Digital PR is public relations work aimed specifically at online outlets, with coverage, mentions and links as the deliverable rather than print column inches or broadcast segments. It uses the same craft as traditional PR, finding a newsworthy angle and pitching the right journalist, but it is built for a different scoreboard: search visibility and, increasingly, whether AI assistants cite you. It is not the same thing as link building, even though the two get confused constantly. Here is what separates all three, and what a digital PR campaign actually looks like in practice.
What is digital PR, exactly?
Digital PR is the practice of earning coverage, brand mentions and backlinks from online publications by pitching journalists and editors a story, a dataset or an expert source worth covering, the same core craft as traditional media relations, aimed at outlets and outcomes that are measurable online.
The Public Relations Society of America's official definition of public relations, adopted in 2012 after a public vote, describes the broader discipline as "a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics." Digital PR is that same process with a narrower lens: the publics are reached through online publications, and the relationship being built is also legible in search rankings and AI citations, not only in reputation.
How is digital PR different from traditional PR?
Mainly in where the coverage lives and how directly you can measure it.
Traditional PR work, a print feature, a TV segment, a radio interview, builds reputation and reach that is real but hard to attribute to a specific outcome. Digital PR targets outlets that publish online, which means a successful placement produces something traditional PR rarely does on its own: a clickable link back to your site, a mention a search engine can index, and a source an AI assistant can cite. The pitching, the news judgment and the relationship-building are identical skills. What changed is that the deliverable now shows up in analytics instead of only in a clippings folder.
Is digital PR the same thing as link building?
No, and the distinction matters for what you're actually paying for.
Link building, in its older, more mechanical form, is the practice of acquiring links directly: outreach to site owners, guest posts, directory submissions, sometimes outright payment for placement. Digital PR earns the link as a byproduct of a journalist deciding your story, data or source is worth citing. Google's own spam policies draw this line explicitly: any link acquired through payment, product exchange or other commercial arrangement, including a paid guest post or sponsored placement, must carry a "nofollow" or "sponsored" tag so it does not pass ranking credit. A link a journalist adds on their own editorial judgment carries no such requirement, because nobody paid for it.
That is the entire reason digital PR exists as a separate discipline rather than a rebrand of link building: a bought link is capped in value by Google's own rules the moment it's labeled honestly, while an earned editorial link is not. Calling a paid placement "digital PR" doesn't change which category it actually falls into, or which rule applies to it.
What happened to HARO, and what replaced it?
It shut down, and nothing has fully replaced the free, high-volume version it offered.
HARO, Help a Reporter Out, connected journalists seeking sources with people willing to be quoted, and became one of the most common entry points into digital PR for years. Cision rebranded it as Connectively in 2024 and introduced paid pitch fees, and Cision's own announcement confirms that "as of December 9, 2024, the Connectively (HARO) platform has been permanently discontinued," a decision the company said followed "carefully evaluating customer feedback" as it consolidated resources into its CisionOne platform. Journalist-request platforms like Qwoted have picked up some of that volume since, and Featured.com relaunched the HARO brand as a newsletter in 2025, but the shutdown is a useful reminder that digital PR built entirely around one third-party platform is fragile. The more durable version of the skill is building a direct list of the specific journalists who cover your category, so the pitch doesn't depend on any one tool staying in business.
Sources: Muck Rack's May 2026 study of AI-cited links, and Cision's Connectively discontinuation announcement, both linked in the article.
Why does digital PR matter for AI visibility now?
Because the same editorial coverage digital PR earns is what AI assistants are citing almost exclusively.
Muck Rack's May 2026 "What Is AI Reading?" study, an analysis of more than 25 million links cited across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, found that earned media makes up 84% of AI citations, while paid and advertorial content makes up 0.3%. That finding has held across three editions of the study since July 2025. A digital PR campaign that earns a mention in a publication an AI assistant already treats as a trusted source does double duty: it produces the kind of independent coverage that drives AI citations, and it produces a real backlink, the traditional SEO outcome digital PR was originally built to chase.
What does a digital PR campaign actually look like?
Usually one of a handful of repeatable formats, not a single release sent everywhere at once.
Original research or proprietary data a journalist can't get anywhere else is the most durable version: a survey of your own customers, an analysis of data you already hold, or commentary on a dataset nobody has covered yet. Expert commentary, making a genuinely knowledgeable spokesperson available when a journalist is actively writing on a relevant topic, is the lower-cost version, and it's the gap platforms like HARO used to fill. Newsjacking, a fast, substantive reaction to a story already breaking in your category, works when the comment adds real information rather than a generic quote. What doesn't work reliably is a press release with no real news attached, sent in the hope that volume substitutes for a story, the same mistake covered at length in whether press releases are still worth it.
How do you know if digital PR is working?
By the quality of what you earned, not the number of links in a spreadsheet.
A handful of links from publications your actual audience reads, each attached to a story that represents you accurately, outperforms dozens of links from low-relevance sites every time, both for search engines and for a human reader who clicks through. The same standard that applies to PR broadly applies here: AMEC's Barcelona Principles 4.0 explicitly rejects measures like advertising value equivalency in favor of judging outcome and impact, and a digital PR program is no exception: did the coverage land where your audience actually looks, not just how many domains now link to you.
The direct answer, for anyone who read this far
Digital PR is public relations work aimed at online publications, where a journalist's editorial decision to cover your story produces both the reputational benefit of traditional PR and a measurable backlink or citation. It is not link building, because a bought link is tagged nofollow or sponsored under Google's own rules the moment it's labeled honestly, while an earned one is not, and it is not a rebrand of press release distribution, because a release is a record, not a pitch. What makes digital PR work now is the same thing that always made it work: a real story, pitched to the specific journalist who covers it, which increasingly also decides whether an AI assistant ever mentions you at all.
If you want help building a digital PR campaign around a story you actually have, request a quotation and we'll help you find the angle.
