Digital PR: Extinction or Distinction?
AI
Digital PR
It might be easy to look around right now and ask, “How can I grow my business in this market?”
With a cost-of-living crisis, cautious consumer spending, and marketing budgets under constant scrutiny, most brands are being asked to deliver growth with less resources than ever before.
But amid all the uncertainty, there is one marketing channel that is quietly and consistently driving measurable business impact: digital PR.
And not just brand awareness or backlinks. We’re talking about genuine, commercial growth.
In the last 12 months, JBH clients have seen results that most paid channels would struggle to match.
- Better.co.uk increased revenue by 60% and improved ROI by 25% while cutting marketing spend by more than half.
- Cosmetify saw a 162% increase in revenue, a 74% uplift in organic traffic, and a 421% ROI from its digital PR investment.
These are not vanity metrics. They are proof that when digital PR is treated as a strategic growth channel, it can deliver brand visibility, search performance, and direct sales in a single campaign.
It might sound unusual to think of digital PR as a growth mechanism ,after all, many still see it as an SEO tool or a way to win coverage. But the data tells a very different story.
At JBH, we’ve spent the last year analysing the real commercial effects of digital PR.
What we found is that it delivers far more than backlinks or mentions. It builds authority with AI search engines, strengthens organic visibility, and drives qualified traffic that converts.
In short, digital PR has evolved from a visibility tactic into a proven revenue engine.
And in this article, you’ll learn exactly how it happens.
A New Role for Digital PR: Brand, SEO, and Revenue in One
Traditionally, digital PR has been viewed as a means for SEOs to acquire backlinks and brand mentions, thereby improving rankings.
That remains a vital benefit, but it’s only part of the picture.
What we’ve uncovered is that digital PR delivers three powerful business effects at the same time:
- It builds brand visibility across AI search and large language models.
- It improves organic search performance through high-quality, relevant links.
- It drives direct commercial impact by improving traffic, conversions, and revenue.
Let’s take those in turn.
Digital PR and AI Visibility: Preparing for the Future of Search
Search is changing fast. With the rise of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other large language models, consumers are starting to receive product and brand recommendations directly from AI tools rather than traditional search results.
These large language models don’t just pull data from your website — they reference and prioritise third-party content that positions your brand as a credible source of information.
This process, often referred to as mutual information, rewards brands that are consistently mentioned across trusted publications. The more your brand appears in reputable online articles, the more likely AI models are to include you in their recommendations.
In other words, digital PR doesn’t just help you rank on Google; it helps you get found by AI.
For businesses seeking to future-proof their visibility in an AI-powered world, digital PR is no longer optional. It’s a fundamental part of the future of GEO and SEO.
It’s how you teach large language models who you are and why you matter.
The Power of Links: Still the Foundation of Search
While AI search is emerging, traditional organic search is still the single largest driver of website traffic and revenue for most brands.
And links still matter — significantly.
High-quality backlinks remain one of Google’s most trusted signals of authority and relevance. They drive better rankings, higher visibility, and more clicks from customers actively looking to buy.
But not all links are created equal.
A performance-led digital PR strategy focuses on earning links that directly support commercial intent, to category pages, product listings, and service pages — not just to blogs or homepages.
That’s the difference between coverage that looks good and coverage that performs.
When your digital PR campaigns are strategically aligned with your revenue-driving pages, you’re not just building authority, you’re building a pipeline of qualified organic visitors.
Better.co.uk proved this powerfully. With 26% of JBH’s earned links pointing directly to commercial pages, the brand saw a 60% year-on-year revenue increase and a 25% boost in ROI.
The data is clear: links that serve a purpose serve the bottom line.
The Human Effect: Reach, Relevance, and Sales Activation
The third and most underestimated benefit of digital PR is its ability to generate direct sales through sheer visibility.
Digital PR tells people your brand exists. It reaches broad audiences at scale through credible, trusted sources — and it does so in a way that’s measurable.
Why does this matter commercially? Because the media ecosystem has changed.
Journalists today are KPI’d on traffic, engagement, and audience growth. That means the content they create and the stories that include your brand are designed to reach large, relevant audiences through syndication networks, social channels, and Google Discover.
