PR & Communications

Not the way they did. Google discounted links inside syndicated releases years ago, so distribution volume no longer builds authority. What remains is indexation, entity reinforcement, and inclusion in the corpus AI assistants draw on — which is why the wire services themselves now sell AI-optimised formats. Treat a release as a citation asset and an entity signal, not as a link buy.

Four things carry most of the weight: a factual claim stated once, plainly, near the top; an explicit question-and-answer block using the phrasing people actually ask; a named expert with a verifiable bio and a linked profile the model can resolve to a real entity; and schema on both the release and the newsroom that marks up the organisation, the person, and the questions. We then test the release against live assistants rather than assuming it worked.

Partially, and we are explicit about the limits. Referral traffic from assistants is capturable in analytics but understates reality, because most citations produce a read and no click. So the measurable layer is a tracked prompt set run on a fixed schedule across the major assistants, recording whether the client is named, how they are described, and which source the answer points to. That gives a trend line. It is not the same as a rank report and we do not present it as one.

Yes. Search, schema, and AI-citation work can be delivered under your brand, with reporting formatted for you to pass to your client directly. This is the most common shape of engagement for agencies who own the media relationships and do not want to build a technical team to sit behind them.

Both. Platform work is a different scope: it is self-serve conversion, activation, and retention rather than campaign delivery. We have run that scope for a US distribution platform, covering the path from signup to first published release to paid conversion as three separately measured steps.

Both, and they are different engagements. Client-side work is the release layer: schema, entity clarity, and citation measurement on the coverage you place. Agency-side work targets your own pipeline instead — the "which PR agency should we hire" question, and the entity signals that decide whether an answer engine can describe your firm correctly when a buyer asks it for options. Most agencies start client-side because it is billable to the client, then bring their own site in once they can see what the measurement actually shows.

It measures a different surface. Traditional PR SEO reports links and rankings, and both are now weak proxies: Google's own spam policies list optimised anchor text in press releases as link spam, so wire links do not build authority — that is Google's position, not ours. The published generative-engine research (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024, a ten-thousand-query benchmark) found the tactics that actually move AI visibility are adding statistics, citing sources, and adding quotations, and that lower-authority domains gain the most from them. AEO work builds that structure and then measures citation directly, rather than inferring it from rankings.

No. A release optimised in isolation has nothing measuring whether it was cited and nowhere to send the authority it earns, which produces exactly the unattributed pickup that made the category look broken in the first place. We do the format work, but inside a programme that also carries the entity layer and the citation measurement. If the format work is genuinely all you need, our guide to formatting a release for AI citation gives the method away for free.

We do not publish a standard figure, because the starting citation position, the newsroom setup, the release cadence, and the strength of the underlying news all change the outcome. Before work starts we agree what counts as a citation, record the current baseline across a fixed prompt set and analytics, and set reporting milestones from there.