If you want LLM-powered tools like ChatGPT to cite your content and recommend your brand, you need to build strong editorial trust.
LLMs are able to reason through language, so they operate a lot like a researcher or journalist. Instead of only focusing on technical authority signals like DA/DR scores and link volume, AI search tools place more emphasis on editorial signals like semantic relevance, content quality, helpfulness, and brand sentiment.
Traditional authority signals still matter, but they serve more as a proxy for whether content is already trusted by search engines and humans.
Because of this, digital PR is the perfect technique for improving AI search visibility. It focuses on securing brand mentions on authoritative websites, building backlinks for thought leadership content, and generating a buzz about your business online.
These are the exact tactics that help you establish editorial trust with LLMs, so digital PR is an extremely powerful tool for AI SEO.
In this guide, we’ll teach you how to use digital PR to improve your visibility on tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- How AI evaluates trust signals
- Why digital PR aligns perfectly with these signals
- How to develop a winning digital PR placement
How AI Search Tools Evaluate Trust Signals
Let’s examine the ‘thought process’ behind the trust signals that LLMs value.
Whenever a tool like ChatGPT has to retrieve online sources to answer a user prompt, a multi-step process takes place internally.
Step one: Contextual relevance
First, the LLM checks to see if the content provides the information necessary to generate a suitable response to the prompt.
For example, let’s say the prompt is, “What are the best CNC machines for beginners in 2025?”
Since this is a prompt requiring the most up-to-date information on CNC machines, ChatGPT won’t be able to rely on its training data and will have to use RAG (retrieval augmented generation) to pull online content.
It will search for blogs, roundups, and news articles mentioning the best CNC machines for beginners. When evaluating this content, the LLM will check to see if it directly answers the user’s prompt.
What typically wins here is structured, fact-driven language. Producing Q&A and FAQ-style content is an easy way to capitalize on this. Subheadings and bulleted lists are also big winners since they’re easy for LLMs to parse.
If it’s decided that the content is contextually relevant, the LLM moves onto the second step of the process, which is to determine if the information is reliable.
Step two: Cross-verification to ensure accuracy
To ensure the information the LLM gathered is accurate, it will check to see if the fact it retrieved (i.e., a good CNC machine for beginners) appears across multiple trustworthy sources. If it’s able to find two or three respected sources that back the claim up, trust is amplified.
It’s equivalent to journalists double or triple-sourcing the facts in their stories. This step also cuts down on inaccuracies and hallucinations. If you produce factually accurate content, you should have nothing to worry about during this process.
The next step involves verifying your brand as a credible source.
Step three: Brand mentions and entity clarity
Editorial mentions are the top way LLMs establish a brand’s credibility, both as a whole and on specific topics.
The most important thing to remember is that relevance beats raw authority.
A brand mention on a relevant CNC blog with strong topical authority will be more impactful than a backlink on a major website like Forbes for an unrelated topic (like finance).
The fact that Forbes has a sky-high domain rating won’t be taken into consideration much.
LLMs want to know that you’re a trusted source for a particular topic, so they aren’t concerned with PageRank-style link signals.
Also, the editorial framing of your brand mentions is a huge deal. In other words, the context of the brand mention, such as the surrounding text, is extremely important.
LLMs want to see brand mentions that:
- Position your brand as an expert source or thought leader in your field
- Cite your expertise, products, or services as a top-tier
- Are factual and clearly non-promotional
Entity clarity also comes into play here.
LLMs use entity recognition to identify and understand entities, which can be people, places, things, organizations, and more. An easy way to grasp this concept is that LLMs use entity recognition to distinguish something like Jaguar, the car manufacturer, from jaguar, the animal.
In a broader sense, entity recognition is how LLMs correlate brands with particular topics, products, and services.
Entity clarity refers to how clear it is that your brand specializes in a particular area of expertise or offers certain products and services.
