Mike King: Studios to get them broadcast coverage. Spoiler alert, she didn’t get arrested, but she did break in with a jackpot amount of airtime. Lexi has buried treasure on three continents and counting, and has helped three people win court cases by combining expertise in digital forensics with SEO. Presenting AI’s impact on media and PR SEO, please welcome Lexi Mills.

Lexi Mills: Hi. It is wonderful to be here back on stage speaking to other SEOs and other marketers again. My job has largely been to get coverage and links from places like this for these sorts of businesses over the last 20 years. And that is to grow their audiences, it’s to help them get investment, it’s to help them grow their rankings, and sometimes even to help them sell. And when I was thinking about this presentation, I had a memory come up and I just couldn’t shake it. So I’m going to tell you about it before I begin talking to you about the impact of AI on SEO and PR. Now we will look, I promise, at what it means to the publishing industry now. We’re going to look at what it means to PR SEO, what LLMs and PR have in common, and what future proof strategies look like. But I think more importantly than anything, there’s a lesson from this memory that I couldn’t shake. You see, I was sat maybe 20 years ago in a meeting with a very seasoned PR. She did print PR. And I sat with a client, and I was the digital PR agency. And I was young. I had a lot to learn from this woman. And she said, gosh, you I had the worst nightmare last night. I was like, oh, really? What was it about? And she said, I dreamt the entire print industry went under. I went bankrupt, and my line was irrelevant. Now, I’m young at this point. Right? I have a lot to learn from her. But I thought, you are in fact absolutely correct. [One moment, please. Hello? Is that working? Fantastic.] 

So I was sitting there thinking, oh my gosh, this lady doesn’t realize that this is in fact happening. How is she not seeing this? She’s been around for years and years. But then I realized something when reflecting on this. She didn’t realize what was happening because she didn’t want to look at it. If we’re too frightened to look at it, we’ll be too frightened to find solutions. And the reality is, and I knew this at the beginning of my career, that getting print coverage is the hardest coverage you will ever get in your life. If you can get print coverage, in those days, all you ever had to do is say, hey, can you check it online? Furthermore, if they said no, then you just rang the journalist on the digital desk and they would put it up online. This wasn’t rocket science, but she was too frightened. And this is because our brains don’t function well when we’re in heightened states of emotion. When we panic, our logic centers shut down. And I think we can all say that we’ve had a bit of panic over the last few years. And I’m not saying that we need to completely remove any stress, but I learned something about stress recently. Unlike oxytocin, our happy love chemical, stress is airborne. It’s contagious. So if we sit in a room together like this and we are freaking out about the changes, we’re sending that to each other. But if we can be collectively calm and excited, then we can turn on the logic centers of our brain and see the opportunities in front of us. And that’s how I think we get to the next phase. And we’re not the only people who’ve had to do this. Actually, a lot of journalists have been through a pretty scary time over the last 20 years.

So let’s look at that. Now firstly, at the beginning of my career, most journalists didn’t understand what I was doing in SEO. I tried and tried, but until Panda hit, none of them understood. And then subsequently, more and more algorithms kept hitting them and all these kind of dodgy tactics started getting wiped out and they had to skill up fast. They had to not freak out and skill up. And so they moved in what I would call the algorithmic age of media. And that was awesome for me because now I could have real conversations about what I was doing. But we’re now moving into the AI age of media. And it is underpinned with some scary stuff, job losses, job losses, some of the worst we’ve seen in the history of media. And this has led unexpectedly to the rise of AI journalism. And one of the pieces of technology I’ve been following really closely is called Cyborg. It’s been developed by Bloomberg and it essentially just takes earning reports, scrapes them, and spits out really fast articles. And it’s been pretty good. They’ve been using a lot. But you’ll notice when you see a Cyborg article, you’ll see this little updated tag. And we see this more and more in journalism. Updating content keeps it fresh. It makes it good for Google. But this updated thing here is because the article was in fact inaccurate. So they had to correct it. But that’s because they value being fast more than being accurate, which is deeply concerning in many areas. But this has been going on a long time. I mean, there have been a lot of stories this year about how Cyborg has misfired.

These stories are from 2025, and they say new technology making mistakes. This has been around since 2019. It’s still making mistakes and they’re still using it. And more and more publications are using AI-driven media because they need to be fast. It’s what’s serving their audiences. And this means we need to be feeding these machines. We have to be pitching these AI machines if we want that level of coverage. But this inaccuracy actually violates the editor’s code of conduct, and they’re pretty nervous about that. Most journalists don’t get into journalism because they want to put out inaccurate information. And so in this is an opportunity for us because more and more media are looking for experts to comment on all the different things, to back up their articles, to sense check them. The amount of times we give a quote to a journalist that actually corrects something that they were about to publish, we become more important in that regard.