An article featuring your brand can easily be read by tens of thousands of people in its first few days live.
Those impressions translate into awareness today, and conversions tomorrow.
Here’s how that works in practice:
- Around 95% of your audience isn’t actively in-market for your product at any given time.
- But when they see your brand in relevant, helpful content, you build memory structures that ensure you’re the first name they recall when they are ready to buy.
- The 5% who are in-market often discover you through these same articles, particularly through platforms like Google Discover that intelligently recommend content based on consumer search behaviour.
In short: digital PR operates across both brand building and sales activation simultaneously.
How Digital PR Drives Measurable Growth
To see this in action, let’s revisit two very different success stories.
When the mortgage market became highly competitive and consumer confidence dipped, Better.co.uk made a bold move. The brand reduced its overall marketing spend by more than half, leaving digital PR as the sole organic activity.
JBH’s approach focused on performance-led digital PR — creating expert-led, data-driven content that earned coverage in publications like Forbes and Insurance Edge while securing direct links to the brand’s key mortgage category pages.
The results were transformative:
- 60% increase in revenue
- 23% uplift in marketing ROI
- 90% reduction in cost per lead (YoY)
- 89% drop in cost per customer sign-up (YoY)
In a market where most brands were scaling back, Better.co.uk proved that smart digital PR could deliver commercial growth even under tight constraints.
Read the complete Better.co.uk case study here.
Beauty brand Cosmetify had already built visibility through its annual Cosmetify Beauty Index, but it hadn’t translated that attention into measurable revenue.
JBH redesigned the campaign with a performance-first mindset. By prioritising placements that drove category-specific links and do-follow coverage, we turned attention into action.
The outcome spoke volumes:
- 74% growth in organic traffic
- 162% increase in total revenue
- 421% ROI
- 1,621% category revenue increase
The campaign reached millions, earning top-tier features in Grazia and Glamour — and even caught the attention of global beauty giant Huda Beauty, whose 56.9 million followers amplified the story further.
Digital PR became not just a brand exercise, but a direct sales driver.
Read the complete Cosmetify case study here.
Why This Works: The Full-Funnel Effect of Digital PR
Digital PR succeeds because it unites the two sides of modern marketing: brand visibility and performance efficiency.
It builds mental availability by keeping your brand present in the minds of future buyers through broad media exposure.
It drives physical availability by creating direct pathways — links and citations — that make your brand easier to find, click, and buy from.
And it amplifies every other channel in your mix.
Here’s how:
- Search impact: Earned links and brand mentions strengthen your domain authority, improving visibility for high-value keywords.
- AI integration: Frequent, trusted mentions ensure your brand appears in emerging AI search results and recommendation engines.
- Content distribution: Coverage is indexed, shared, and syndicated, delivering compounding visibility.
- Sales activation: High-intent audiences discover your content through contextual relevance, driving measurable conversions.
In other words, digital PR bridges the long-term and the short-term. It feeds the brand-building engine and fuels performance.
The Commercial Case for Investment
For marketers deciding where to invest in 2025, the choice has become more complex. SEO, paid media, and AI-driven marketing each promise results, but few channels now deliver consistent, compounding returns.
Digital PR is different. It offers both credibility and commercial impact.
When executed strategically, it drives measurable growth through:
- Increased organic visibility and traffic
- Lower customer acquisition costs
- Improved conversion rates
- Stronger brand recall and authority
And crucially, it leaves behind a durable digital footprint — one that continues to attract attention, clicks, and conversions long after a campaign ends.
Digital PR Is Modern Marketing
In a challenging economy, the brands that grow are those that stay visible, relevant, and credible across search, AI, and media.
Digital PR does exactly that.
It feeds the algorithms of tomorrow while driving the revenue you need today. It builds brand authority, boosts search performance, and connects you directly with audiences ready to engage and buy.
It’s time to stop treating digital PR as link building and start treating it as what it truly is: a full-funnel growth channel.
Ready to turn coverage into conversions?
Get in touch with JBH.
Our performance-led digital PR programmes are designed to increase visibility, build authority, and deliver measurable business results.
Reach out to JBH to discover how digital PR can help grow your brand and boost your revenue.
