Kevin Rowe Shares Digital PR System Behind 1,000+ Earned Links
Kevin Rowe, CEO of the link building agency PureLinq, has described a two year rebuild of how his agency earns coverage, after link building stopped working around 2020 and he says he lost half of the business overnight. The system centres on original research rather than standalone link building, on the argument that one dataset can earn links, brand mentions, AI citations and social distribution at once.
One client campaign produced more than 1,000 earned citations, including coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Axios, Fox Business and Reuters. The first month produced a single link and the client complained, Rowe said, before placements climbed and journalists began emailing to ask when the next dataset would be ready. The Wall Street Journal later asked the team to update a dataset on its own.
A second client, an online university in a regulated category, kept its existing blog, added a handful of studies and put its professors in front of the media. Rowe said individual studies pull traffic from AI Overviews and several hold position one for commercial keywords, and that clicks arriving from ChatGPT convert above average, though he described the volume as low next to Google search.
Rowe warned that free federal data and language models make poor studies easy to produce, and that journalists who catch a brand sending inaccurate data will stop working with it. He also said syndication networks are useful for exposure but should not be counted on for links, since value comes from a journalist picking a story up and writing about it.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗
Topics: AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Citations