Digital PR

What is Digital PR? From strategy and tactics to measurement

14 hours ago

What is digital PR?

Digital PR (digital public relations), or sometimes known as online PR, is a marketing strategy designed to earn brand coverage and links in the right places; where your target audience sits online, i.e. key authoritative publications and websites in your niche. With consistency, over time this serves to boost brand awareness, and improve topical authority and online visibility - supporting SEO.

It therefore sits under the umbrella of SEO. This includes AEO, GEO and any other terminology you wish to use for the digital search space. It's all essentially the same thing, where people go to search for answers to problems (or their ‘wants’ or ‘desires’).

Digital PR layers on top of a strong technical foundation, and strategic content strategy, to help build and grow online brands and ultimately, drive increased revenue.

Where Digital PR sits, in relation to on-page SEO, technical SEO and content production.

The search space has evolved over the past few years (hello AIOs, ChatGPT, Gemini and all your favourite LLMs), and with it, digital PR has become even more important. It’s an exciting time for digital PRs as brand mentions have been highlighted as just as important as links for boosting brand visibility in digital search spaces. Something we’ve always talked about as being hints for Google are now actively being shouted about as key focuses for the new AI era.

Digital PR and the rise of Generative AI

Generative AI is everywhere and is being used at many different points of the buyer's journey - from initial problem solving through to now pulling tailored shopping options, and even checking local stores for stock levels - making it important to businesses to appear within the results there too.

To showcase the current scale of generative AI:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in October 2025 that ChatGPT had reached 800m weekly active users globally, a 60% increase in just over six months.
Ahrefs’ 2024 study of AI Overview triggers, which looked at 146 million SERPs, found that Google’s AI overviews currently appear for approximately 20% of searches - with some categories having as high as a 60% chance of triggering an AI overview.

Since the launch of Google’s AI overviews and the increase in use of LLMS (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and many more) there have been several studies and articles on the factors which correlate with brands being mentioned or brand content being pulled into AI responses.

Ahrefs’ 2025 analysis of AI Overview brand visibility factors, which looked at 75,000 brands, revealed that ‘branded web mentions’ has the strongest correlation with AI overview brand visibility.

It found that:

Branded web mentions showed the strongest correlation with AI Overview visibility (Spearman: 0.664)
This was significantly higher than backlinks and nine other tested factors, including DR and branded search volume.

This shows correlation, not causation, but the strength of the pattern indicates that earning high-quality brand mentions should now be treated as a primary lever for AI visibility.

This, among other studies, have re-highlighted the importance of digital PR for visibility in generative AI, and not just for links, but for earning brand mentions from key websites and publications to build trust and authority too.

While mentions are getting their time in the spotlight, digital PR shouldn’t however just ignore links all together. We know LLMs conduct searches (“queries”) to pull together a response for a user, therefore ranking on traditional search engines is important too - which is where links still come in. Therefore traditional SEO best practices aren’t going anywhere - we’re just evolving!

Digital PR vs link building

Digital PR is a form of link building, but not like in the early 2000s sense of the word - or like the ‘questionable’ tactics we still see today. Digital PR is strategic, targeted and tailored, using storytelling and content to help build links from relevant, authoritative websites (i.e. the ones you want linking to you to make a difference) over time.

Digital PR doesn’t just focus on building a volume of links, from any website in existence - as it’s been highlighted many times by Google that this doesn't move the needle anymore. Google updates over the years have refined what the crawlers consider ‘authority signals’.

Gary Illyes, analyst at Google, was quoted at a search conference in 2024 stating that they need few links to rank pages.

Alongside this, Google’s internal API documentation which surfaced in the 2024 algorithm leak, suggested that the algorithm now scores inbound links based on quality, relevance, and overall trustworthiness. It also suggested that the algorithm seeks contextual relevance from links, and brand mentions - we should mention those too as the documentation highlighted that unlinked brand mentions contribute to search relevance and trust signals, something we’ve believed to be true for a while. Whilst we can’t take the leaked document as definitive, several factors do align with what we’ve seen in organic search over the years.

This highlights that organic visibility is now driven by a blend of signals (not just links alone) which help Google assess trust and authority. To simplify this, we can break this down into a model that reflects how Google increasingly evaluates a brand.

