What is Digital PR?
Digital (Digital Public Relations) is about earning authority, coverage and links by placing brands in the trusted sources people and AI look for answers. It is earned media that places your brand at the centre of conversations that matter, built on credibility rather than paid placement.
It has come a long way from what we used to call link building.
The old playbook was transactional: get a link, hit your link KPI, move on. The new one is strategic. We are building brands into credible, authoritative sources that journalists return to and reference, audiences trust, and AI systems recommend when answering queries.
How does Digital PR work?
The model is simple in principle and demanding in execution. We identify search behaviour trends, newsworthy moments, trending cultural conversations or proprietary client data which is valuable to journalists because they cannot access it themselves. We then craft a story so relevant or data-rich that publications want to cover it without being paid to do so because their readers are genuinely interested in it.
In practice, that means monitoring news cycles and social platforms for emerging trends, identifying angles that align with a client’s expertise or product offering, and building a story, a press release anchored in exclusive data, expert commentary or timely analysis.
From there, we construct a targeted list of journalists who actively cover that beat, pitch them directly, secure the coverage and report the results. Every stage of that process requires judgement and expertise of the media landscape. It is not something that can be templated and repeated. It’s also not a one size fits all approach. Every market is different.
One detail worth emphasising is that journalist lists must be rebuilt for every campaign. People move constantly, and a reporter who covered fashion at Vogue last quarter may now be writing travel pieces for Harper’s Bazaar. Recycling old lists is a reliable route to low response rates or worse potentially being blocked.
The right approach is to go directly to each publication, search the topic you want to cover, see who is actively writing about it now, and build the list fresh so it’s hyper relevant.
What is the difference between Digital PR and Traditional PR?
Traditional PR is built around broadcast, effective in a media landscape where attention is concentrated in a handful of (offline) channels, think about TV, magazines, radio and events. Success is measured in metrics that are sometimes hard to tie back to commercial outcomes, such as brand sentiment. Traditional PR focuses on the brand and what they want to share from a brand point of view, whereas Digital PR focuses on what’s newsworthy and what journalists want to cover and places the brand at the centre of that.
Digital PR bridges both, earning high-authority media coverage that drives traditional and AI search visibility, referral traffic, brand mentions and trust signals across the channels. When done properly, it supports SEO, GEO, brand positioning and commercial outcomes simultaneously, not as separate workstreams, but as a connected result of a combined strategy.
Digital PR builds authority in a world where audiences are fragmented across the web and where AI systems are synthesising that web to answer questions on their behalf. A brand covered in a high-authority online publication is not only reaching that publication’s readers. It is becoming part of the indexed, referenceable web that tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity draw on when constructing answers. That is a fundamentally different value proposition.
What kind of Digital PR Strategies are there?
Digital PR examples span a wide range of formats – data-driven reports that give journalists exclusive numbers they cannot source elsewhere, consumer surveys that tap into cultural attitudes.
Interactive tools and calculators that earn links by being genuinely useful, newsjacking and reactive commentary that positions a brand inside a breaking story.
Concept-led creative campaigns that spark emotion and generate coverage through sheer originality.
Reactive PR: Newsjacking and Expert Commentary
Reactive PR means moving quickly when a story breaks and reacting to it with unique insights.
A brand in the fashion space might offer commentary on sustainability claims trending on social media, or a fintech client might provide expert analysis when the Bank of England announces a rate decision.
The format is consistent: identify the trending moment, craft the angle, pitch within hours. Speed is essential, but so is genuine relevance.
Journalists receive more pitches than ever while working in smaller newsrooms, which means only commentary that is strategically aligned and genuinely useful cuts through. That requires knowing what a journalist has written recently, understanding their audience and delivering something they can use without significant additional work.
The Benefits of Digital PR
Done well, the digital PR benefits compound across multiple channels where their audience gets their information from.
- Improved SEO/GEO and search visibility: earned links and brand mentions from trusted publications signal relevance and authority to search engines and LLMs at scale which improves their rankings and AI search visibility.
- Enhanced brand awareness and trust: audiences are increasingly sceptical of advertising and more receptive to coverage that is earned rather than bought. When a trusted publication refers to a brand’s website it will signal credibility and trust to readers
- Referral traffic with high intent: a reader who clicks through from a relevant article or publication arrives already engaged, with context and genuine interest meaning they are more likely to convert
Digital PR for GEO in the age of AI: Why it matters now
The most significant shift in digital PR strategy is not happening in newsrooms. It is happening in search.
AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews are increasingly the touchpoint for consumer research, services and brands. These systems do not simply crawl links. They synthesise information from across the web, drawing on brand mentions, product reviews, listicles and expert commentary to construct their answers.
A brand that is rarely mentioned by credible third-party sources may be less likely to appear in AI-generated recommendations. Technical SEO improves discoverability, but external authority and reputation signals often play a major role in whether AI systems recommend a brand.
Google traffic is dropping and is being replaced by AI search, meaning that being ranked well in traditional search is no longer sufficient. Brands need to be referenceable by appearing in “best of” roundups, product review articles, expert commentary pieces and trend analysis, with journalists citing their data and mentioning their name in contexts that signal authority and relevance, often without a link at all.
Product PR has become a visibility strategy in the most direct sense: if a brand is not featured in the content that AI systems are indexing and referencing, it is invisible to a growing share of its audience at precisely the moment that audience is making a purchasing decision.
What good measurement looks like in Digital PR
Measuring digital PR by coverage volume or domain authority scores alone is no longer adequate, and clients are right to expect more.
The metrics that matter connect earned media to commercial outcomes, whether campaigns are driving visitors to the pages that actually convert, whether sales or leads can be attributed to specific placements, whether the brand is winning share of voice in the publications that reach its target audience, and whether there is a demonstrable uplift in rankings, traffic or engagement that can be pointed to when coverage goes live.
The difference between strategic digital PR and a vanity exercise is not the number of placements secured; it is whether those placements move the needle where it counts.
Digital PR integration is everything
When connecting SEO, GEO, Content, Social and Digital PR, the latter becomes a major driver of growth across multiple channels.
The rise of AI search makes this integration more urgent, not less.
The brands that will win in this new landscape are the ones being talked about, referenced and recommended, and Digital PR is one of the most powerful tools we have to make that happen.
ROAST’s approach to Digital PR
At ROAST, we start with understanding where a brand sits, its current backlink profile, their current AI visibility score, the publications that matter in its sector, and where competitors are earning coverage that it isn’t.
Every campaign is built around content that journalists want to cover: original data, expert angles and timely stories that earn placements without being paid for. Our team is made up of PR specialists and SEO strategists, people who understand what makes a story land and moves the needle in search. Increasingly, that means thinking beyond traditional search, as AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity pull from across the web to construct answers. Brands that appear in authoritative publications become the sources those systems reference.
Our digital PR work is built to earn the kind of coverage that signals credibility to search engines and AI platforms alike.
If you’d like to explore how Digital PR could work harder within your marketing strategy, get in touch with the team at ROAST.
