What is digital PR?

Instead of buying ads or placements, digital PR earns attention by giving journalists and other sites a reason to cover something on their own: a proprietary data study, a survey, an original piece of research, or expert commentary worth quoting.

For AI visibility, the value has partly shifted from the link itself to the mention. A system synthesizing an answer often draws on how a brand or claim gets talked about across many sources, not on how much ranking value a link would have passed. A widely covered data study can shape how a model describes a brand even through outlets that wrote about it but never linked back.

The common mistake is running digital PR purely to earn links and treating unlinked coverage as a failed pitch. Unlinked mentions still add to the broader footprint that both search and AI systems draw on when forming an impression of a brand, so coverage that never produces a link isn't necessarily coverage that didn't help.