How to build a digital PR strategy that supports SEO and your brand goals

Digital PR activity without a guiding strategy is like going on an expedition for buried treasure without a map, or starting an investment portfolio with zero research. It's not to say you won't stumble across a win, but the chances are much slimmer - and in 2026, the competition is more fierce than ever. 

This article covers what a digital PR strategy is, why it matters more in 2026, the inputs that make one robust, and how to keep it effective over time. Each section also includes the questions a budget holder should be asking the team leading the work, to ensure their strategy is as strong as possible.

What is a digital PR strategy?

A digital PR strategy is the piece of work that guides all of your activity so it's designed to have maximum impact for the brand. It's not about earning links and mentions anywhere. It's about how you build trust and authority for the right topics, so you're visible in the spaces where your customers are actually researching their decisions.

As digital PR supports building brand strength and increasing visibility in search, this strategy can’t be produced in a silo. It needs to be informed by brand and SEO, and essentially be an extension of their strategies. 

A robust digital PR strategy should therefore be produced from: 

• Brand goals and key target persona insights
• SEO strategy insights and priorities 
• In-depth competitor analysis 
• Media and AI landscape research 

As search is evolving at an incredible rate with the adoption of AI, and with the media landscape continually adapting to the climate at the time (to target their own readers' wants, needs and desires), this shouldn’t be a one-off static document. The digital PR strategy needs to be revisited regularly to make sure digital PR activity stays aligned to changes brand-side, with target audiences, in the media or the wider search landscape. 

Why a digital PR strategy matters more in 2026 than it ever did

There's a lot moving in search and media at the moment, but two shifts in particular are landing at the same time, and digital PR is having to adapt to both. 

The first is the rise of AI search (and everything that comes with it): 

• ChatGPT has surpassed 1 billion weekly active users (as of August 2026) - more than double the 400 million of February 2025.
• Google AI Overviews now appear on 43% of searches, according to Similarweb - nearly triple the 15% of a year ago. The feature spans more than 200 countries and territories in over 40 languages.
• Around two-thirds of American adults (65%) and roughly one in three Brits (35%) use AI weekly.
• Over half of British adults (55%) now use AI to find out information or research a topic.

If your brand isn't visible in these spaces during the purchase journey, you're essentially absent from consideration. And with this channel only growing, that could have a big impact on your bottom line.

The second force is competition - which has likely increased because of the above shift. Average worldwide search interest in digital PR over the past 12 months is up 168% on the year before, and more brands are investing in quality earned media than ever before. Alongside this, the media industry is regularly making cuts to employee numbers, so the fight for journalist attention and editorial space is at an all-time high. Doing digital PR and trying to cut through the noise without a strategy in this environment isn't just inefficient, it'll be expensive.

What the rise of AI search has changed about the signals that matter 

Brand strength and authority (which are supported by digital PR) have always influenced visibility. AI search has made them the dominant signal, not a supporting one - and the data behind that shift is now hard to argue with.

Ahrefs’ 2025 analysis of the top brand visibility factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews, which looked at 75,000 brands, revealed that ‘branded web mentions’ has one of the strongest correlations with brand visibility in these spaces. With an average Spearman correlation of 0.676 vs 0.218 for backlinks, that’s roughly a 3:1 advantage. 

In addition, Muck Rack’s Generative AI report 2025 analysed more than one million links cited by Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and ChatGPT, and found that 82% of AI citations come from earned media rather than brand-owned content, with journalism alone accounting for around 20-30%. Digital PR tool BuzzStream analysed 4 million citations (April 2026) and found that 14% came from news publications specifically - second only to blog content (53%). 

What we've always treated as hints for Google are now being shouted from the rooftops in this AI search/GEO era: brand strength and authority are the key focuses. Digital PR could influence brand strength to increase overall brand visibility in AI, or earn coverage which itself is cited. 

So ‘more links equals better performance' is the old equation. And whilst it still has some weight, with relevant links supporting traditional search performance, which in turn does correlate with AI visibility - it’s not the only, or dominant factor, for visibility in AI. A digital PR strategy built purely around link acquisition (and volume) will therefore be working harder for less over time, because what 'better performance' actually looks like is the thing that’s changing.

So digital PR isn't a purely link building strategy, and it isn't a traditional PR strategy either. It sits between the two, earning coverage that builds both search authority and AI visibility, with brand positioning and commercial goals shaping all activity.

The inputs: what a robust strategy is built on

A digital PR strategy doesn't start with campaign ideas, it starts with data, insights and understanding. This information pieces together to form a strategy and plan, which maximise chances of success - like uncovering buried treasure, or seeing a healthy return on your investment portfolio. 

I covered the core steps of this process in a recent Whiteboard Friday on Moz if you'd prefer a short video walk-through.

Brand knowledge and goals

The first, and arguably most important place to start, is brand understanding. The digital PR team, and especially the person leading the strategy, need an in-depth understanding of the brand. That includes:

• The goals for the next 12, 24, even 36 months if they're available. 
• Direction, key products or services (and why those are the priorities)
• The core target audience. 

