PR Is the New SEO: How to Get Your Brand Into AI Search Results

This post is a follow up to a panel I was a guest on with host Chris Raulf of and co-panelist Brett Farmiloe of Featured.

There are three reasons people have traditionally invested in PR: credibility, exposure, and SEO. Those still hold. But now there’s a fourth reason, to show up in AI or LLMs.

AI systems are trained on what gets published in authoritative media. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini about your industry, those systems generate answers by pulling from their training data. That data skews heavily toward Forbes, the Times, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, Fast Company, and publications like them. Getting mentioned in those outlets is no longer just about impressing humans. It is about being visible to the machines people increasingly use to find what they are looking for.

Between 2013-2016, I wrote hundreds of articles for Forbes and roughly two dozen other publications. The year after I started writing for Forbes, my marketing agency MWI grew 1,500%. I can track over $10 million in revenue directly to articles I wrote for Forbes and other publications. At my writing peak, I received over 1,000 pitches a month from PR firms, corporate PR departments, entrepreneurs, and other individuals (99% of which were terrible). That inspired me to leverage my experience in the media world to launch Canvas PR. Here is what actually works when it comes to getting the kind of PR that will help you show up in the AI LLMs.

Start with the right publication

The publication that matters is the one your target audience already reads, not the one with the biggest name. If your clients are CFOs, they probably read the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, not TechCrunch. If you are targeting startup founders, Forbes Entrepreneurs and Fast Company are more relevant than the Times business section. Go where your audience already is. In the long run, the AI systems will also be pulling from the best sources for any given topic, which means the right publication for your audience is also the right publication for your AI visibility.

Then find the right writer

Getting into Forbes (or the publication of your choice) is the goal. But to get there, you need to find the right writer. Large publications have dozens or hundreds of writers, each covering different beats. A writer who covers CMO profiles is not going to write about your supply chain software, even if you pitch them something genuinely interesting.

Find one writer who has consistently covered your specific topic in the last six to twelve months and make your pitch specific to them. Study their recent work. Know what angles they favor, what sources they rely on, what questions they tend to ask. Pitching everyone at a publication is a guaranteed path to nothing. One targeted pitch beats a hundred spray-and-pray emails.

Lead with what the journalist needs, not what you want

Every journalist is already behind on five stories (or fifty) they promised an editor. The pitch that gets deleted is the one that opens with “I’ve got a great story for you.” As I noted in the Canvas PR guide to DIY PR, every journalist gets thousands of pitches like that every month, and they have become very good at recognizing them.

The pitch that works better looks like this, from my own testing:

Hi Jill, what stories are you working on? I’m not pitching anything, but I saw your article [article title] in [publication] and I happen to know some people in that space, and if you’re working on more stories about [topic 1] or [topic 2] I might know some people.

This works because it is short, it is obviously written for that specific journalist, and it offers help without asking for anything. Most people are not willing to do the homework this pitch requires, which is exactly why it stands out.

If you have a mutual connection with the journalist, lead with that. A note from someone the journalist already trusts will get read. Cold outreach from a stranger, no matter how polished, usually will not. Good PR firms get paid well because they are selling relationships they have spent years building, not just writing skill.

When you do have something concrete to pitch, lead with the specific thing. These get attention:

• “We just published a study with 10,000 respondents and the results were surprising.”
• “We achieved [specific, verifiable result] for a client in your coverage area and have the numbers to back it up.”
• “We just closed a deal with [a company your readers know].”

What does not work: “innovative,” “revolutionary,” “disrupting the industry.” Every pitch uses those words. They signal nothing. State facts instead.

Make the placement substantive enough to matter

A placement where your brand appears in half a sentence and adds nothing memorable is not going to teach an AI anything useful about you. AI systems are reading these articles the same way a discerning human would. A paragraph with specific examples, concrete results, and real insight is far more likely to get picked up and cited than a throwaway mention.

When working with publications, push for as much real substance as possible. Multiple mentions within an article, specific context about what you do and the results you have produced, and quotes that demonstrate actual expertise. The goal is not to appear. The goal is to be remembered.

Show, don’t tell: the E-E-A-T problem

Google’s framework for evaluating content quality is called E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The first E, Experience, was added in 2022, and it is the one most people miss. It refers to firsthand, lived experience with a topic, as opposed to general knowledge about it. Google’s quality guidelines have made clear that this kind of direct experience is increasingly what separates content worth citing from content worth ignoring. One of the most effective ways to demonstrate it is to tell stories. Not summaries of what you do, but actual accounts of situations you have been in, decisions you made, and what happened.