And there’s another piece of tech called RADAR. Now RADAR was actually a Google funded project done in collaboration with the Press Association. For those of you who don’t know, the Press Association is the same as the American Associated Press, essentially almost a global newsroom for a different territory. Now, Radar was designed to help service the requirement for regional news because that’s where we lost a lot of jobs. And it was doing pretty well. It’s putting out a couple thousand articles here and there. But what’s really interesting about Radar is it wasn’t just about speed. It wasn’t just about regionality. They’ve been focused on quality content. And now their stories are getting front page news. This means if you want to get some of the front page news stories, some of the bigger features, you have to be able to pitch AI. You have to know how to get in there, which means the PR game is becoming more technical. And pitching these machines is not something that’s actually unfamiliar to PRs, especially because we’ve been integrating PR and SEO over a period of time. And I’ll talk you through that in a moment.

Now I said there’s been a whole load of job losses and there have been. But interestingly, in the first quarter of this year, we actually saw that slow. It’s actually half the amount of these sort of publications have been letting their journalists go. We’ve seen it halt and we’re seeing hiring. So the question is, who are they hiring? Because they’ve been a pretty pretty good place for us to follow in terms of what we should be doing. Well, we’re seeing them hire more and more multimedia journalists. More and more people. You can do multimodal content. And one of the things I’ve noticed is something that I’m calling the celebrity chef effect. So if you go to someone like Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant, his name is on the restaurant. Correct? His name is on the menu. He might have even designed the menu. He’s not cooking your food. And what we found in journalism is that they’re doing this too. And it’s been heartbreaking. Some of my friends have built out new TV shows, new radio programs, and then suddenly out of nowhere, soon as it’s established, the publication hocks them out, puts them in the back, and puts a celebrity on the front. And they’re cycling through these, which means we’re not just pitching machines. We’re trying to pitch invisible authors. You can no longer see who’s presenting something, who’s writing something, and think they’re the way to get into one of their stories. And I think we’re gonna see this more and more.

And this multimodal journalism is something we really need to keep an eye on. Bloomberg has been exceptional at it. If you look at what they’re doing with their video channels, it’s insane. The amount that people are paying to sponsor their different video content is absolutely unreal. And because Bloomberg do tend to lead in innovation, I think we’ll see other publications doing this too. But this guy is Steven I’ve been friends with since the very beginning of my career before I was even remotely useful, to be clear. And him and I did the first ever piece of interactive journalism I’d ever done. It was an infographic about celebrity debt. And no journalist wanted to put my interactive infographic on their website. Well, he did. And we’ve stayed friends ever since. And I think he is really leading the way in what the future of news will look like. So if you look at where different publications are losing traffic, you’ll see that his publication is gaining it. He knows what he’s doing. It’s written in the metrics. And yes, absolutely, he’s doing more regional content than ever before. I actually don’t know if he’s using radar. I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t want to not tell you and I didn’t want to violate his trust. I will ask and you can ask me later. But what he recognized is that how people are sourcing their news, the access points are changing dramatically. Now this isn’t huge news to us. We know that social media has been an access point for many points of our clients, but it’s certainly become more so for media over the years. And we’ve seen that Google is dropping as a source and direct to publication has also been dropping. But when you look at the publications that are really kicking ass, and then you go onto TikTok and you see which publications are ranking the highest, there is a correlation. The people who are harnessing different influences in the different social channels are surviving this whole media revolution.

And we’ve also seen linking policies move like crazy. They were never stable, but we’ve now had to set up a whole separate inbox to track them at shift6. Because one day people are asking for money for links, the next day it’s natural. This is getting harder and harder. And we’re also finding that increasingly publications are telling us that if you aren’t part of a link network, an affiliate network, you can’t even get to the journalists that are working on there. Now when we consider that 16 brands represent over 250 publications, if they choose to go this route, that is a huge section of the media you can no longer pitch to unless your client has an affiliate network set up. So as a PR, it’s now becoming more our job to check these sorts of things because you don’t want to burn time and budget pitching something that you’re never gonna get through to. And we can’t ignore the AI content deals. They’re happening left, right, and center when it comes to media publications. I’m actually not confident in how these are gonna go. Part of me suspects some of it is a little bit placating, but I think we need to keep an eye on them. 

