AI in Digital Marketing – Shifting Landscapes
Artificial intelligence keeps reshaping the way marketers build visibility, strengthen brand authority, and connect with audiences.
Success for brands used to mean SEO, collecting backlinks and pushing rankings.
Today, the game has changed. With the introduction of AI-Overviews and LLMs like ChatGPT shaping how users discover brands, an old and trusty friend is making a strong comeback.
Once seen as a supporting discipline, Digital PR is now at the core of AI-driven marketing.
As Peak Ace’s Expert Consultant Digital Strategy, Sarah Weingarten, put it:
“We’re seeing more and more clients and marketers ask for support in staying visible within LLMs. One effective lever for this is Digital PR. It builds trust, creates attention beyond the website, and earns high‑quality mentions and backlinks. What used to be simple link building has evolved into its own discipline, focused on exceptional content, brand awareness, thought leadership, and strategic visibility across strong domains. This strengthened organic visibility both off-page and on-page. Now we are taking it a step further: as LLMs read and evaluate content, Digital PR, combined with the right technical measures and a clear content structure, has become a key driver of visibility within LLMs.”
The AI-Driven Renaissance of Digital PR
With search and discovery increasingly powered by language models, it’s no longer enough to optimise your brand’s website. Brands now need to be present wherever LLMs look: trusted publications, mentioned in authoritative sources, and cited across the web.
This dynamic is giving rise to what some call “LLMO” (Large Language Model Optimisation), an evolution of SEO that focuses on ensuring your brand is visible, relevant, and credible within the training and reference data of AI systems.
“Digital PR is making a huge comeback. In the age of AI-powered search, credibility is earned through placements (mentions + backlinks) in established media (that either cannot be bought or just for a very high price). As consumers increasingly turn to AI for purchasing guidance, leading brands are gaining visibility by securing mentions in sources trusted by AI and positioning themselves as topical experts. Brand mentions are the new currency and digital PR is your ATM/gateway.”
Gordon Herenz – Expert Lead Content Marketing & Strategy at Peak Ace
What does this mean for you?
Leaning into digital PR is all about showing you’re a trusted source on your subject matter.
Mentions, quotes, and citations now carry as much weight in the LLM world as backlinks once did. As a result, digital PR, branding, and SEO have converged into a new strategic blend – often called GEO – that prioritises visibility beyond SERPs.
The three core principles of your digital PR strategy remain the same:
- Strong storytelling
- Consistent brand voice
- Trustworthy content
However, the changing search landscape means making some tweaks and changes to your traditional digital PR strategy to get it AI-ready.
Here are our top strategies for getting your PR materials mentioned in AI:
- Engineer “mention‑rich” coverage:
- Prioritise stories where your brand appears in headlines, subheads, captions, and body copy, not just in boilerplate
- Push for brand mentions and topical keywords in anchor text and surrounding copy
- Diversify your content formats. Guest posts, expert roundups, interviews, podcasts (with transcripts) and YouTube features (YouTube mentions are currently outperforming web mentions as AI visibility predictors)
- Integrate reviews and UGC with PR
- Combine PR pushes with review campaigns on platforms that AI regularly reads (industry review sites, G2/Capterra‑style platforms, Google reviews)
- Use earned media wins as social proof in email and CRM to trigger more reviews, then reuse review insights as hooks for further PR angles, creating a “visibility loop”
- Make coverage machine‑readable
- Ensure your own site has strong entity markup (Organisation, Product, Person, FAQ, How-To) and that your PR landing pages mirror the facts that appear in press coverage
- Where possible, encourage publishers to use structured data (Article, Review, Event, Product) and consistent naming for your brand and key people
- Maintain a canonical “About” and “Facts” section on your site that media can reference, reducing factual drift across articles AI will later reconcile
- Optimise for the prompts AI actually sees
- Map the questions your audience asks (“best B2B SEO agency in Germany”, “digital PR agency for SaaS”) and build PR angles that answer those questions explicitly
- Secure inclusion in “best of”, “top X tools”, and comparison pieces, which LLMs frequently cite in list‑style answers
- Target YouTube creators and podcasts covering those same queries
What KPIs are important for me?
Measuring your digital PR success looks a bit different in the era of AI-driven marketing.
You’ll still want to keep track of your usual digital PR KPIs, such as total branded web mentions, branded anchors and brand search volume. But AI in digital marketing adds a whole new layer to measuring your internet PR performance.
Here’s what to look for:
- Presence in AI Overviews: Number of queries where your brand appears in Google AI Overviews for your priority topics, and total AI Overview mentions over time. With Peak Ace’s free LLM Traffic Dashboard, you can measure how much of your traffic is driven by AI.
- Presence in other AI assistants: Count and share of prompts where you’re named in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot answers for your core topics.
- Brand share of voice in AI: Percentage of AI answers in your niche that mention your brand versus competitors (e.g., “3 of the top 10 AI answers about ‘digital PR agency Europe’ include us”).
- Position and role in answers: Are you the primary recommendation, one of several options, or just a background mention? Track proportion of answers where you’re presented as a lead vs. secondary brand.
- Sentiment of AI mentions: Tone (positive/neutral/negative) of how AI systems describe you and whether they highlight your strengths or flag risks.
In a nutshell: AI Visibility Starts with Digital PR
AI in digital marketing has fundamentally changed how brands earn visibility. As artificial intelligence in digital marketing reshapes search, discovery and recommendations, it’s no longer enough to optimise pages for SERP rankings.
Brands that want to win in an AI-first world must be visible where AI looks for answers: trusted media, authoritative mentions, expert quotes, reviews, and consistent brand signals across the web.
In a landscape dominated by ai in digital marketing, digital PR has become a strategic must-have. It’s responsible for fuelling credibility, building authority, and feeding the signals AI relies on to recommend brands with confidence.
When storytelling, consistency, and trust come together, digital PR becomes the bridge between classic SEO, modern AI visibility, and long-term brand growth.
In short: content is still king, but credibility is the crown. Brands that invest in digital PR as part of their AI in digital marketing strategy not only rank, but get recognised, recommended, and remembered by both humans and machines.
Ready to Learn More?
Our practical guide to LLM optimisation breaks down how to optimise your content for AI-driven search.
Take digital PR into your own hands by learning:
- How to structure content so LLMs recognise it as a reliable source
- The key differences between SEO and LLM optimisation
- Technical best practices, including structured data and API integration
- Practical tools and methods to enhance visibility in AI-powered systems
- A step-by-step roadmap for future-proofing your content strategy
