Digital PR

On a Thursday afternoon in January 2021, a Sheffield-based marketing executive named Carrie Rose scrolled through Twitter and stopped at a post from John Mueller, Google's Search Advocate. "I love some of the things I see from digital pr," Mueller had written. "It's a shame it often gets bucketed with the spammy kind of link building. It's just as critical as tech SEO, probably more so in many cases."

Rose, who had co-founded the agency Rise at Seven in 2019 with Stephen Kenwright, took a screenshot. The post validated what she had been telling clients for years. Traditional SEO agencies focused on technical fixes and keyword optimization. Her firm operated differently, pitching stories to journalists the way publicists pitch celebrity profiles. The stories happened to include links back to client websites.

The endorsement from Mueller marked a turning point for an industry that had struggled for legitimacy. Digital PR emerged in the mid-2010s as a hybrid practice, borrowing methods from traditional public relations while serving the metrics-driven goals of search engine optimization. Its practitioners earned media coverage not through advertising budgets but through newsworthy content. A survey conducted by data journalism platform Stacker in 2023 found that 89.6 percent of professionals believed digital PR was the most effective tactic for building backlinks.

The Origins of a Profession

The roots of modern PR reach back to the early twentieth century. Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, coined the term "public relations" in the 1920s and applied psychological principles to shape public opinion. His "Torches of Freedom" campaign encouraged women to smoke cigarettes as a symbol of liberation. Ivy Lee, working for John D. Rockefeller during labor disputes in Colorado's coal mines, pioneered the press release as a communication tool. Basil Clarke established the first British PR agency in 1924 and authored the profession's first ethics code five years later.

In 2006, journalist Tom Foremski published a blog post titled "Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!" arguing that the traditional format had become obsolete. Todd Defren at Shift Communications responded by creating the Social Media Release, which incorporated video, audio, and links. Press releases stopped being documents sent by fax and became searchable web content.

Google's algorithm amplified this shift. The search engine had always used backlinks as a signal of authority. A link from The New York Times to a mattress company's website indicated that real journalists considered that company worth mentioning. SEO professionals recognized the opportunity. If links improved rankings, and journalists created links by citing sources, then getting quoted in the press became a marketing strategy.

The Debate Over Legitimacy

The practice attracted skeptics from the start. Jono Alderson, a developer at Yoast, pushed back against Mueller's praise in the same Twitter thread. "I think that glorifying digital PR, over doing the hard work of being a good solution to the problems of an audience is bad for brands, and the web," Alderson wrote. "I want a search engine to return the best results, not the company which paid an agency the most to launch a fancy microsite."

Bill Slawski, a patent analyst who studied Google's filings, saw the debate differently. "Digital PR and SEO together can work very well," he replied. "I find myself puzzled by people who insist the digital PR is a thing to itself & SEO works by itself, because I know how effective they can be when used together."

Traditional link building involved tactics like guest posting, directory submissions, and link exchanges. Sites would trade links with each other regardless of relevance. Entire networks of low-quality blogs existed solely to sell backlinks. Google responded by penalizing these schemes. The Penguin algorithm update in 2012 devastated websites that had accumulated manipulative links.

Digital PR practitioners insisted their approach differed. Rather than acquiring links through artificial means, they earned coverage by providing journalists with genuinely useful information. A mattress company might commission a survey about sleep habits across different cities. A personal finance site might analyze government data on cost-of-living changes. Reporters covering those beats could cite the research, and the citations included links.

"The work I've seen come out from Rise at Seven since they began has been next level and industry leading," Hobson wrote on LinkedIn when announcing the move.

The Google Leak

In May 2024, a leak of internal Google documentation added new dimensions to the debate. An automated system inadvertently pushed 2,596 modules and over 14,000 attributes describing Google's ranking systems to a public GitHub repository. Erfan Azimi, a former Google employee, shared the documents with Rand Fishkin of SparkToro and Mike King of iPullRank. The SEO community spent months parsing the technical details.

"API docs don't equal ranking factors," Mueller cautioned on X. "Many fields are for debugging, not scoring." Google's official statement warned against drawing conclusions from "out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information."

The leak shifted industry assumptions. A 2024 study by Ahrefs analyzed one billion pages and found that 91 percent of content received no organic traffic from Google, primarily due to a lack of quality backlinks. Pages ranking in the top three search results had an average of 35 percent more backlinks than those ranked fourth through tenth. For marketers who had questioned whether links still mattered, the data provided an answer.