If possible, having the target audience split by persona - taking into account demographics and psychographics - is beneficial, as activity needs to be tailored towards these to make sure it’s tied to their wants, needs and desires, and will therefore resonate with them and key press. Many digital PRs will be able to help develop these if they don't exist yet, but having that clarity from the outset shapes everything that follows.

If the brand (and the way you want to be perceived) isn't at the core of the stories and topics, the digital PR activity won't be building authority against the right areas. You might earn coverage, but it won't compound in the direction that supports commercial growth. It’s important to remember that activity and impact aren't the same thing.

It's also worth identifying internal experts early on. These spokespeople who can add unique, credible insight on specific topics are increasingly valuable, particularly as journalists lean more heavily on experts to provide a human narrative to set their stories apart from AI-produced content. 

Goals and direction

The next 12, 24 or 36 months. Key products or services, and why those are the priorities.

Audience personas

Demographics and psychographics, so stories tie to what each persona wants and needs.

Internal experts

Spokespeople who add credible insight, as journalists lean on experts to stand apart from AI-produced content.

SEO strategy integration

As mentioned before, the digital PR strategy should be an extension of the SEO strategy, not a separate focus. After all, it's feeding into the same goal of increasing visibility in key search spaces, including generative AI. 

The digital PR team needs a clear understanding of:

• The key SEO focuses for the next 12 months, including focus keywords and queries, clusters or themes.
• Any technical issues being worked on that could hold digital PR performance back - and the timescales for resolving them.

This goes both ways. SEO doesn’t need to just feed into the PR strategy and activity, PR can also feed into the SEO work to maximise performance. 

For example, if there's an SEO content plan, having visibility of it and being able to work with the person leading that stream of work, could open up additional earned coverage opportunities. Especially if the roadmap allows time for content input from a digital PR, with the ability to add unique data or expert commentary - this can also help increase organic pickup of helpful content. 

The more connected the two workstreams are, the more each one can complement and benefit the other - leading to a greater impact for the brand.

SEO feeds in

Focus keywords, clusters and themes for the next 12 months. Technical issues being fixed, and when.

One goal, one interconnecting strategy

Both workstreams exist to grow visibility in the search spaces that matter, including generative AI.

PR feeds back

Unique data and expert commentary for the content plan, opening up earned coverage and organic pickup.

Competitor analysis

This part of the strategy process is crucial to help inform understanding on what’s supporting performance and visibility in your specific niche, at that moment in time. Whilst you don’t want to just copy your competitors, or you’ll only ever be as good as them, it helps to show what’s working as a starting point, to help ground your approach - and provide justification to anyone who needs it.

The goal of this competitor analysis is to understand how the brands winning in organic and AI search are actually earning their coverage, and therefore building brand authority. First, you need to narrow down which competitors are worth digging into. 

To do this, we'd recommend looking at a top-level overview of organic performance first. You'll never be able to split digital PR activity out definitively - link or referring domain volumes, or volume of mentions, don't necessarily mean better performance on their own. But combining several signals gives you a good idea of who’s performing well in search, and therefore who you should take note of. 

Organic traffic
Estimates, and the trajectory over time

Keyword rankings
Volume, and top positions for your target topics

Referring domains
Quality and relevance, not just volume

Brand mentions
Increasingly important given the link to AI visibility

AI visibility
Share of voice, and where and how LLMs cite them

No single metric is conclusive. Combined, they uncover who you should take a closer look at.

These are the types of metrics we look at to determine which competitors are the ones we want to dig further into:

• Estimates of organic traffic - this includes trajectory over time, so you can see if there are any competitors seeing significant rises.
• Keyword rankings - volume and those in top positions for your target topics.
• Referring domain profile - not just volume, but quality and relevancy.
• Brand mention volume - this is increasingly important given the relationship with AI visibility, but do be aware that some brands share names with other things, therefore making this hard to analyse.
• AI visibility - share of voice, where and how competitors are being cited by LLMs, and for which prompts or topics.

AI visibility is a relatively new addition to this process. It's no longer enough to only benchmark against who's ranking well in traditional search. You need to understand which competitors are being cited by LLMs (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini) and Google's AI Overviews - where your target audience might be sitting early in their purchase journey. 

Once the top-performing brands are identified, the real investigative work begins. You're looking at how those brands are earning coverage - both mentions and links - in authoritative titles and relevant spaces. 

Start by looking at what the coverage is:

• The type of approach or tactic - for example is it a data-led campaign, a thought leadership piece, expert commentary within a wider story, or a brand story?
• The topic/theme
• Perceived target persona/audience
• If it includes data, what kind of data is it? Proprietary data, free publicly available data or something else.

Then dig into why the story landed coverage:

• What’s new? - any unique data or insight they're bringing
• The timing - is it reactive to a key moment in time?
• Any cultural hooks - is it jumping on the back of a current trend or something specific happening?