The most common E-E-A-T mistake I see is telling rather than showing. “We’re really good at XYZ” is telling. “We ran this specific process for a client and here is the documented outcome” is showing. Journalists can work with the second one. LLMs can cite the second one. The first one gets filtered out by both.

First-person accounts of real experiences perform better for a related reason. There is a documented correlation between first-person pronoun usage, I, we, my, and content that gets selected by publishers and cited by AI systems. The reason is straightforward: first-person language signals firsthand knowledge, something AI-generated content cannot authentically produce. Document your real experiences, write from them in first person, and lead with specific outcomes rather than general claims.

On links versus mentions

Around 2017, most large publications made their links nofollow. Search Engine Roundtable reported in August 2017 that Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc had all quietly switched to nofollowing their external links. The stated logic was that those links would no longer pass SEO value. As it turns out, they still do. In 2019, Google announced a significant shift in how it treats nofollow links. According to Google’s official announcement: “All the link attributes — sponsored, ugc, and nofollow — are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search.” Since March 2020, this applies to crawling and indexing as well, not just ranking.

And the line between a nofollow link and an unlinked brand mention has blurred further in the context of AI search. Brett Farmiloe of Featured.com put it this way: “I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona where there’s a lot of Waymos, a lot of self-driving cars that are dominating the roads and I’ve always thought to myself, look, if they could drive a car without a driver, they could figure out an unlinked mention can factor into their overall search index.”

Google has confirmed this direction. As Google’s John Mueller has noted in recorded Q&As, Google picks up brand mentions on other websites even without a link. SEO researcher Marie Haynes, who specializes in E-E-A-T, consistently advises that off-site reputation building, including unlinked mentions, improves performance in Google’s core updates. Rand Fishkin (the founder of SparkToro and Moz and one of the most respected SEO experts) has written extensively on brand signals as ranking factors and how brand visibility creates reinforcing SEO cycles.

A followed link is still the clearest outcome. It removes ambiguity and sends the strongest signal. But do not turn down a placement because you could not get a followed link. The mention alone is doing real work, increasingly so.

The DIY path: Featured.com and HARO

Featured.com connects over 200,000 experts with more than 2,500 media outlets. Journalists post questions, experts respond, and the best responses get included in published articles. HARO, which Brett Farmiloe acquired and revived in 2025 after it was discontinued, sends journalist requests three times a day. Both are free to start.

The mistake most people make on these platforms is treating them like a lottery. The people who succeed are the ones who respond only when they are genuinely the most qualified person to answer a specific question. As Brett Farmiloe put it in a W2 Communications interview: “the common mistake that we see is discounting the value of your personal brand and just spraying anything that AI generates to journalists. If that stuff gets published, then that’s online for a long time.” According to that same interview, 21% of HARO responses are now AI-generated, and journalists can filter them out with a single checkbox. Write from your actual experience, in first person, with specific examples.

A few tactical notes for HARO submissions in particular:

• Follow the reporter’s instructions exactly. If they ask for a quote, send a quote, not three options for them to choose from.
• Skip the introduction. Do not open with “Thank you so much for considering my submission.” Start with the answer.
• Keep it concise. A reporter sorting through 200 responses is looking for something they can copy and paste quickly.
• Do not follow up. Submit and move on. If you get included, great. If not, respond to the next opportunity.

Your profile on Featured also matters beyond individual submissions. The platform’s expert directory is indexed by search engines and increasingly cited by AI systems. Build out your profile with specific, verifiable experience in your core topics. Your title in particular gets indexed, so be precise rather than generic.

When to use a guaranteed placement service

Featured and HARO are excellent for building a steady stream of mentions over time if you are willing to do the work. The tradeoff is that you do not control the timing, the article content (beyond your contribution), nor necessarily which publication(s) you end up in.

Canvas PR fits a different need. We have longstanding relationships with writers at the publications we work with, and we write the articles ourselves. Because we’ve worked with these journalists for years, we know their voice, their publication’s standards, and the format they want. We can send a finished article to a journalist written in their voice and they will look at it and often accept and publish it verbatim. That’s why we can guarantee placement within 90 days. If you want help getting placed in a specific publication and you want maximum control over the article, that is the Canvas model. Average placement cost is around $3,000. We have hundreds of publications we work with. Forbes, Inc., and USA Today tend to be the most popular.

The two approaches are not competing. Featured and HARO are volume and opportunity-based. Canvas is precision-targeted. When timing is specific, when you have a book launch, an investor meeting, or a speaker positioning push and you need a particular logo from a particular outlet by a specific date, that is when a guaranteed placement makes sense.

If you want to explore guaranteed placements, you can reach out to Canvas PR here. If you want to start building a DIY pipeline, Featured.com and HARO are the right place to begin.