Be The Brand AI Recommends & Digital PR | James Dooley ft Ben Nicholls, Peter Jones & Paul Truscott

James Dooley (0:00)

Why Be The Brand, airecommends.com uses Digital PR? Today, I'm joined by the co-founders, Paul David Truscott and Peter Victor Jones. And we're joined today with Ben Nicholls, the founder of JamPrime and JamPress, who's been doing some amazing Digital PR campaigns, which has been getting a lot of our clients, some amazing AI visibility and traction within ChatGPT, Claw, Perplexity, GROK, Google AI mode, Google AI Overviews. It's been getting seen everywhere. So first and foremost, I want to say thank you, Ben, for getting the exposure on the Digital PR campaigns. So I'm going to start to you.

With regards to AI visibility, obviously, we're all doing more than we ever have been doing. I've been using you for many years. I've known you for a long time and you've always done good profile PR and good Digital PR for a lot of my different companies that I own. But we've raised the bar this year when it comes to AI visibility, because these trusted sources of what you're getting us is defining the entity. It's helping us get a Google Knowledge Panel, which is then helping us be the brand AI Recommends, which is why we chose that name of the company that's been co-founded with Paul and Peter. But my question to you is, do you feel the entrepreneurs and business owners have caught up yet just with how much digital PR is influencing the LLM models? Because I personally feel that people aren't using digital PR. If I think the jumps on the bandwagon of third-party, collaborative sources of guest posts and press releases.

But I still feel they're falling behind and they're not using digital PR as much as they should be for increased AI visibility. But I might be wrong, so I'd like to hear from yourself what your thoughts are on it.

Ben Nicholls (1:55)

I mean, I think it's something that people are learning more and more. But these technologies, they're still quite young, and a lot of people don't know how to get recommended in them yet.

What we've found and what you guys have found over the last period of time is that these articles are really paramount to helping you get referenced in those LLM. So, yeah, it's been interesting watching the knowledge surface and working with you guys over time to see how impactful it can be. I think a lot of people initially thought that getting surfaced in LLMs was going to be similar to doing good SEO work and stuff like that, which it is, but there's obviously a lot more to it. Those LLMs are taking a lot more information from a lot more places. But what we've learned and what we've learned together is that it's grounded in those trusted sources. So I don't think the knowledge is widespread yet. I think people are still learning a lot, but that's our goal is to educate people on that fact.

James Dooley (3:02)

So expanding upon that with regards to being grounded in its data for the large language models. Paul, can you expand a little bit about that, about how these trusted sources are the seed set of sites and why that is important as part of the training data for large language models?

Paul Truscott (3:20)

The large language models, much like Google, don't want to embarrass themselves by presenting information that is either incorrect or is perhaps of lower quality.

So if they use a trusted source, there's a lot, it doesn't mean it's infallible, but it's much less likely to be problematic. And so they have a list of trusted sources that they're going to prefer to cite. We touched on as well earlier in another video about the corroborative sources. The one thing about PR is that it is truly a third party source. A lot of people use press releases, for example, and call them third party, but they're not in the strictest sense because you determine to a great degree what goes on that press release. And all of the LLMs understand that. So, those press releases can have quite a good effect in certain less competitive fields, but if you're in a really competitive market, you're not going to find a press release is going to do an awful lot for you. This is where you're going to need the heavy hitters like Ben to come in and actually present a proper PR campaign that is going to give you that genuine third party corroboration.

James Dooley (4:38)

Peter, I want to touch on Be The Brand AI Recommends, right? So obviously, we're doing it. It's an AEO service. It helps businesses to increase AI visibility. However, it's not just about increasing AI visibility. It's about changing it potentially from a negative sentiment to a positive sentiment, changing it from just being cited to actually being recommended by the large language models.