In the past, Digital PR was about generating “buzz” and backlinks. Success was measured in placement volume and Domain Authority (DA). In the age of Semantic Search and AI, Digital PR is a precise engineering discipline: Entity Authority Construction.
Your goal is not just to get a link; it is to teach the Knowledge Graph who you are.
The Knowledge Graph Goal
Search engines like Google and Bing, and answer engines like Perplexity, organize information into Knowledge Graphs.
- Nodes: Entities (people, companies, concepts).
- Edges: Relationships (“founded by,” “located in,” “expert in”).
If you are not a node in the graph, you are merely a string of text. You want to be an Object.
Your goal with Digital PR is to:
- Mint the Entity: Ensure the graph knows you exist as a distinct object, with a unique ID (Reconciliation).
- Define Attributes: Teach the graph your properties (Industry: “SaaS”, HQ: “San Francisco”).
- Validate Relationships: Confirm connections to other authoritative nodes.
The Strategy: Triangulation
To construct a solid entity, you need Triangulation. You need multiple independent, high-authority sources to confirm the same facts about you. This mimics how humans determine truth.
- Source A (Crunchbase): Says “Company X is a Fintech startup.” This provides the “Business” context.
- Source B (Bloomberg): Says “Company X raised Series A.” This provides the “Financial” context.
- Source C (CEO LinkedIn): Says “I run Company X.” This provides the “Social” context.
When an AI reads these three sources, the “fact” of your existence becomes solidified. A single press release is noise; three independent corroborations are a fact.
Campaign Types for Entities
1. Data Journalism
Releasing proprietary data builds authority as a “Source of Truth.” If you publish a study on “The State of AI Marketing,” and that study is cited by Forbes and TechCrunch, the Knowledge Graph attributes the quality “Expert” to your entity. You become the node that other nodes point to for verification.
2. Executive Profiling
Positioning your leadership as subject matter experts connects your corporate entity to the personal entities of trusted humans. If your CEO is recognized as an entity, that authority flows to the company.
3. Correction Campaigns
Actively finding hallucinations or errors about your brand in the wild and asking for corrections is now a vital PR function. If an AI generates a biography of your company that says you were founded in 2020 (when it was 2010), you must correct the record in the training data sources (Wikipedia, Wikidata, About Us pages). You are effectively curating your own entry in the world’s database.