Market Expansion

The digital PR market expanded. Industry analysts estimated the global market for digital PR services at $7.98 billion in 2025, with agency services alone valued at $2.98 billion. Online searches for the term "digital PR" grew by 120 percent between 2024 and 2025 according to Google Trends data. Data-led campaigns accounted for 42.3 percent of activity, according to a 2024 analysis.

Nearly three-quarters of practitioners reported that getting results had become more challenging compared to the previous year. More than half cited journalist outreach as their biggest obstacle. Media layoffs compounded the difficulty. In January 2025 alone, U.S. employers announced 49,795 job cuts, with newsrooms particularly affected. Fewer journalists meant more competition for their attention.

Measuring Impact

Traditional PR tracked impressions and sentiment. Digital PR added backlinks, domain authority scores, and organic traffic. The most challenging part of the work, according to a 2025 BuzzStream survey, was measuring impact. Thirty-one percent of respondents cited it as their top difficulty, followed closely by ideation at 30 percent.

Some in the industry argue for expanding the definition beyond links entirely. "Digital PR for SEO isn't link building," wrote Garrett Sussman of iPullRank in Search Engine Land. "Link building doesn't represent the complexity of how AI impacts the ranking algorithm." He advocated treating digital PR as reputation management, building authority through consistent mentions rather than accumulating links.

Google's March 2024 Helpful Content Update penalized sites producing content primarily for search engine manipulation. Websites that had scaled by publishing thousands of low-quality pages saw traffic collapse overnight. The sites that survived tended to be those digital PR had already targeted: established news organizations with editorial standards.

Industry Perspectives

The industry splits over methodology. One camp views digital PR as evolved link building, measuring success by the number and quality of backlinks acquired. Another camp positions it closer to traditional public relations, emphasizing brand awareness and reputation regardless of specific SEO metrics. A third camp argues the distinction matters less than execution.

"What was missing in this industry is a search led creative agency which not only delivered measurable results but made clients and brands feel awesome about it too," Rose said when Rise at Seven announced its expansion plans in 2020. The agency moved into a 3,000-square-foot office in Sheffield's St Paul's Place and secured a larger London base.

Rose had studied Digital Media at the University of Leeds and graduated in 2014. She spent seven years at agencies including Stickyeyes and Branded3 before launching her own firm. In 2019, she applied for the BBC's The Apprentice but was rejected after reaching the final 30 candidates. The failed audition freed her to pursue the business plan she had prepared for the show.

Bernays applied psychological techniques to selling cigarettes; critics accused him of manipulation. When Ivy Lee issued press releases during labor disputes, journalists questioned his motives. The tension between serving clients and serving the public never fully resolves.

Practical Realities

For marketers navigating the current landscape, the practical challenges remain concrete. Budgets average under $10,000 per month for 66.5 percent of teams, according to a 2025 survey. CEOs directly control PR budgets in 38 percent of organizations, making them key decision-makers for any proposed campaign. More than half of practitioners cannot reliably report their average cost per link.

AI adds uncertainty. Claude and competing language models can generate press releases, draft pitches, and analyze data. A 2025 survey by Siege Media found that AI usage among content marketers rose from 83.2 percent in 2024 to 90 percent. Most used the tools for ideation and strategy rather than final writing.

Hobson, who became VP of PR at Rise at Seven's U.S. operation, framed the opportunity in terms of speed. "The importance of being first really elevates your marketing efforts," he said in 2023. "Speed is a competitive advantage, and in today's world where TikTok, Netflix and Elon Musk can have an immediate impact on consumer buying behaviour, brands need access to both data and resources in order to move fast to current trends."

Looking Forward

Mueller's 2021 tweet remains pinned in the memories of practitioners who remember fighting for credibility. The same week he praised digital PR, he added nuance that often gets overlooked. "There is a simplification of 'link building = against Google's guidelines,' which seems like it needs a lot more nuance," he wrote. "On the other hand, 'Doing SEO = against Google's guidelines' seems less common."

Digital PR no longer needs to prove it belongs alongside technical SEO work. The question now is what happens when tactics that worked in 2021 stop working in 2026. Algorithm updates, AI tools, and shrinking newsrooms continue to reshape the landscape. Practitioners who built careers on data-driven storytelling must now contend with a world where the data itself is changing.