9 Experts Explain How Digital PR Can Improve Your SEO and GEO in 2026

If you’ve been trying to keep up with search engine optimization (SEO) in the past year you probably know that “best practices” are evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to keep track. The biggest shift right now is about generative engine optimization (GEO) — how searchers interact with information through AI Overviews and chats.

While there isn’t one single thing you can do to magically make your SEO and GEO perfect for 2026, there is one key element of success that you might be overlooking: digital PR.

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR is a public relations strategy that prioritizes online media instead of traditional print or terrestrial media coverage — think podcast appearances, not FM radio ads.

“In the AI search landscape, digital PR is your brand’s credibility engine,” said Rewati Khare, group head of SEO at Pepper Content. “If you want AI engines to pick you, cite you, and trust you, you must invest in stories that matter and signals that last. Authority is now the moat — and digital PR builds it.”

How is Digital PR Different From Traditional PR?

A digital PR campaign still involves media outreach, just like traditional PR, but may be much more personalized than sending a batch press release out to traditional media outlets. Instead, your digital PR campaign may involve various elements of traditional PR, SEO, and social media marketing. These can include things like:

• Press releases tailored to specific bloggers at non-traditional digital media publications
• Customized swag boxes to community managers and influencers
• Podcast pitches that are adjusted to suit the audience of each show you’re targeting

The result of this upfront effort to curate connections with bloggers, influencers, and podcasts pays off, though, especially when it comes to improving brand awareness ... and how your website is cited in generative AI search results.

“Digital PR helps brands strengthen their entity authority, which is becoming real currency in an AI-powered world,” said Khare.

Ultimately, you want your digital PR efforts to result in earned media that feels organic and excited about your brand. Running digital ads or paying for sponsored blog posts in tandem can help with your overall marketing efforts, but organic coverage is a key part of the digital PR — and GEO — process.

How Does Digital PR Influence Traditional and AI SEO?

A good digital PR strategy contains some of the elements you’re likely already doing for your SEO work. By focusing on getting earned media through carefully planned digital PR strategies, you can further boost the results you’re seeing in both traditional and AI search engines.

Provides Value

The first way that digital PR supports SEO and GEO is by reinforcing your brand visibility online. Being a good resource is still paramount in 2026 for GEO and SEO, but you don’t have to wait for people (or Google's algorithms) to find and reference you.

Instead, you can combine elements of PR and link building strategies to connect with different online outlets, be a guest on podcasts, and entice LLMs to reference you in their results.

Want to learn more about how LLM mentions work? Check out our complete guide to achieving AI visibility.

Boosts Expertise and Brand Authority

If your brand is mentioned in guides, blog posts, studies, and interviews published by trusted sources, then your trust value goes up as well.

“AI search surfaces trusted brands, not just optimized pages,” said Zoe Blogg, managing director of Reboot Online. “Digital PR is the fastest and best way to build the authority and citations that AI models rely on.”

But it's not enough to get your press release pushed out on a wire — and value can come in various multimedia formats.

“One of the big pillars of our overall marketing plan is pitching and appearing on podcasts,“ said Maggie Patterson, consultant and founder of BS-Free Business. “This year, I’ve recorded over 20 guest interviews. It’s not only a good visibility activity, but it also actively boosts our search and AI equity. As we’re generally discussing the same themes, it builds topical authority and allows us to reach a much wider audience.

Ultimately, an effective digital PR approach boosts your E-E-A-T, which is still relevant in the GEO world.

Generates Backlinks

Earned and organic references to you and your brand are likely to include backlinks, too. If the content created about your brand is high-quality, and published on reputable sites, it’ll have a net positive effect on your GEO as well as your SEO efforts.

As always, links from low-quality sites, or in low-quality content, won’t have a positive effect on your brand reputation or reach. But determining domain quality in an AI-driven world of search requires nuance and human judgment.

“Going purely by domain authority and traffic and using this as your basis on who to reach out to isn’t enough. Search engines are much pickier now about backlink profiles, and LLMs treat links as a piece, rather than the whole pie,” said Laura James, organic growth lead at Supernormal. ”Generic link exchanges are close to worthless, or will be.”

One plus, though, is that you no longer have to stress about whether you've received a dofollow link or not.

“AI models don‘t care if a link is no follow; they care whether the mention is textually consistent, repeated across sources, and semantically relevant to the topics most associated with your brand,” said Jenny Halasz, principal advisor at New Media Advisors.

Increases Citations

In fact, you can see GEO benefit from digital PR efforts that result in another site or podcast simply mentioning your brand. A backlink isn’t a requirement for today's online media coverage, though it's nice to have.

“AI isn’t reading links,” said Khare. “It’s reading signals. When LLMs decide which brands to surface, they lean heavily on trust, verifiable expertise, consistency of mentions, and reputational cues across the web.”

This is true across AI search tools. Whether your target audience prefers AI Mode, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, linked and unlinked brand mentions can help you appear in more AI responses. Multimedia assets, including images and videos, can help, too.

“Mentions, sentiment, context, and image links have been found to influence if and how often LLMs cite you,” said James.

Feeds Data to Crawlers

Digital PR supports your traditional SEO performance, too, as it results in more content about your brand being picked up by crawlers. Ultimately, you can appear in both the AI Mode or AI Overview and traditional search results. This gives you maximum exposure to your audience, no matter how they prefer to search.

What Do You Need For Effective Digital PR?

