Digital PR is one of those terms that means something different depending on who says it. So rather than define it here, we pulled what four practitioners said about it out loud, on the record, in full interviews on the Unscripted SEO podcast. Every quote below was checked word for word against the original recording.
The short version: it is earning coverage by being worth quoting, and a large share of the people doing it do not call it digital PR at all.
Half the field is doing it without the name
There are the technical SEOs, and there are SEOs who haven’t realized yet that their job is digital PR and branding.
Zak Ali, Unscripted SEO
This is the most useful reframe in the set, because it explains why the discipline is so badly measured. If the person doing the work files it under SEO, it gets judged on rankings rather than on coverage, and the part that actually built authority never gets counted.
It is not press releases, and the distinction is the whole job
And I’m not just talking about like a normal publicist that’s a press release pusher, but the type of publicist that I am now calling myself, because I think that’s the cleanest word, is I’m a publicist, is the kind that manufactures the attention.
Justin Oberman, Unscripted SEO
A press release announces something and hopes somebody cares. The alternative is creating a reason for somebody to care and then being available when they do. Those are different jobs with different skills, and only one of them reliably produces coverage.
The goal is the mention, not the link
So I think that’s one of the things that we’re pushing is some digital PR, getting the right mentions.
Robert Spinrad, Unscripted SEO
Worth sitting with, because it inverts how most link-building is sold. A brand named in a story by a writer who chose to name it carries weight whether or not it is hyperlinked – and increasingly that is the material AI answer engines draw on when someone asks a question in your category.
It is an input, not a channel
So we’re thinking about digital PR, we’re thinking about design, we’re thinking about video, we’re thinking about all of these other elements on whether it’s on page or off page that matter, that impact how you show up across the web.
Erika Braeger, Unscripted SEO
The strategist’s framing rather than the tactician’s. Digital PR sitting in its own budget line, disconnected from everything else, is how it ends up measured on placements per month instead of on whether the brand is easier to find and easier to trust.
What this means if you want to be quoted
Every one of those four is describing the same underlying trade: a company earns coverage by putting a real person with a real opinion in front of someone who needs one, at the moment they need it. The hard part is never the expertise. It is being reachable on the day a reporter is asking.
That is the gap we close. See what we do for brands and for journalists, or how the process runs.
Quotes are verbatim from the recorded interviews, verified against the raw transcripts on 11 September 2026. Speaker attribution confirmed for each.