Many new users often ask: what does PR really deliver? The honest answer: less direct evidence than you might be used to from marketing or sales. You don't have dashboards that fill up with conversions and no A/B testing that you can adjust in real-time.
But that doesn't make publications any less valuable. In fact, in an age where AI plays an increasingly significant role, earned media is becoming more critical.
Why PR is harder to measure (and why it's becoming more relevant)
PR is about credibility, visibility, and authority. These are not metrics you can directly track in Google Analytics. A publication is not just about reach, but mainly about context: a journalist who finds your story worth sharing. You cannot purchase that implicit recommendation.
Meanwhile, something else is happening: LLMs increasingly prefer original, organic content over sponsored or optimized marketing texts. That's earned media. As AI increasingly functions as an information source or ‘search engine’, the value of publications automatically increases. An article genuinely written or selected by an editorial team is better interpreted and more frequently used as a source. For companies, this means reliability is more crucial than ever.
This also means that generic AI texts lose their value. Those who have entire blogs or LinkedIn posts written by AI without their own perspective simply add nothing to the information system, and thus become less visible. PR and original content actually strengthen each other.
How we estimate the PR value
At Presscloud, we work with an indicative PR value based on four factors. Not as absolute science, but as a realistic framework. In our Use Cases, you can see an estimated news value for each highlighted publication, based on the following factors:
Size of the medium: national media have the highest base value due to their massive distribution. An item on RTL Nieuws naturally weighs differently than a small niche blog.
Relevance of the medium: does the medium match your target audience? Then it also offers more value. A site like Productnieuws.nl is ideal for everything related to product launches and/or updates, De Ondernemer for entrepreneurs and start-ups, and local media for businesses operating locally. Relevance is just as important as reach.
Estimated number of people reached: page views don't tell the whole story. Your article is also read on the train, at the gym, forwarded in WhatsApp groups, or discussed at the coffee machine. The visible reach is always lower than the actual reach, which we take into account in our estimate.
Authenticity and exclusivity: an automated aggregator like Drimble scores low. A carefully crafted interview in Quote or a niche expert platform scores high. Journalistic attention and human selection give a publication extra weight, both for readers and algorithms.
The real value: visibility, trust, and independence
A publication is ultimately more than exposure. It's a signal that your story is worth it, confirmed by an independent medium. That builds trust with customers, partners, and increasingly with AI systems that determine what information to use as sources. This is GEO, the discipline that determines if your brand is found by AI models like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Claude. And to echo the words of Denise van Ooijen: GEO is the new SEO.
In a time when misinformation is on the rise and AI detects publications faster than you can keep track of them, one thing remains: reputation is human work. Publications strengthen that foundation. And a strong foundation pays off, even if you don't always see it reflected directly in your dashboards.