So as much as AI is absolutely changing journalism, I think we also need to recognize that money is. Journalists are being targeted on click through rates. Their promotions are being determined by how much time on page they’re getting. Their futures are determined by whether we’re pitching them things that kick ass. We’re not just looking for filler content, they’re looking for things that will determine their future. So we have to accept that AI and finance combined are shaping the way we see media and the way we have to interact with them. So we’ve had a look a bit about how AI is redefining media. But what do we do about it? Well, we have to be able to pitch machines. And that means we have to have the content on our sites. And the machines are prioritizing exact match. So if they want Apple’s content, they go to the Apple website. And if you have a clear news section, they will prioritize that. Now if you’re looking for a way to build an awesome news section, NASA’s website has always been rocking. But Wise actually has a phenomenal news section.

But the reality is you don’t have to be super fancy about this. Just a very basic news page will actually train the AIs that you want them to take your news, and they know they can trust it. So you don’t have to break the bank building a Wizzy Fandango news page. And we have to have really good About Us and FAQs. We’re finding more and more that journalists are pulling from those, and we’re starting to see LLMs and AI do it too. And we need to promote our people because what we’re seeing is trust is a factor here. The AIs are picking who to trust, not just the businesses, but which people. And the movement towards having to do reputation marketing for the people behind the businesses has never been higher.

But none of this is new. I was talking about this years ago. It’s just more important than ever before for both media and for LLMs. But we need to make these robots trust you. That’s the most important thing because it isn’t enough just to have the content. They have to believe that it is yours. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how do you reach robots. Now at the beginning of my SEO career, I knew that SEOs were using newswires to generate some links. And I was like, really? Because we can do that with PR. But it was working in some cases at least for a little while. But I was really taken with this idea of taking a PR tool and using it differently. I always loved playing with the box that the toys came in. I was like, why wouldn’t I do that in my career?

So we started doing a lot of wire experiments at shift6. And it’s been super interesting because a wire essentially is a direct feed into a publication. So it’s a way to get through. But not all wires are made equal. There are some wires that have had a really bad reputation with the press. PR Web in particular has been known for putting out stories that weren’t true, that weren’t fact checked, where the sources weren’t real. So I went and asked a bunch of journalists, which whys do you trust? And they gave me these ones. So I thought, okay, I’m gonna start our experiments here. And then we were doing this project with the University of Oxford and MasterCard. And the thing is they were launching this brand new cyber security course. But they weren’t launching it on either of their websites. It was being resold on a brand new site. And we knew every time we launched a new course, we do all this great PR and then people would come and try and steal it. They would put up a PPC ad to a course that didn’t even exist every time we launched a huge PR campaign. And I didn’t want this to happen. Not least, because I couldn’t optimize our client site fast enough. And bear in mind, these courses are like five to 15 grand. These aren’t small ticket items. So trust is an important factor. We couldn’t afford to have confused consumers. So I knew I could generate a result on Yahoo News because we had big brands. So that’s what we did. We used a wire that specifically targeted in Yahoo News. And within a few hours, we got a smart result at the top of Google and not one university tried to compete with our course promotion that time. And we pointed all of our initial press links at this one article. And then once we had this rich result, we then turned and pointed all the links at our client site. And within a few days, we had them optimizing. And the conversion rate with online education when you have rich results, we actually found to be extremely high, especially in the pandemic when the world was flooded with a lot of online education.

So I was like, that was fun. What next? Well, firstly, get all the press coverage because that’s not gonna last and that’s not gonna hold for forever. But then I thought, let’s see what we can do in Web3. Because Web3 is particularly interesting in that they are still really active on Twitter and most of their robo journalists access Twitter. That’s how they’re triggered. So we went and we took one of our client’s press releases and we put it on a very specific wire designed to target all these robo journalists. And this is what happened to their token price. When it went live, it shot up. And then we did it again because it’s not a study unless you’ve done it twice. Right? And then we did it again. And what you’ll see is every single time you get this huge spike and you get a drop, but then you’ll get another spike. And that’s the natural coverage. That’s the link building. But most of this is generated by AI coverage. But it wouldn’t have held. The token price wouldn’t have held if we hadn’t have used real press to back it up. So you have to be working in a loop with the AI journalists. And fun fact, if you want to buy, you can actually watch these press releases go out. You don’t buy on the first loop. You wait for the drop. You wait for the second loop. You wait for the drop. Buy there. That is your safest place to buy. If you wanna be a little bit more risk averse, you can buy on the third one, but I would recommend second. And it’s technically legal to do that. And this idea of median stock price, by the way, isn’t new. Right? We’ve known about it for ages. You saw Facebook testifying the stock price went crazy. And we see that social media has been doing this for years. And I think we’re gonna find this with LLMs in the future. So understanding the relationship between media and LLMs and stock price is gonna become more important in the future.

