Digital PR glossary

Digital PR

Digital PR is the practice of earning coverage, brand mentions and links from online publications by giving journalists stories, data and expert comment they want to publish. It combines media relations with search goals, so success is measured in relevant links and visibility as well as audience reach.

Reviewed by Gareth Hoyle, Managing Director
Last reviewed 31 October 2026

How is digital PR different from traditional PR?

Traditional PR aims for coverage and reputation, often in print and broadcast, and is judged on reach and sentiment. Digital PR targets online outlets and also records what each piece does for search: whether it links to the site, which page it links to and whether the publication is relevant to the brand's audience.

Campaigns are usually built around something a journalist can't get elsewhere: a survey, an analysis of public data, a tool, or an expert who is available on the day a story breaks.

What does Google say about digital PR?

On 23 January 2021 Google's John Mueller wrote that he loved some of the things he saw from digital PR, that it was a shame it often got bucketed with the spammy kind of link building, and that it was just as critical as tech SEO, probably more so in many cases.

The line Google draws is about how links are obtained. Its spam policies list advertorials where payment is received for links that pass ranking credit, and links with optimised anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites, as link spam. Coverage a journalist chooses to write, linking where it helps the reader, is neither.

Why it matters for AI search

AI assistants draw on the same publications that journalists write for. In a May 2025 Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions had the strongest correlation with brand visibility in Google AI Overviews (0.664), well ahead of the number of backlinks (0.218). Correlation is not causation, but it means coverage that names a brand has value even when it doesn't link.

Example

A bicycle insurer ranks UK cities by recorded bike theft using street-level crime data from police.uk. National outlets cover the overall ranking, regional papers cover their own city's position, and each article names the insurer and can link to a methodology page, so one dataset produces many relevant pieces of coverage.