Digital PR Strategies for Local Businesses: The Double Bubble of SEO Authority and AI Visibility

**James Dooley** (0:00)
Digital PR is now giving a double bubble. It's helping increase rankings in Google Search, but also massively increasing AI visibility within the LLMs. Today, I'm joined with Chris Panteli, who does a lot of digital PR for a lot of different companies worldwide. So Chris, obviously you've got quite a lot of data on this.
With regards to, you used to sell, obviously, digital PR and a lot of people was obsessed with the backlinks. But now it seems to be a lot of people are not really too bothered as much about the do follow, high authoritative, high DR backlinks and more about even just the way things are being framed with them branded mentions. So for anyone who doesn't know who you are and they've been hiding under a rock, can you explain why digital PR is now the double bubble, not just for SEO, but also for greater AI visibility?

**Chris Panteli** (0:58)
Yeah, sure. So thanks for having me.
For our clients, the deliverable is still the link. But we are seeing a transition now where actually the branded mention in of itself holds huge amounts of weight. So traditionally, earned media links are the best links that you can get to build authority in terms of SEO. You are getting that algorithmic SEO value of the page rank being passed to your website, to the root domain from the link, from the backlink. But when it comes to Digital PR and Digital PR link building, 99.9% of the time, the way that that link will be structured is by way of attribution for the quotes that you've given. That will be your name from your company, and then that company will hopefully be linked to. But that is the perfect anatomy of a branded mention. We've discussed this before.
Name, frame, and explain. Was it? Is that right?

**James Dooley** (2:04)
Name, frame, and proof.

**Chris Panteli** (2:07)
You're getting that from a branded mention. If I'm getting cited in Forbes as Chris Panteli from, who owns a digital PR agency called Linkify, that is who I am, what I do on a website that is hugely authoritative. So the actual practice of engaging in digital PR means that you can win these SEO algorithmic links and also have branded mentions on huge websites, which does huge amounts for your AI visibility.

**James Dooley** (2:35)
Yeah, for sure. Why do you think it is that digital PR earned media links are being cited more than majority of other sources? You've obviously have got one or two others like YouTube is doing all right, and Reddit is doing all right, some social media and stuff like that. But generally speaking, it's the highly authoritative, trusted, high-end magazines, the high-end newspapers, the places where really you can only get earned media from a digital PR campaign. Why is it you think that the LLMs are citing those more than any other website?

**Chris Panteli** (3:08)
Trust. Google spent 25 years developing an algorithm that meant that they were able to surface 10 websites on page one that they felt comfortable having on their front page. If somebody was going to search for best treatments for cancer, they didn't want weird stuff on page one. They wanted stuff that they could trust, and they did that through an ingenious mechanism called backlinks. So I start a website tomorrow about weird cures for cancer.
Who am I, what's my website, how can they trust me? Whereas if I have a website that I started 10 years ago, and I've got links from the BBC, Forbes, New York Times, then that website can be inherently trusted because of the trust that's being passed from all these other websites. So I think LLMs are in a position where they need to have results and surface recommendations inside of the answers that they can trust. The easiest way to do that is by sourcing from already pre-existing trusted websites.

**James Dooley** (4:19)
Yeah, for sure. With regards to that, so the episode here is called Double Bubble, with regards to increasing search visibility within Google or within Bing, but also increasing LLM visibility. Have you started to find is a transition between the customers? You do a lot of Digital PR campaigns for a lot of different customers. Are they starting to know wanting to track the AI search visibility part, as well as seeing the backlink, or is it still just obsessed with the backlink?

**Chris Panteli** (4:51)
It really depends on the client, but AI visibility is increasingly becoming an equally important part for customers. I think the reason that the Digital PR is so attractive, especially the Digital PR that we do at Linkify, which is truly earned media.