But this expert thing is something I wanna touch on again. If you wanna get in a lot of coverage, you need experts. But the problem is we’ve had a huge rise in AI fake experts. People trying to capitalize on this, hack it. And it’s come out in the news a lot and journalists have gotten really frightened. So they are now checking on LLMs, on Google, on social media. They’re even reverse image searching and checking people’s WhatsApp photos to determine if the expert is real. So we really do need to be doing reputation marketing for our experts in the future if you want to be able to get into a lot of this coverage. We have a pretty strict process. We make sure that we update their LinkedIn. It’s a great way to get the LLMs to look at things. We if we’re using WhatsApp to put them in touch, we’ll check that photo. Crunchbase, BlueSky, Twitter, you don’t have to do anything on these platforms, but you do need to own them. And then we make sure that they’re working well in LLMs. And one of the interesting things is we found just creating exact match domains for our clients has really helped feed LLMs. At the beginning, I was actually split testing what I could teach an LLM about me. I managed to teach it I was a journalist, that I worked in government, all kinds of weird things just by using leximills[.]net. And this is massively preferable to Wikipedia because we don’t own Wikipedia. We don’t get to choose what content is on there. And we have to accept that the future of LLMs is the future of scalable reputation damage, not just marketing opportunities. So owning these real estates becomes more and more important, not just for the present but also for the future.

And the great thing about these quotes is that there’s actually all these new tools exploding onto the market all the time that we get to use to help us get quotes. So media will put out a request and you can jump on it. And the cool thing is some of them will give you an LLM index straight away. This is a profile on quoted for one of our clients. It indexes on ChatGPT. Guys, this is easy. You should do this straight away for all your experts. It’s free and it’s easy. It gets a good index. It allows your experts to be checked out. Why wouldn’t you? But these tools that give quotes actually have a topic bias. We found it’s very prevalent. It works well with a lot of business, a lot of technology. Over time, we’re finding it works more with lifestyle. But you have to keep monitoring. It’s not right for everyone. And you have to be fast. And this is really challenging because being fast when there are this many tools to check is hard. So we came up with a process. We will take a client, we’ll talk to them, we’ll make a keyword cloud using SEO tools of everything they can comment on. Then we have all these tools and we just feed them into one database. And then we just keyword match them. It’s not rocket science, but it sends an alert to an email alias and the account managers are working 24/7 and they respond. And the moment there’s a match, they’ll send details of our experts to the journalists, draft a quote, client signs it off, we send it over to the journalists. And we are getting loads of coverage this way. And this is an example of how we did it for Kristen Miller, one of our old clients. And we managed to get an awful lot of coverage with high domains really fast, and they all indexed in LLMs.

We’ve also been trying to do this with ChatGPT. So a couple of our clients are authors. They have a lot of different digital media that we can suck in. But the challenge is, as much as journalists are using loads of AI coverage, they’re terrified of getting any AI stuff from us. And we had to try and figure out how to get around this. So we ran a test. We put typos and grammar errors into our PR work. Like, that is sacrilegious in PR. But our results went up by 20% by putting a typo in because it made the journalist feel that it wasn’t AI coverage. It wasn’t a quote generated by AI. And it put a lot of work in for in it for us because then we have to go back and get the typo corrected. Because isn’t it bizarre that they’re scared of typos and coverage but they don’t correct them? I thought that was odd. Anyway, it’s one of the things to be mindful of. If they do not believe it is real, you’re less likely to get the coverage. And we know this because we tested it with typos. So in my view, we have actually moved to a new era. We’ve moved from an attention-based economy where we’re trying to grab attention and engage people to a trust based one. And this is a really big shift. And this to me means that PR and SEO are moving closer together than ever before. We need to build trust around brand, around product, around team, not just the one thing that we’ve been focused on. And we need to think beyond optimization of just websites. We have to optimize all the real estate that builds trust, and that’s hard. And we need to be using both our traditional skills in a loop with our technical, constantly reevaluating. We run on really strict checklists, and every time we go through it, it’s this is the item and is it relevant? Do we need to adapt it? Because every single time the world is changing, we need to know if this is the right tactic for now. If we do not constantly iterate, we will fall behind.

