Recently, BBC News ran a story which outlined how businesses are navigating the seismic shift in search. In the article, Kip Bodnar, Hubspot’s CMO, broke down the new landscape simply: “What you have now is access to all the world's intelligence instantaneously. How people find information and subsequently take action is very, very different."  

If you want to compete in the realm of Web 4.0, you must optimise for GEO (generative engine optimisation) or risk being left behind. Search is now increasingly driven by reputation, expertise, and real-world signals, with LLMs drawing from a brand’s overall web presence: onsite, social, review platforms, and media. In short: to win in GEO you need to identify how your brand is understood by LLMs.  

One of the best tools in your arsenal is digital PR, as long as you’re using it in the right way. It’s no longer just about earning links and getting citations but about shaping how LLMs see brands. To do this, you must broaden your strategy.  

The problem with siloed digital PR in an AI-driven web 

It used to be that your digital PR team could put out a couple of campaigns, do some reactive press, earn some great links and its high fives all around. While that’s still going to work for SEO, isolated digital PR tactics will struggle to create lasting authority in GEO.  

AI search models assess credibility by interpreting content, focusing on verifiable trust signals rather than popularity and backlinks. It becomes more about a brand’s digital footprint than how many sites are linking to them. Factual accuracy, consistency, expertise, and reputation are all large parts of what make up that footprint, which means a good modern digital PR strategy should impact brand perception in these categories.  

Think about it this way. A brand is no longer just a website, but an entity across the web. Traditional digital PR strategies can’t affect this, so we need to move towards digital PR 2.0.  

Why your strategy needs to evolve towards digital PR 2.0 

We need to reframe digital PR’s strategic value as this is the best way we have to unify owned expertise, earned media, social proof, and community participation. We must move from mono to surround sound. This is what we mean by digital PR 2.0: a broader, more integrated approach designed to build brand entities that LLMs recognise as credible, authoritative, and trustworthy. 

• Owned expertise: E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) is more important than ever. LLMs want you to show your expertise and authority as a brand, whether it’s on a series of YouTube videos or being featured in the media.  

• Earned media: The core of what we’re used to doing as PRs. Getting visibility on high authority sites through news and commentary. LLMs are drawing information from these sites, so your brand should be there.  

• Social proof: LLMs try to understand what people are saying about your brand, and social is the venue for this chatter. They review co-occurrences, searching for where brands are mentioned alongside sentiment terms like ‘reliable’.  

• Community participation: Like social, LLMs look at communities as part of their dataset. Reddit is a huge source, where brands can interact with customers and answer questions.  

To make this shift tangible, your digital PR strategy needs to address five key areas. 

Five shifts that will broaden your digital PR impact on AI search 

1. Demonstrable expertise 

Digital PR 2.0 requires more than generic spokespeople. Brands need recognised subject-matter experts with consistent, distinctive viewpoints rooting in lived experience and proprietary insights. 

2. Entity-building beyond the website 

Your site is still important, but so is everything else. Brands are no longer defined by their domain alone but by their social sentiment, Wikipedia entries, awards, and Reddit, among others. Digital PR 2.0 should engineer these entity touchpoints rather than leaving them to the whims of the internet.  

3. Community participation, not just broadcast 

AI search relies on human consensus, so current and highly engaging conversations tend to be prioritised over static web pages. It’s now even more important to be present where these conversations happen and have experts answer questions and engage with the community.  

4. Social visibility that reinforces credibility 

Your social presence shouldn’t be considered as a bolt-on but a way of reinforcing your authority and credibility as a brand. Having consistent expert-led content, using both in-house experts and content creators in your space, can help strengthen associations to your entity in the “eyes” of LLMs.  

5. Media coverage that shapes narratives 

Something that traditional PR excels at is building narratives around the brand in the media. Too many digital PR strategies have tunnel-vision around creating campaigns purely for the benefit of gaining links without thought around how that story weaves into the overall brand narrative. Digital PR 2.0 is about getting coverage that does exactly this.  

What this means for the future of digital PR 

Ultimately, LLM-driven search has elevated the discipline beyond what it was even a year ago. Continuing with the same tactics won’t deliver the authority brands now need to be visible. Success in AI search depends on influencing how LLMs perceive your brand across the web: building credibility, reinforcing expertise, and earning trust. We’re moving from a link-led to an entity-led strategy.  

At KINESSO, we do this through our TRAQ report, part on Omnicom's suite of AI solutions, which assesses how effectively a brand is surfaced in GEO. It’s an actionable framework that uses over 120 criteria to build a complete picture. If this is something you would be interested in, then get in touch.