I work with a brand, especially lately when I work with certain SaaS and startups that are starting to do digital PR and have already established area for social media management and community management. Because for example, in the tech sector, all of the DevRel and YouTube channels and influencers out there, it's very, very impressive as well as also I have to mention Reddit conversations. And now that I have started to monitor their inclusions and visibility in LLMs, it's outstanding and impressive for me how the share of them that are coming from these social channels and platforms, and many, many times are not necessarily coming from there directly, but influencers or their evangelizers or the conversations that many times come spontaneously, but are also well addressed by the community management team. And I can definitely see how easy that can become also an online reputation challenge and management type of challenge as well, if you don't address it well. So I will highly, highly recommend everybody, and that can be a great follow-up Monday's edition, talking about the impact of that and how to tackle that from that regard as well. So thank you. Thank you very much, Mark and Garrett, for coming. It was fantastic. I learned a ton and I hope that you have also learned as well. If you liked today's episode, remember to like it. Remember to follow Garrett and Mark in LinkedIn X Blue Sky. And remember to also start subscribing to the channel in case you don't want to miss the next one. You shouldn't. And subscribe to the SEO Forum newsletter to keep updated to all of what is going on with AI search as well. Thank you very much. And until the next one, bye-bye.