Hawkscan

What is digital PR?

Digital PR is a marketing practice that earns a brand coverage on third-party websites, such as news sites, trade media, blogs and podcasts, through stories, original data and expert commentary. Long used to win backlinks for SEO, it now also shapes the sources that ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants cite in their answers.

Why digital PR matters for AI answers

AI assistants build their answers on what others publish. Muck Rack's May 2026 study of more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini across 17 industries found that earned media made up 84% of citations. Journalism alone accounted for 27%, while paid and advertorial content made up just 0.3%. The earned share has stayed between 82% and 89% since July 2025.

Muck Rack sells a platform to PR teams, so it has a stake in the result, but independent research points the same way: an academic study by Chen et al. found a "systematic and overwhelming bias towards Earned media" in AI search.

How digital PR works

A digital PR campaign usually runs in four steps:

  1. Find a story worth covering: original data, a survey, a useful tool, or an expert view on a current event.
  2. Pitch it to the journalists and editors who cover that beat.
  3. Earn the coverage: articles that name the brand, often with a link.
  4. Get retrieved. When that coverage ranks for a prompt or one of its sub-queries, AI engines can cite it and name the brand.

The line with link spam is payment and intent. Google lists "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites" as link spam, as well as advertorials that pass ranking credit. Paid placements are fine with a rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" link, but they are paid media, not PR.

Example: a trend question

The type of prompt changes what gets cited. Muck Rack found that industry trend questions draw journalism citations at more than double the rate of how-to questions, and that press releases appear 3.5 times more often in trend answers than in "best of" answers.

Take a prompt like "What are the biggest trends in e-bike sales this year?" An answer to it leans on news coverage, so a brand whose sales data was reported by trade media has a way in. For "best e-bike for commuting", the coverage that counts is reviews and comparisons instead.

How to measure digital PR in AI search

Coverage counts and backlinks still measure the SEO side. For AI search, check which outlets the engines actually cite for your prompts. Hawkscan lists the pages and the 8 most-cited domains in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Google AI Mode, and shows whether each cited page mentions your brand. Pitch the outlets on that list first, starting with your citation gap: the cited pages that name competitors but not you.

Then track the result over weeks, not days: coverage turns into earned media and brand mentions that engines read whether or not they carry a link.

Sources

  1. Muck Rack, Earned media still drives 84% of AI citations. Here's what that means for PR. ()
  2. Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search ()
  3. arXiv (Chen et al.), Generative Engine Optimization: How to Dominate AI Search ()

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