Off-Site trust signals include:

High-quality links – Links from relevant, authoritative, trustworthy sources
High-quality mentions – Unlinked but credible references that reinforce your brand’s identity and topical expertise
Contextual relevance – Coverage from publications within your target niche, demonstrating that your brand is part of the right conversations online
Entity consistency – Consistent spelling, naming, and context for your brand across all mentions and citations - further highlighting relevance of the content as well as the publication
Expert attribution – Quotes, commentary, and insights tied to real individuals supporting E-E-A-T and strengthening your brand entities.

To earn these trust signals consistently, we'd recommend sitting on the left of this scale:

By earning both coverage and mentions from authoritative sources, you’re building trust signals for both traditional search and AI-driven visibility.

Digital PR vs traditional PR

There are many similarities between digital PR and traditional PR. After all, digital PR was born from traditional PR, and they’re both about building brand awareness and reputation. But they do differ.

Digital PR focuses predominantly on online channels, or opportunities which eventually influence online coverage, as it’s this coverage that will support SEO and benefit website performance.

The traditional PR focuses of print coverage, events and activations aren’t usually priorities for digital PRs - because of effort vs reward, where the reward is focused on benefitting SEO, and being able to measure that.

So, what online channels does digital PR focus on?

The main focus of digital PR is media outreach to secure brand mentions and links. Digital PR strategies for media outreach should target quality, relevant websites and publications in the brand’s niche. These will be key places that the target audience is sat online, and have the best impact in terms of building trust and authority signals to support SEO.

These could be uncovered from an analysis into which publications are writing about, and linking to, competitors, or from research into the target audience and media landscape.

That said, a brand’s target audience is likely to sit in other places online too, such as forums, social media, on emails, etc. Therefore, wherever possible and relevant, amplifying stories through other channels where the target audience sits should also be a consideration. This can lead to further coverage or have an influence on user behaviour, which further supports SEO.

What are the benefits of digital PR?

Digital PR coverage (earned mentions and links) can have many benefits. At Aira we predominantly focus on the SEO side of those benefits;

Improve topical authority and brand awareness (in Google’s/Generative AI eyes)
Supports E-E-A-T signals - used by Google to assess quality content
Can increase branded search - as users search for you after reading coverage
Improves search engine rankings
Increases visibility in generative AI
When part of a holistic digital marketing strategy, these all lead to increased traffic, and revenue.

At Aira, we’ve seen these benefits of digital PR, when part of a holistic strategy, on clients across a range of industries from finance and ecommerce, to travel and even B2B tech/SaaS.

But there are brand benefits to implementing digital PR which we can’t forget too. Especially as digital PR coverage is designed to reach the target audience;

Boosts brand awareness
Increases brand reputation and affiliation - helping consumers feel connected to your brand
Can increase branded search

These brand benefits can just be harder (or more costly) to measure, and sometimes harder to separate from other ATL activity. And it’s important to remember that without being able to separate it, we can’t claim correlation is causation.

How do I know digital PR is right for me?

No matter your industry, you’ll know that increasing brand awareness and visibility is key. If you own or lead an online business, digital PR, and more broadly SEO, should be considered.

A number of industries, like insurance, money saving, healthcare and travel are incredibly noisy, and move quickly. If you operate in a buzzy, competitive online space, the chances are you will need to implement digital PR to be able to compete with active competitors long term.

Some B2B industries can be quieter, with fewer relevant coverage opportunities - so even competitors aren’t featured in key titles that often. If your brand competes in this type of space, it doesn’t mean you don’t need digital PR, it just means the scale of activity will be very different.

Digital PR tends to work best for businesses that;

Have a strong, technically sound website as a foundation.
Are in a position to provide expertise on a subject - this could be through data we help source or commentary (which we can guide), and should always be from a named expert.
Have some creative freedom - we’ll always stay relevant to the brand and target audience, but if our content campaigns and stories are too branded, it’ll limit earned coverage opportunities due to being seen as advertorial. We need some creative freedom to allow innovation and to be able to create a buzz with the target audience.
Have limited internal restrictions around outreach - due to the speed of the news agenda and opportunities, we’re a very agile team and work quickly to capitalise on all opportunities. That said, we have worked with a number of businesses with internal red tape and legal approval processes, and helped shape internal processes too! So it can work if your internal team is willing to try something new!