Analysing this across the top performing competitors helps to uncover trends in what's actually landing brands coverage in the right places - and likely influencing visibility and overall performance. A side note: You could also take note of the specific journalists covering competitors so you know who to target when you get to outreach. 

It’s also helpful to start looking at how these brands are using owned channels - like social media and email marketing - to maximise reach and performance of digital PR stories. This can help shape your approach for additional amplification, which although not a key focus, can help to support PR and therefore SEO and GEO. 

I put together a free Digital PR Competitor Audit template to help with this process. It covers the key metrics and gives you a structure to work from.

Media landscape analysis

As well as looking at how competitors are earning coverage, a media landscape analysis should be conducted to understand the topics being covered in your sector, and any potential gaps you could fill. This is where the strategy starts to move from replicating what competitors are doing, to finding opportunities to stand out and set the brand apart. 

Narrowing down which publications to analyse, it’s important to remember that the publications worth targeting aren't just those with high domain authority. They're the relevant ones for the brand’s industry and core topics, where the brand’s target audiences are, as well as the ones regularly cited or trusted by LLMs. This could take the focus from purely national publications, to all the topically relevant websites which could have a positive impact on brand strength and topical authority if they covered you. 

Once you have your publication and website list, some questions to ask could be:

• What topics are regularly being covered?
• In what way are they being covered? Is this something you could add a unique perspective on?
• Is there any specific timing around the topics being covered? Are they likely to crop up every year, or tied to specific moments?
• Are there any gaps in the topics and content which you could suggest? These need to be relevant and important to the publication or website’s target audience now.

Bringing it together: building the strategic output

Once you have all of the insight to fuel the strategy, the story starts to come together. There's no single prescribed way to do this, which is part of what makes it interesting. It’s a bit like piecing together a puzzle, or building a case where every piece of evidence has to earn its place.

You're bringing together brand knowledge and key focuses, target audience insights (their wants, needs, desires), the priorities from the SEO strategy, competitor intelligence, and the media landscape analysis. With all of these pieces, you're compiling a data-backed case for what you should do over the next 6, 12, or 24 months to compete in search.

KPIs should be set alongside the strategy. They give the strategy accountability and without them, you're measuring activity rather than impact. We tend to split ours into:

• Lead metrics - things we’re able to control (to some extent) like coverage outputs
• Lag metrics - wider benefits (which correlate with digital PR activity), such as AI visibility, rankings, traffic and revenue. 

When you're reviewing the strategy output, step back, put yourself in a senior stakeholder's shoes, and ask:

• If this were presented to me, would I be asking extra questions? 
• Would I challenge why we're not considering a particular route?
• If I were the budget holder, would I be happy with what's being suggested if it were my budget? 

That kind of honest interrogation is what helps get a strategy approved. If you can’t answer these questions confidently, your senior stakeholders are likely to pull you up, and either delay activity, or not buy into it.

What should a good brief to a digital PR agency in 2026 include?

For anyone briefing a digital PR agency or team for SEO and GEO support, there are several key things to include to fuel an effective strategy and maximise performance of subsequent digital PR activity.

These are:

• Your brand goals, positioning and any key focuses for the business over the next 12-24 months.
• Target audience - ideally at a persona level, so research and strategy can be tailored towards these.
• SEO strategy - especially the priorities and any technical constraints.
• A list of your direct competitors, and any other brands you monitor.
• What success looks like commercially, not just in terms of links or coverage volume - so the strategy can be tailored towards this focus.

If your agency isn't asking for most of these before they start, that's also worth paying attention to.

Keeping the strategy alive

This is the point that tends to get glossed over in strategy guides, but it's one of the most important things: a digital PR strategy is not a one-time deliverable, it needs to be revisited and evolve to adapt to changes brand-side or in the wider landscape. Competitors (usually) aren’t standing still, AI search is evolving rapidly, and brand priorities can change too - such as when a new product is launched. A strategy document from 12 months ago may already be misaligned with the current state of play. 

How often you need to revisit your digital PR strategy depends on your industry and how fast-paced it is. It could need revisiting every 6 months for a fast-moving industry like travel or finance, or every 12-18 months could work for a slower industry like many B2B spaces. 

Revisiting could mean re-running competitor analysis, checking whether the media landscape has shifted, reviewing whether the KPIs still align with commercial goals, and adjusting the activity pipeline accordingly. In between major revisits, it’s worth checking back in and ensuring the activity pipeline is continuing to align to the strategy and goals.

To audit your current digital PR strategy, start by asking: 

• Are the competitor benchmarks still the right ones? 
• Has the AI search landscape changed which should be your target publications? 
• Are the keyword clusters from the SEO strategy still the priority? 

Use the questions in each section to audit your own digital PR strategy. You can see how we approach digital PR at Aira if you want a point of comparison, or get in touch if you’d rather speak to one of our Digital PR Leads about how to approach it for your brand.