Ways to provide this clarity include:
- Credible brand mentions
- Positive community discussion (like Redditors commenting on your expertise or great service)
- Thought leader content that covers the same topics (that gets cited and linked to by related sites)
Strong entity clarity leads to reinforced trust and more citations since you’ll become a ‘go-to’ source for topics related to your niche.
How Digital PR Aligns with These Trust Signals
Now that you know how LLMs establish trust with online sources, let’s discover how digital PR campaigns fuel those trust signals.
The most obvious is that digital PR focuses on earning brand mentions and backlinks, but that’s only scratching the surface. The fact is that almost every digital PR technique (besides self-distributing press releases) feeds into an LLM trust signal.
Speaking of self-distributed press releases, let’s briefly discuss them.
AI search tools are focused on genuine newsworthiness when analyzing brand mentions. Thus, self-published press releases won’t carry much clout.
Press-release distribution can yield results, but there are some important caveats:
- The content must be truly newsworthy and relevant to your niche. This heightens the chances that actual journalists will cover it, mention it, or link to it, all of which are extremely beneficial. The goal is to foster real news coverage instead of flooding low-quality sites with self-promotional material.
- You need to use reputable newswire services and PR platforms with real journalist exposure.
- Follow up with journalists and media professionals after the fact to amplify your coverage.
Here are some other ways digital PR techniques build trust on LLMs.
Premium editorial coverage is more than just a link
Do brand mentions the right way, and you’ll establish deep levels of trust on AI search platforms. Moreover, since LLMs don’t lean on link graph signals as much as search engine algorithms, your brand mentions don’t even need to contain backlinks to impact your authority.
Don’t get us wrong, backlinks are still extremely valuable, they just play a different role on LLMs.
For example, other sites linking to your content as a reliable resource is immensely impactful to your authority on AI search tools.
Other types of backlinks, like those appearing on high-DR sites but with little relevance, won’t impact your authority much at all.
That’s why we’re encouraging site owners to shift their focus from raw authority to contextual relevance and editorial quality.
News mentions confirm authority
Getting your brand featured on reputable news outlets (in a positive light, of course) is a fantastic way to solidify your authority to LLMs.
However, the news outlets have to hold some sort of relevance to your website. If they aren’t a niche-specific news source (like a CNC news site, sticking with the aforementioned examples), then the mention must at least appear on a contextually relevant page, like a story covering CNC machines.
Digital PR signals brand relevance across multiple channels
Other digital PR tactics, like producing original research, newsjacking stories, and creating thought leadership content, are excellent for diversifying your brand’s authority and relevance.
This provides strong entity clarity and reinforces the authority you’ve already built.
Expert content, eye-opening research, and trending news stories naturally attract brand mentions and backlinks, making them AI SEO powerhouses.
What Makes a Strong Digital PR Placement
Lastly, let’s examine what makes a digital PR placement trustworthy and authoritative to LLMs:
- Domain relevance. Once again, you need to build brand mentions and backlinks on domains that are topically or contextually relevant to yours. Irrelevant PR placements (i.e., mentions on websites outside of your area of expertise) won’t do your brand any good, so don’t waste your time on them.
- Natural brand mentions. The best brand mentions are ones that occur completely naturally. That’s why original research and thought leadership content are both so powerful, because they attract mentions without requiring any outreach on your behalf.
- Unique value or insight in the piece. LLMs will be able to tell if your content simply regurgitates easily accessible information found on other websites. The real value lies in original insights, first-hand experiences, experiments, and expert interviews. As a bonus, LLMs will begin to tie your entity to the experts you interview, so you get to inherit their credibility, too.
Earning More Citations and Recommendations Through Digital PR
To summarize, digital PR campaigns are practically designed to improve AI search visibility. Their focus on quality editorial placements aligns with LLMs’ quality and trust standards, so it’s the premium tactic for earning more AI citations.
Do you want to improve your visibility on AI search platforms like ChatGPT?
Sign up for our Digital PR services to earn reputable brand mentions, expand your brand’s online reach, and pick up valuable citations.