If you’re still unsure, we’re always up for an initial conversation where we can help you decide if Digital PR, or perhaps one of our other services is right for you - just get in touch.

What’s the best strategy and approach for digital PR?

There isn’t a one size fits all approach when it comes to digital PR; it highly depends on the industry, websites you want to target and your target audience.

At Aira we will run an audit of your brand website and competitors, including any challenger brands new on the scene. We will dig into your target audience (using any insights and personas you have too!), and conduct a media and cultural landscape analysis to help determine what’s being spoken about, topic gaps, and what might impact relevant opportunities i.e. seasonal or cultural hooks.

All of this insight should be analysed to pull out the target websites, key topics for storytelling, and the tactics which are most likely to be effective. This shapes a tailored strategy and approach for each brand, which is taken into ideation sessions.

The strongest ideas from our sessions are run through a rigorous concepting process which has been evolved over the years, to ensure only the most robust ideas move ahead to client approval. We’ll manage the production from end-to-end, producing copy and design if required, and following approval, will outreach to target online media to secure coverage. We’ll also work with relevant teams to further amplify the story across owned media.

We’ll always keep the brand up-to-date on outreach and earned media coverage. We’ll regularly review activity and feed any learnings back into the ideas and approach.

Therefore a framework for a typical approach looks like this;

Research and auditing - competitors and industry, target audience, media and cultural landscape
Analysis & Insights - Pulling out the key focuses for tactics, topics and target websites
Ideation - Ideas which align to the findings
Production - Storytelling, including the right elements, and ensuring the brand is positioned as an authority
Outreach - Tailored and targeted
Reporting and evaluation - feeding learnings back into the strategy

Which digital PR tactic is most effective for 2026?

Just like the strategy, there isn’t one leading tactic for everyone - it depends on the industry and space you’re operating in.

However, there are several tactics we tend to rely on at Aira. And it always works best when you combine these throughout the year, and scale up and down, reacting to the landscape and what’s currently happening.

These are the tactics we tend to use most often, alongside what each tactic is and some of our favourite examples to bring these to life.

Tactic	What is this tactic?	Some of our team’s favourite examples over the years
Digital PR campaign	A data or insight-led creative story, which uncovers something new (and relevant) to create headlines for digital PR outreach. These range in scale and complexity, and can be produced with or without content (and design). Large scale campaigns could be interactive or include video. Our internal team of creatives manages everything from end-to-end, designing each campaign with multiple angles for longevity, to help attract coverage and links over time.	- An extensive prescriptions report fuelled by NHS and survey data. - An analysis of personal finance education across every state in the US to uncover where does it best (and where it isn't so good). - An index cross-analysing multiple data sources to round-up the best dog friendly vacations.
Thought leadership	Using a brand’s internal experts to provide commentary to press on relevant trending topics, which are important to the target audience. This could be ahead of a seasonal hook like Black Friday or key travel periods. Quotes will always be human-written, and can be drafted by the Aira team for brands to add to. We introduce your brand to key press contacts to get them front of mind for any future content too.	- Using internal experts at a lawn company to provide the best methods to get thriving grass, just before it hit the key lawn sowing period. - Comments from a company formation agent sharing the impact on the increase in cost to register a business in the UK, and advice for new businesses. - Predictions from internal experts on trends for the coming year in a range of subjects from flowers to multi-factor authentication.
Reactive PR	This isn’t just waiting for opportunities to land in our inbox and hitting reply. We constantly monitor the news and proactively outreach in response to breaking news. We need to be collaborative and quick with this tactic, but this can add great value. And yes, this can be done across time zones too!	- Comments from a classic car insurer responding to the news that the chancellor could lift the 40-year car tax. These comments went live within an hour of the first coverage breaking-out. - Expert commentary from a pharmacist to highlight the difference between hay fever and covid symptoms when significant pollen bombs were announced. Over multiple pollen bombs in two years, we secured 179 pieces of earned media coverage.
Existing content	We don’t always need to create more content. Sometimes we can give your blog content a little zhuzh using our creative flair, to help create new topical stories for outreach. This could be updating or adding new data or quotes, and even including new design assets if valuable.	- We used data on the cheapest states to go to college (in-state) to support an editorial blog post, and secure coverage on CNBC and several finance sites. - We added quotes from an in-house spokesperson to a winter care guide for electric vehicles, and used the quotes as tips for media outreach ahead of cold weather.
Brand news	We look to capitalise on all relevant coverage opportunities, so if a brand has a new product launch or some business news which we believe more of the world should know about, we might be able to help here too. We just need to be kept in the loop with any upcoming news and we can do the rest.	- Outreaching new/relevant products for seasonal gift guides e.g. Christmas and Valentine’s Day.
PR stunt	A one-off time-sensitive, attention-grabbing innovative story. This could be creating something (physically or digitally) different to normal to create a buzz and get people talking.	- An ultimate working from home desk concept product, which was launched in the height of lockdown.

