Earlier this year, the Impression PR team attended the Digital PR Summit and had the opportunity to learn from some of the industry’s brightest minds, including Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs. His talk illustrated exactly why Digital PR and SEO are no longer just complementary disciplines. In the age of AI, they are entirely interdependent.
How is AI changing SEO?
To address the question, Ryan quoted his colleague, Patrick Stox, who sums it up perfectly: “This is the era of off-page SEO.”
For the uninitiated, off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your website to influence your rankings. Historically, this has meant broken link building, Google Business Profile optimisation, guest blogging, and the “holy grail”: backlinks.
Backlinks are the “bread and butter” of all Digital PRs and the KPI of any successful campaign. PRists spend much more time than they’d want to admit chasing journalists with emails that say: “Loved the article, thank you for the coverage! But please, can you include a link to our client’s site?”
Classically, “coverage” hasn’t equalled “happy results” until it includes that backlink. Well, at least that was the status quo, until now.
Beyond backlinks: The shift towards a balanced search strategy
Ryan and the Ahrefs team conducted a study five years ago into how linking factors (follow links, Domain Ratings, etc.) correlate with SERP rankings. When they ran the study again more recently, they found that correlation had dropped across the board.
So, if backlink building is becoming less of a “silver bullet” for rankings, does Digital PR lose its value? On the contrary, Digital PR’s value has shifted toward a more balanced approach between links and brand mentions.
Brand mentions: The #1 ranking factor for LLMs?
To clarify, a brand mention is any online reference to a brand, product, or service, be it in a social post, Reddit review, YouTube video, or news article.
Recent research suggests that branded mentions are becoming the most critical factor in determining visibility within AI Overviews. But why? Ryan explained that Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on vast amounts of training data. The more your brand is mentioned across the web, the better ‘educated’ the LLM becomes on your brand; it begins to understand exactly who you are and what you do.
Now, if you take out your earphones and listen closely enough, you can probably hear the collective sigh of relief from Digital PR professionals everywhere. As links are increasingly hard to secure, the value of the humble brand mention is finally being quantified.
3 Tips for improving AI visibility for Digital PRs
For Digital PRs looking to optimise for AI, Ryan shared three key insights:
Freshness trumps authority
AI seems to prioritise content from the last year over older sources, even if those older sources have higher domain authority. Even if you landed a powerhouse piece in The Guardian in 2025 on a key topic for your client, you need to refresh and re-push that narrative in 2026 to stay visible in AI Overviews.
Focus on listicles
LLMs love listicles. Being cited in a “Top 10” list has a disproportionate effect on visibility, regardless of the site’s DR. The goal is to get your client cited as close to the top of the list as possible. To do this, pivot your outreach toward journalists who specialise in roundups and maintain those relationships.
LLMs love YouTube
AI models use YouTube transcripts as primary training data and frequently cite video content in their answers. For marketers, it’s time to widen media lists to include YouTubers and video-first journalists. Interestingly, LLMs don’t seem to be swayed by raw views or subscriber counts. Instead, topical relevance and the sentiment of the brand mention are key.
Why can’t we ignore SERP rankings?
While the “off-page” era is exciting, a later SEO panel titled ‘Influencing brand visibility in search beyond Google’ provided a vital reminder: Don’t ignore traditional SEO at the expense of AI rankings.
Ashley Liddell used Shark’s LED Light Therapy Mask campaign as a prime example. Through a strategic mix of influencer partnerships, Digital PR, and social search, Shark dominated the conversation, driving non-branded organic searches for “LED face masks” to 74,000 a month in the UK alone.
However, as James Brockbank pointed out, powerful off-page work is redundant if your on-page SEO isn’t there to catch the demand. If a consumer sees a Shark mask on TikTok or in an AI overview, but then searches for “LED face mask” on Google and Shark doesn’t rank on Page 1, a competitor will get the sale.
“Yes, generate that demand across the funnel, but then you have to be visible to capture it. If you don’t, you just generate demand for someone else.”
James Brockbank
The bottom line
Digital PRs and social teams hold the key when it comes to generating demand and visibility in AI, but they have to work in tandem with SEO teams to capture that heat. Organic marketing is, more than ever, a necessarily integrated and interdependent discipline.
At Impression, our Digital PR and Social teams work increasingly closely with our SEO experts to bridge this gap for our clients. By aligning demand-gen with search visibility, we ensure that the brand authority we build doesn’t just start conversations; it converts them.
