The death of the backlink: Why PR is now the most powerful SEO tool you have

For three decades, the rules of digital visibility were simple enough: earn links, climb rankings, get found. SEO was a technical game, and PR sat in a separate lane - focused on reputation, relationships, and column inches.

That's over.

The rise of AI-powered search tools: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot have quietly rewritten the rulebook. And in doing so, it has handed PR professionals something they never quite had before: the keys to search visibility.

From Backlinks to Brand Mentions

Traditional SEO was built on the logic of links. The more authoritative sites that linked to you, the more Google trusted you, and the higher you ranked. PR helped with this indirectly, a placement in an industry publication might earn a backlink, which fed the SEO machine.

But LLMs don't work like Google. They don't count links. They read, absorb and synthesise enormous volumes of text. News articles, trade publications, analyst reports, press releases, forums, blogs. From that they form a picture of who the authoritative voices in any given space are.

In AI-powered chat search, the focus is no longer on backlinks, but on brand mentions. It's no longer crucial who links to a website, but where a brand is mentioned and what is being said about it. 

That is, quite simply, the core business of PR.

What This Means in Practise

When a CTO at a major bank asks ChatGPT which cybersecurity vendors are worth evaluating, the answer won't be shaped by who spent the most on Google Ads, or who had the most technically optimised website. It will be shaped by which companies have been consistently mentioned. Positively, credibly, and in context across the publications, analyst reports and thought leadership pieces that the LLM has been trained on.

If your client has been regularly featured in iTWire, TechDay, the Australian Financial Review's technology section, and cited in analyst commentary, they stand a very good chance of surfacing in that answer. If they haven't, they won't, regardless of how good their product actually is.

The New Discipline: GEO

The industry is beginning to call this Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO. GEO ensures that content structure, technical schema, and messaging hierarchy work seamlessly with AI crawlers and citation algorithms so that preferred messaging surfaces more frequently and accurately across ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, and emerging AI platforms. 

But here's what the technology vendors selling GEO tools often don't say loudly enough: the content that feeds those citation algorithms comes from earned media. Press releases that get picked up. Executive commentary placed in trade publications. Customer case studies published on credible third-party platforms. Thought leadership articles in the outlets your buyers actually read.

That's PR work.

What Forward-Looking PR Firms Are Doing

The most sophisticated agencies are already adapting. Using AI agents to act as specific buyer personas, firms are now querying LLMs to understand what questions those personas are most likely to ask and what answers they're currently receiving. That insight then directly shapes the PR and content strategy: what narratives to push, which outlets to target, what executive voices to amplify.

The measurement question is also evolving. Alongside traditional metrics like media placements and share of voice, the new question is: does your client appear in an AI-generated answer when their buyer asks a relevant question?

Why This Is Good News for PR

For years, PR struggled to demonstrate its commercial value in a language that CFOs understood. SEO had dashboards, rankings, traffic data. PR had clippings and AVEs.

That's changing. When a media placement in a credible trade publication directly influences whether a company appears in an AI-generated recommendation to a potential buyer, the commercial chain is clear. PR is no longer just reputation management. It's pipeline management.

The agencies and in-house teams that understand this first will have a significant advantage. The window to build that positioning is open right now.