How do you measure digital PR? What are digital PR KPIs?

PR measurement has always been a challenge. Looking back over the years, traditional PR metrics have often been criticised, from claims of having billions of eyeballs on a story/brand message, to different calculations for an equivalent cost in advertising value.

It’s always crucial to stay as close to tangible outputs as possible, especially when looking at lead digital PR metrics and KPIs - i.e. results we know we impacted/can impact.

For digital PR this should always be direct outputs, which are, coverage (brand mentions or links), including the quality (domain authority/rating) and relevancy scores, as well as reporting on new referring domains. Relevancy scores could also include territory/country of coverage.

By sitting under the umbrella of SEO, Digital PR has a slightly easier job with reporting on longer term benefits. But it can still be an obstacle we need to tailor an approach to, and overcome together with the brand - to also ensure we’re delivering reporting that the brand needs internally.

Metrics which could be reported on as longer term measures of digital PR success include;

Search rankings and share of voice
Brand search volumes and clicks
Other traffic, such as referral and direct - as noreferrer link clicks can show here. You can also create a custom group channel to show traffic from AI sources.
Mentions or share of voice in generative AI
Conversions/leads
Revenue

It’s key to note, when looking at longer term reporting for digital PR and wider benefits, a lot of the time we’re discussing correlations and not causation. These should only be included if it can be confidently discussed that there’s a correlation, and there was no other big marketing activity which could have impacted this.

How much does digital PR cost?

Packages are tailored, and therefore costs, based on your budget and/or recommended on what you need to compete in your industry space. Some brands/industries will need less activity and therefore less budget, whereas others are highly competitive, so there is no specific cost that works for all.

At Aira, we generally work best with clients who can invest at least £3,000 a month. That said, the more you have to work with, the faster we can move, and the more we can tackle for you to help move the needle.

When we start discussing a proposal, we can suggest a couple of cost options so you can see the difference in scale.

If you don’t quite have that much, we might still be able to help or point you in the right direction, so do still get in touch.

To summarise on what digital PR is…

Digital PR is a marketing strategy that sits under SEO. It uses tactics to secure earned brand mentions and links, to grow brand awareness, topical authority and visibility, supporting search engine rankings and visibility in generative AI.

With the rise of generative AI, Digital PR has become even more important as it’s a fundamental way of earning brand mentions (as well as links) in the right places, which correlates with increased visibility in these new search spaces.

Digital PR differs to traditional PR and link building, with its focus on benefitting more areas which support online performance in today’s evolved search space.

It’s important to note that there isn’t a one size fits all approach when it comes to digital PR, or one tactic that would work for every brand; it highly depends on the industry, websites you want to target and your target audience. All digital PR strategies and approaches should therefore be tailored, and utilise a number of tactics across the year to maximise coverage opportunities.

Measuring digital PR, and the wider benefits specifically, can be challenging. We recommend sticking to tangible outputs, like coverage, quality and relevancy, as lead metrics and KPIs. Then, working together on an agreed approach to reporting on wider benefits.

If you still have questions or would like further clarity on how digital PR could support your brand, drop us a message and we’d be more than happy to chat.

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