Digital PR for Better AI Visibility | James Dooley ft Ben Nicholls, Peter Jones & Paul Truscott

James Dooley: How digital PR can help increase AI visibility? Today I'm joined with Paul David Truscott, Ben Nicholls, and Peter Victor Jones. So Paul, I'll start with you. How does digital PR increase AI visibility in certain large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, or Google AI Mode?

Paul David Truscott: Okay, well all of those models, okay, have preferred sources when it comes to grounding data. So the grounding data is essentially all of the information that it's going to collect that it's then going to use to construct both its citations and its answers. Okay, so if you're not in the grounding data, end... End of story. You don't go anywhere, right? So that's the ticket to the game. And the kind of publications that Ben can get you into are the best ticket to the best game. That's the best way to put it. And then after that, it's... It's about how well you've done your job online. Because what Ben does will help increase brand search. It will help increase your visibility within those AI search engines. And then the rest is up to what you've done online. And if you've done a good job, it'll all kick in and you'll get... You'll start getting a lot more mentions and a lot more citations and recommendations.

James Dooley: Yeah, over to you, Ben. So obviously you've got a very successful digital PR agency in the UK called JamPrime. You also are the founder of Jam Press. Are you finding that more and more companies or entrepreneurs are starting to try to use digital PR to increase AI visibility, or do you still think a lot of people are not aware? Like, obviously we know from being in the trenches of testing every single day that digital PR is massively helping increase recommendations on the large language models. Are you seeing that yourself and more and more people coming literally for increasing AI visibility to do digital PR, or not yet?

Ben Nicholls: We are seeing it a little bit. I think, you know, obviously the, the, the AI has been around for a couple of years now in the way that, that, that everyone started using them. They're getting more commonplace. Everyone's playing with, with them a lot more. So I think, you know, just the, the top-of-mind sort of, like, understanding of why you might want to be surfaced in, in, in AI is sort of, like, really increasing. So yeah, we do see people asking about it, asking whether our work is going to help them to, to get referenced by AI. And I think it will be sort of, like, um... It will just be an industry that's going to grow and grow and grow. I think, for the same reasons, you know, SEO is very important for businesses. You know, if you want to be the first page of Google, you obviously want to be on... Be, be surfaced by AI, as I think, you know, I've heard a lot about the intent of those searches and, and the ability to convert because, you know... So I think, yes, it's, it's really important. We are noticing an, an, an uptick in that sort of request and, you know, it's, it's something that we're proud to try and help deliver.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And then, uh, Peter. So obviously you're the co-founder of Be The Brand AI Recommends. So obviously it's an AEO service which is helping both business owners but also corporate brands to increase visibility in all of the large language models. We've obviously been doing quite a lot of research and it's not just about being cited but trying to be recommended. And my question to you is, we... As a, a big part of our R&D, we started to realise that entities, known entities within Google... So, if you had a Knowledge Panel within Google Search, or you was a known entity in, like, places like ChatGPT, but if you became part of the answer with... As this, let's say, they brought 20 brands back and then they narrowed it down to the best five brands, we started to realise the ones with the strongest entities was always the ones that ended up being recommended. Can you expand a little bit more on that? Because obviously from there now we've now had to start integrating digital PR as part of our AEO service to increase brand visibility because we need to strengthen their entity. Before we even think about doing awards and case studies and testimonials, defining the entity is important for Be The Brand AI Recommends.

Peter Victor Jones: Yes, so defining the entity is, is vital to give the AI engines the confidence and clarity about who you are and what you do, where you do it if that applies, if you're a regional business as opposed to a national business. Um, and that confidence is ultimately what allows your brand to be the one that gets recommended. If it's not confident about who you are and what you do and why you're great, then it won't recommend you.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And then Paul, expanding on that a little bit more. So me and you did a lot of split testing and we did a lot of split testing from different places of going, doing, like, cheap press releases. So we used, like, ABNewswire, EIN Presswire, we used GlobeNewswire, Magic PR. And they worked. And they worked well, but they seemed... A lot of them to get purged, the articles, after a few months. And then we tried guest posts. And the guest posts would rank and they ranked in the top 10 results of Google and obviously within Bing. And it was helping get cited within the AI Overviews, within AI Mode, within Claude, within Perplexity, within Grok, and also within ChatGPT. So we're ticking the boxes, right?

Paul David Truscott: Brilliant, brilliant. It was only recently when we started to have some bigger clients come to us and we started to integrate digital PR. And when we started to integrate the digital PR and was getting more of the trusted sources for the case studies and the awards specifically... So it was amplifying the case studies and the awards with digital PR, which was getting in these high-end magazines, high-end newspapers. And straight away we just seen it was night and day difference of the sources that was being recommended. The, the newspapers and the magazines just literally dwarfed all the others. They were just being cited time and time and time again by all of the large language models. Can you expand upon that a little bit?

James Dooley: Yeah.

Paul David Truscott: Really comes down to the trust. Um, you know, Peter touched on this. Clarity is one thing and, and you can... You can dictate that as long as you know what you're doing online. You, you can govern the clarity. Um, but the trust has to be there in the, in the source. And the sources that Ben can help you, um, find yourself on are the best in, in the world. So you're ultimately going to be, um... You're going to be cited and you're going to be part of the grounding data far more frequently. You're going to be cited and mentioned more frequently. And it's not a temporal thing in the same way that it is with a, a, um, uh, you know, a, a short-term publication like a, a press release. The problem with them is that they are real flashes in the pan. So I like to use press releases to test ideas. So, does this concept work? And then we'll move to digital PR to, to make it more permanent, to make it bind, to make it stick.

James Dooley: Yeah. So it's just about the, the permanency really and, and the authority of it because they're just much more trusted.

Paul David Truscott: Yeah, for sure.

James Dooley: Anyone who's watching this and you're looking for more AI visibility, that could be more AI visibility in ChatGPT or more AI visibility in AI Mode or Google AI Overviews. Digital PR has become a very important part to be part of that grounding data. One other thing that we didn't touch upon because I didn't lead Paul to it was the harmonic centrality within Common Crawl, which is part of the training data as well. These digital PR newspaper links and the articles of what you're getting are the seed set of trusted sites, which is not only training RAG, the live retrieval, it is also part of the training data. And this is where digital PR becomes very important for increased AI visibility. Paul, Peter, and Ben, thank you very much.

Paul David Truscott: Thank you, James.