If you want to see benefits from your digital PR efforts, then you need to have the right tools and strategy in place before you start. If not, you can wind up hurting your GEO performance rather than helping it.

“Digital PR matters; it creates the high-entropy signals that AI ranking models use to disambiguate credible entities from statistical noise,“ said Sai Deshmukh, associate director at Junglee Games. “But if your brand is mentioned in stories filled with irrelevant topics, it distorts your authority signals. Bad context is worse than no PR because it pollutes the embeddings that represent your brand.”

At minimum, you’ll the following to succeed when doing digital PR:

• A solid strategy
• Reliable tools
• Strong creator and media relationships
• High-quality content

Strategy

When planning your approach to digital PR, you’ll want to develop a strategy that covers:

• Content creation: what kind of assets you’ll create, pitch, or target
• Media distribution: How you’ll send your pitches, press releases, and valuable insights to others
• Relationship management: who on your team will be responsible for creating connections and managing inquiries

This means you’ll need to work cross-functionally with different partners, as successful digital PR can’t exist in a silo.

“It’s more critical than ever for in-house SEO teams to coordinate digital PR, SEO, and GEO initiatives with key stakeholders like corporate communications teams and external agencies,” said Halasz. “Every quote, interview, or article should be structured to increase its chances of being pulled into a generative answer. This means clear entities, expert attribution, and concise formatting.”

You’ll also need to keep a close eye on trending topics so that you can plan ways to jump into the hype and establish your brand as a trusted voice.

“I spend time looking at where and which conversations are happening, how our brand is being talked about, and whether the context matches the topics we want to be known for,” said James. “I dip into Reddit to see what’s trending, what people are annoyed about, and where conversations are heating up around topics important to my product … I pull ideas straight from what people are actually talking about.”

Tools

A good trend tracking tool can help you stay ahead of key conversations on social and in traditional media — but you’ll also want to build out your tech stack with:

• PR distribution tools like Collaborator
• Media monitoring solutions like Prowly
• SEO tools like Semrush
• Media contact discovery tools like Muck Rack

“Muck Rack and Semrush have been a lethal combo for me,” said Deshmukh. “I’ve tells me who is talking, the other tells me what the intent is. Campaigns built on those two signals consistently drive two to three times higher link acquisition for me.”

Relationships

Traditional and digital PR can involve a fair amount of cold outreach. But as you begin to connect with different people and companies, it’s important to focus on building strong relationships.

“Journalists get hundreds of pitches a day and they want to see names that they recognize,” said Lydia Fox, offpage SEO consultant at Serpify.

Content

When you do send cold outreach, including ebooks or pitches about your brand, make sure that it’s closely tailored to the recipient and their blog, podcast, or media outlet.

“As a podcast host myself, I get too many poorly executed pitches with zero customization for my shows,” said Patterson. “Anyone who’s willing to do the research and send a thoughtful, on-point pitch has an amazing opportunity to reach a new audience and reap the follow-on benefits from search.”

Can You Use AI in the Digital PR Process?

AI can be useful when planning your digital PR strategy, especially when you want to understand how LLMs are currently talking about your brand or your competitors.

“Google AI Overviews and AI Mode expose the key ranking competitors for any topic,” said Halasz. “And checking answers on ChatGPT and Claude is important to test prompts to check if and where a brand is mentioned or cited.”

But AI tools can hallucinate and deliver different search results based on the language you use in your prompts. Using a purpose-built AI — like the tools inside of the Semrush AI PR toolkit — is a good idea, as it reduces your room for error. You don’t have to figure out how to prompt a general-purpose tool like ChatGPT for specific information; the AI is already trained to surface the PR insights you need.

Plus, a Semrush subscription gives you access to a reliable SEO tool that shows you exactly which search engine results pages (SERPs) have AI Overviews. You can see which brands are currently linked in the AI Overview result, too.

4 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting Digital PR Campaigns

The digital PR experts we spoke to called out four key things that most people get wrong when first starting this type of marketing.

1. Working in a silo

“You can’t do digital PR in a silo,” said Emma Russell, founder of Oxford Comma Digital. “It’s something that can help in so many different ways for so many different endeavors.”

2. Only Focusing on Links

”Treating digital PR like link building with a press release wrapper is a mindset that kills creativity,” said Khare.

That said, experts agree that links are still valuable, if you can get them.

"PR is a relationship game, and only relationships allow you to follow up," said Adrienne Kmetz, founder of AKConsulting. "Earned media plus a link is a powerful combination; follow up to get a link on the heels of a mention."

3. Not Validating Your Ideas

”A lot of teams jump straight into making a big report, ebook, or asset without checking to see if the story is actually interesting — whether it’s actually something journalists want to include in their content or whether readers care,” said James. “I always try to start with the angle first. If the narrative isn’t clear or compelling, no amount of design or data is going to save it.”

4. Assuming Digital PR is One-Size-Fits-All

“What works in the U.K. rarely works in Germany, France, or the U.S. Each market has its own media culture, sensitivities, data expectations, and storytelling styles,” said Blogg. “We see teams copy-pasting U.K. campaigns internationally and it falls flat. You have to localize properly, not just translate.”

Make Digital PR Easy With Semrush One

While a good strategy is the foundation of every successful digital PR campaign, having a comprehensive tool with reliable data will help you realize — and track — better results.

You don’t have to piece together your own ad hoc tech stack, either. Semrush One is a complete SEO, GEO, and digital PR tool that will help you find the right contacts, develop better content, and track the success of your PR efforts.