End-to-end outreach workflow
Vince Nero
Vince is the Director of Content Marketing at Buzzstream. He thinks content marketers should solve for users, not just Google. He also loves finding creative content online. His previous work includes content marketing agency Siege Media for six years, Homebuyer.com, and The Grit Group. Outside of work, you can catch Vince running, playing with his 2 kids, enjoying some video games, or watching Phillies baseball.
Focus on earning a few high-quality links rather than chasing volume.
Use tightly targeted outreach instead of mass emailing journalists.
Lead every pitch with a clear, compelling story—not a link request.
Tie campaigns to timely trends, news, or seasonal angles.
Create original, data-driven Read more
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“Google Zero” is overstated — traffic isn’t vanishing, growth has just leveled off.
SEO is now a zero-sum game — if you win the click, someone else loses it.
Many publishers mistake flat traffic for actual decline.
AI overviews reduce clicks, but they’re not the core problem.
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There is typically a disparity between links and the bottom line. A lot of the time, a link-building agency may be contracted to just get links or drive organic traffic, but there's no clear throughline to how it impacts the company's bottom line.
And even if you are doing what you are hired for —building Read more
No single site dominates AI citations—Reddit leads at just 3.49%.
Prompt type drives citations more than domain.
Blog/content makes up 53.46% of all citations, far ahead of news (14.09%) and social (8.71%).
Owned content appears in ~40% of brand awareness queries.
Earned media accounts Read more
Stick to core PR and SEO fundamentals instead of chasing every new LLM trend.
Invest in niche sites and communities where your audience actually spends time.
Ensure your brand messaging is clear and consistent across your site and third-party mentions.
Regularly search your brand and category Read more
Relationships drive results: prior replies lead to 1.5x more opens and 19x more responses
A single reply isn’t just engagement—it’s a relationship trigger that compounds future outreach success
Recency matters: journalist relationships decay significantly after ~90 days
Even after Read more
Relevance matters most—don’t pitch journalists things they don’t cover
Use small, targeted media lists instead of mass outreach
Lead with a clear story idea (headline + angle), not a long press release
Build relationships so your emails get prioritized in crowded inboxes
Be reliable Read more
Create newsworthy, data-driven stories—AI rewards original insights it can’t generate itself.
Focus on entity authority, not just links—get your brand mentioned across many relevant platforms.
Build topical dominance with fewer, stronger pages (10x content), not lots of thin content.
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Overall, about 3% of all news citations came from publishers with confirmed OpenAI or Google data partnerships.
Less than 1% of citations from Gemini, AI Mode, and AI Overviews came from Google’s confirmed partner, the Associated Press.
28.5% of ChatGPT news citations came from OpenAI partners, Read more
Around 75% of sites blocking OpenAI or Google AI bots still appeared in AI citations.
Roughly 95% of the cited pages blocked GPTBot or Google-Extended, the bots used for model training.
About 70% of ChatGPT citations came from sites blocking ChatGPT-User or OAI-SearchBot, which power live Read more