So let’s have a quick look now at some bit more LLMs and PR because I did a full audit of all our clients past and present, and I was blown away by how they were optimizing. Now one of the clients that was particularly interesting was an aviation client. And I’m a complete aviation geek, as most of you know. And I was delighted to be working on someone that I actually think is the leader in aviation fuels. I think they will change the future of flying. And we knew that we had to build trust because they needed to raise money. But you know what? If they raise all the money in the world, it’s worth nothing if we’re all too frightened to get on a fly plane with new fuel in it. So we have to build trust with the community in the public as well as with investors. And so we did everything I told you. We did all of their profiles. They were lucky that they had a affiliation with Oxford University which builds trust. Brand trust like borrowing it is really working for us. We built the press center. And then we started off by just getting them an authority magazine piece. So this is Ariana Huffington’s new publication and they do great interviews with multimedia. So you get video content. You get all the multimodal stuff that journalists love. And then we went out to trade. And the thing is, I’ve had a real gripe about trade for years. Trade has a lower DA. And all the SEOs I’d worked with were like, oh, I don’t want that. It’s a DA 40. I’d be like, but it’s so relevant, guys. Well, you know what? LLMs agree. And if you really wanna get great coverage, go to your trade. And the beauty is if you get trade coverage, a lot of national media reference trade. So actually, it’s a great starting point and I feel deeply validated that now I have another reason to fight for it. And the beauty of trade is those journalists have more time. They will write things in detail. They will focus on the copy and get it accurate. And the thing is in a world of LLMs, you need the first iteration, the first digital print to be accurate because it’s gonna proliferate over time. So you have to get that correct. So it’s not all about DA. 

Also, we have found that podcasts have been pretty useful too. We’re finding these indexing left, right, and center for all our clients. And we’re finding that LLMs are a little bit location agnostic. Now what we know is that British media like an up and coming person. American media, because they’re very, very much keyword focused, absolutely love a big name. Well, for a lot of our clients, we’ve been able to get them coverage in Britain indexed in LLMs, and that has come up on American LLM searches and within Google. So this idea of being able to use the international fields whilst LLMs are still a little bit agnostic in terms of location is super helpful.

But let’s go back to our CCU. This is their first plant that they launched. And they were launching it at Oxford Airport. And we thought, we’re gonna do the traditional PR thing. We’re gonna make a big deal out of it. We’ve got a ribbon. It’s not PR without a ribbon and a big pair of scissors. Then we did a whole bunch of interviews. And you’ll notice behind me, this is the BBC interviewing Andrew. And just to be clear, Ox CCU doesn’t own any planes. I had to go and speak to the manager of Oxford Airport with Andrew and beg him to let me use his hangar. And I was there week in, week out, and eventually he agreed to let him let us use the hangar with all the cool planes. Why did I do it? Yes. I wanted to be near the weird cool planes. Okay? But I also knew the journalists did too. And we managed to get amazing photographs and coverage because we’d made this effort to give them what they need on the multimodal side. And we managed to get several people in to do interviews live because we didn’t have the planes all the time. So again, it gave them some urgency. And we ended up getting over a hundred pieces of coverage, and almost half of those had links in. Links to the publication, links to all the assets that we really cared about. And more importantly, we managed to build trust. Trust in a technology that is gonna make it viable for all of us to be able to do this in the future.

So when I’m thinking about what the future of a PR strategy looks like, there are a couple things that come to mind. We need to ask our agencies what are their AI strategies? How are they handling it? How are they thinking about it? And if they don’t have an answer, let’s build the answers together. We also need to ask people about authenticity because the thing I’ve noticed across the board with everybody in our audit that we did is that the clients who are what they say they are optimize well in LLMs. Authenticity is playing a huge role in the future of PR and SEO when it comes to LLMs. But at the core, discoverability is still true. Everything we’ve ever known about SEO, making things findable, that is the fundamental basis of what we’re doing. And we need to constantly iterate on tactics and on metrics. We can’t get held back by things that just used to work and not question whether they work today. We’ve lived in an industry of change. I know the change is overwhelming. It’s technology is growing at an exponential rate. We’re never gonna feel completely calm about it, but we have survived every change to date.

And I’ve always been so excited to be part of Internet discovery, helping people find the information, the sources that they want and they need. But now we get to be part of something even cooler. We get to be part of helping people ask and answer complex questions and determine who to trust thereafter. There is no way that this isn’t gonna be critical to the future of economies, commerce, politics, what medicine we choose to take and not take, and what technology gets adopted, not just invested in. And I feel super honored and super excited to be part of that and to have you all coming on the journey too. I’m Lexi Mills. It’s been lovely to speak to you today. Thank you so much.