PR for AI discoverability means earning mentions where AI tools look: media coverage, Reddit threads, review sites and original research. Val Riley, VP of Marketing at Unbounce, says challenger brands can now beat giants on relevance instead of blog history. Quality still beats volume, and authenticity is the whole game.
Val Riley runs marketing for two software brands at once, and she told Will Ockenden something most PR people want to hear. AI search is handing smaller brands a route past the giants, but only if the coverage, the conversations and the research are real.
She also confessed to a direct mail campaign that leaked, spilled and shattered its way across American offices. We will get to the soil.
Can a challenger brand really beat the giants in AI search?
Yes, because AI search rewards relevance more than age. Val’s second brand, Insightly CRM, competes with Salesforce and HubSpot, and she is blunt about the old rules. Those giants could write every content piece imaginable and dominate with SEO, and a challenger could not outwrite them.
The new rules suit her better. As she puts it, “it’s about people talking to you about you on Reddit, it’s about your latest PR clip or media clip”. It is not about who has the blog that has existed for 13 years.
Her first warning is about shortcuts. Tempted by the output of AI tools, many leaders think the answer is to publish everything with AI. She calls that “a huge, colossal mistake”, and says the old rules still apply: take your time, write high-quality pieces and make your ideal customer feel seen. Her second warning is to do the basics first: “I think you have to make sure your house is in order really quick.”
How do you use Reddit without being fake?
You hire someone who already belongs there. Val pays a contractor to represent her brands on Reddit, which she says she would have laughed at ten years ago. She picked someone who already enjoys the platform, knows its culture and understands each community’s rules.
The reason is quite simple. “you can’t fake it anymore”, she says, and a team member plonked into Reddit with a brief to post will be spotted at once. The approach is modest: answer a question in the right subreddit, and speak as the brand when there is a genuine release to discuss.
Why does original research work so well for AI visibility?
It does three jobs from one piece of work. Val explained that “GEO likes anything that’s new or different, anything that it can cite with statistics”. The media likes research too, so her PR firm pitches it and usually wins a few mentions. And the sales team gets a stack of stories for podcasts and interviews.
Unbounce can do this better than most, because its conversion benchmark report draws on 2.5 billion conversions across landing pages in a dozen industries. Val says that data lets the team tell clients what a good conversion rate looks like in manufacturing, software or healthcare. Few competitors can match it.
You do not need that much data. Will’s own advice to clients is to start with what you already hold, because an organisation’s own numbers are often a gold mine.
Does gating content stop AI tools finding it?
Gated content is invisible to AI tools, but the coverage around it is not. Will asked whether large language models can read gated research, and Val agreed they cannot. Her answer is that media reach does the work. When you quote the findings in many places, you get the attention of the models, and you drive more people to the gated report.
Her team also releases the first few pages as a LinkedIn document ad, with the rest behind a form. The people who want the full 15 pages will complete it, while others read an article that digests the data. You “double dip a little bit”, as she puts it.
The mistake: Publishing huge volumes of content, or posting on Reddit without understanding it, and calling that an AI visibility plan.
Why it happens: Volume feels measurable and fast, whereas earned mentions need patience, a real community and something worth citing.
The fix: Earn coverage, reviews and community mentions with research and real participation, then publish steadily.
Should you buy a GEO measurement tool yet?
Not in a rush, according to Val. She has not run strict measurement on AI visibility herself, and she has heard Profound recommended but with “the price tag’s a little bit hefty”. Her philosophy is calm: “We don’t have to be the very earliest adopter.”
Will worried that these tools resemble the old social listening gold rush, and said he is not sure he fully trusts some of the data. Val’s own worry was about pricing. Platforms often launch cheap to win market share, then triple their rates a year and a half later.
What did the direct mail mistakes teach her?
They taught her that attention is not the same as a booked demo. At SharpSpring, a marketing automation company for agencies, the growth-at-all-costs era meant elaborate parcels. Root beer float kits leaked in the lobby and a money tree arrived with potting soil all over the recipient’s desk.
Logos printed on glass sometimes arrived as shards. One agency owner drove to a waterfront warehouse to collect a parcel and found a Slinky, then sent a furious email. Val says nobody died, though a few unboxing videos came out of it. The company still sold for many millions of dollars, so the mistakes were not fatal.
My view on this: AI search is an audience as well as a channel
Will and I beat the GEO drum with clients constantly, and Val’s examples are exactly why. We consider large language models an audience in their own right, and audiences respond to coverage, reviews and honest conversation, not to volume.
I agree with Will’s caution on measurement. Some measurement is better than none, even if it only benchmarks your starting point. But the tools are young and some are just BS, and I would rather see a team earn a strong media clip than spend a month admiring a visibility score.
Listen to the full episode
Watch the full episode with Val Riley on YouTube, find every episode at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk, and see what Val’s team builds at Unbounce.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where marketing and PR leaders share the career mistakes that taught them the most.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
