- Sonia Weiser
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 11 hours ago
LLMs pull information from trusted sources across the web, including consumer and industry publications and authoritative blog posts.
This makes digital PR an important part of generative engine optimization. Placement in these publications can help your brand and products surface in LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
Why every brand needs digital PR in the age of AI search
While the extent to which LLMs prioritize earned media varies based on industry and query, it’s worth paying attention to digital PR. A new report from Muck Rack shows that “more than 95% of links cited by AI are non-paid coverage” with 27% of that coming from journalistic content. Paid advertorials, press releases, user generated content, and owned media were the least cited. Further supporting the weight of media coverage, research from Hard Numbers found that editorial media drives 61% of content about brand trust and quality.
To take advantage of this, many SEOs will need to rethink their approach to PR, as Misty Larkins, director of public relations at the University of Missouri Health Care, said in her talk at MozCon New York. “For years, SEOs have treated PR as a means to an end,” she said. “Get the placement, and for the love of God, include a backlink.”
But PR is so much more than that. “When you do it right, PR doesn't just earn you a link. It creates searches for your brand.” Branded search is one of the most durable sources of traffic you can build, she says “because when people actively search for you by name, you own that intent.”
How digital PR drives growth
“We tell our clients that we should be prioritizing timely, consistent placements in authoritative publications people trust,” says Katy Powell, PR director and co-founder of Bottled Imagination.
And they’ve seen results: When Bottled Imagination worked with their client Protein Works, their placement on multiple “best of 2025” lists, including a number-one spot in a Men’s Health listicle, “drove a 320% increase in affiliate traffic, a 386% uplift in revenue, and a 78% rise in brand and product searches month-on-month,” explains Powell.
The organic growth from their digital PR efforts contributed to improved visibility in AI search results. Powell notes that the same Men’s Health article showed up as a cited source for “best creatine supplements” in Gemini, perpetuating the brand’s ongoing sales and earned media placements. “Now, Protein Works is regularly cited in AI as one of the ‘best creatine supplements,’ significantly enhancing its brand reach for a widely searched term.”
How to adopt digital PR for AI search
If you’re ready to move beyond backlinks, take a look at some ways you can up your digital PR efforts for AI search.
Build topical authority
Your digital PR strategy needs to align with your overall marketing strategy to help you build topical authority in LLMs. This means you need to have a clear understanding of who you’re targeting and what topics you want to be known for. It might sound obvious, but lots of brands try to be everything to everyone. This does not work well for AI search because LLMs are more likely to surface brands that have a very clear and consistent benefit and message.
Target niche publications
Once you have a clear understanding of your subject and your target audience, you can pitch niche publications in your industry.
Trade and niche publications serve the dual purpose of being both earned media and subject authorities, says Lexi Mills, the CEO of Shift6 Studios, an international digital growth agency specializing in PR and SEO.
In the case of Power Works protein, Powell focused on landing the brand in Men’s Health as the publication had a domain authority of 87 and was frequently cited in LLM visibility tools for their target queries. Even though Men’s Health is a large brand, it’s highly relevant for a protein powder.
LLMs often cite specialized blogs and publications because they’re authoritative and detailed, with clear expertise on their topic. Often with legacy data and comment threads, these sites are perfect sources for grounding AI chat responses.
For instance, I asked ChatGPT which neighborhoods in New York City are best if you’re looking to buy a one-bedroom apartment with a budget of $1 million. The 13 sources it used to answer my prompt included sites from moving companies, real estate firms, apartment marketplaces, and industry-specific trade publications. With the exception of the New York Post, no other mainstream publications were cited.
There’s another benefit: Journalists from mainstream publications frequently cite trade publications in their stories, so initial placement will breed additional mentions throughout the media landscape for a snowball effect.
Pitch strategically
Be strategic about who you pitch and how you pitch them.
When choosing who to pitch to:
Prioritize publications that have active partnerships with AI platforms like Open AI, Perplexity, and Copilot. These publications are cited programmatically.
Target publications with active syndication to benefit from additional distribution, which helps LLMs identify patterns around how your brand is discussed online.
When pitching, remember that journalists and editors can tell when a publicist took the time to research the kind of work they’ve done in the past and take kindly to those who individualize their pitches. Inversely, we know when you’ve sent the same pitch to everyone. Trust me, I’ve been a journalist for the last decade.
“If you're doing it right, every single pitch for every single reporter should be different,” says Lizzy Harris, the CEO of The Colab, a public relations and communications firm. “You shouldn't blanket pitch reporters, what we call spray-and-pray pitching. It's bad practice and has a low success rate.” She’s right–we get a lot of emails, and most of us delete the mass pitches immediately.
Share your proprietary data
More insight from a journalist: We love surveys and research. Numbers help inform trend pieces and inspire deeper dives. Your client may be sitting on a goldmine of data that could translate into an easy-to-pitch case study or report.
Larkins echoed this at MozCon. “When the research comes from you, you're the source that journalists quote,” she said. “You're not just waiting around for them to decide that something is newsworthy. You get positioned as the category expert, and you're not just another brand that's trying to get attention.” In other words: “When you create the data, you control the story.”
Embrace a "hot take" on current events
In the absence of data, you can use a “hot take,” or contrarian (but well-informed) opinion on current events or trends. In the protein example, “protein is good for you” is not an opinion piece any journalist would commission. But “our obsession with protein is distracting us from what really matters” could see interest.
This has additional value as a potential citation in LLMs because fresh perspectives add context when users request information on debatable and emerging topics.
Align with your wider marketing team
It’s true that many marketing teams are used to working in silos—now’s the time to change that. LLMs draw citations from social media, user generated content, video, editorial and other websites. With every branch of a marketing strategy becoming its own full-time role, there needs to be a concerted effort to maintain transparency, communication, and a set of identical end goals across specializations and clients in order to deliver the best results.
“We know which types of publications and articles LLMs are pulling from, so it’s in an organization’s best interest to ensure marketing and PR are working in lockstep to drive results within those places,” says Harris. “This is sort of the Cinderella moment both industries have been waiting for. We finally have benchmarks and results that we can speak to and measure against over time.”
