Digital PR has always had a role in SEO. The connection between earning coverage in authoritative publications and improving search visibility is not new. But for many professional services firms, PR and SEO have sat in separate conversations, measured differently, resourced differently, and in some cases not joined up in a way that maximises the value of either.
That needs to change — and quickly. The rapid rise of AI search has elevated off-site trust signals from a useful SEO lever to a critical one. If your firm is not appearing across authoritative third-party sources, you are not just missing backlinks. You are missing out on visibility in the AI-powered search experiences where a growing number of your prospects are starting their research.
PR has always mattered for SEO — it just hasn't always been treated that way
Disciplines like SEO and PPC come with clear, trackable metrics — rankings improve, clicks increase, conversions are attributed. The cause and effect is direct and easy to report on. PR works differently, and that difference can cause it to be mischaracterised as a ‘nice to have’ rather than a core strategic investment.
That characterisation significantly undersells what PR actually delivers. Good digital PR has always driven real commercial value — sometimes directly, through referral traffic and inbound enquiries generated by coverage, and consistently through brand awareness. The trust built when a firm's name appears regularly in credible publications, when solicitors are quoted as expert voices in the media, when a brand becomes genuinely recognisable across a sector — this is the foundation on which confident buying decisions are made. It has always been the case, and it is often underestimated.
The connection to SEO runs alongside this. Backlinks from authoritative publications remain one of Google's most important ranking signals, and PR is one of the most effective ways to earn them. But links are only part of the picture. Brand mentions, consistent third-party coverage, and the broader off-site footprint that comes from genuine PR activity all contribute to the trust signals that search engines — and increasingly AI — use to evaluate how credible and authoritative a firm is. A well-placed feature in a trade publication or a quoted comment in the national press builds something that on-site content alone cannot replicate.
AI search has raised the stakes considerably
When we talk about search today, we are talking about more than Google's ten blue links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini are now genuinely part of how people find information, including how they research professional services firms before making an enquiry.
The scale of this shift is significant. AI-powered search tools are now handling billions of queries globally, and in professional services, more and more early-stage research is happening via these tools. A prospective client with a legal question might type it into ChatGPT before they ever visit a firm's website. They might ask Perplexity to recommend law firms specialising in a particular area. They might use an AI Overview to understand their options before deciding who to contact.
For firms that have built their entire digital presence around performing well in traditional Google search, this is a challenge. AI search does not simply rank pages — it synthesises information from sources it has determined to be credible and trustworthy. And the way it makes that determination is fundamentally different from how a search engine crawls and ranks a webpage.
Off-site authority is how AI decides who to cite
Large language models — the technology underpinning ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and others — were trained on enormous datasets drawn from across the web. The more frequently a firm or individual appears in authoritative, widely-cited sources, the more likely they are to be recognised as a credible entity, and the more likely they are to be cited when a relevant question is asked.
This is where digital PR becomes critical. A firm that publishes strong content on its own website but rarely features in third-party publications is, from an LLM's perspective, largely unknown. It may rank in traditional search for its target keywords, but it lacks the footprint of off-site references that AI engines draw from when generating their answers.
By contrast, a firm whose partners regularly provide expert commentary in the trade press, whose research is cited in industry reports, whose brand appears consistently across Legal Futures, the Law Society Gazette, sector-specific journals, and mainstream media — that firm is building exactly the kind of off-site authority profile that LLMs learn from and reference.
Unlinked brand mentions matter here too. AI models do not care only about followed backlinks in the way Google's algorithm does. They recognise entity associations. A firm name appearing repeatedly across credible contexts, even without a hyperlink, contributes to the signal that this is a recognised, authoritative entity within its sector.
Why this is especially important for legal and professional services
In legal and professional services, trust is the primary purchase driver. Clients are not making low-stakes decisions. They are choosing a firm to handle a divorce, a serious injury claim, a property transaction, a business dispute. The due diligence they apply before instructing is substantial, and increasingly, that due diligence starts with an AI tool.
When someone asks ChatGPT "what should I look for in a personal injury solicitor?" or Perplexity "which law firms handle clinical negligence in Manchester?", the answers those tools generate will draw from the sources they have determined to be authoritative on those topics. If your firm is not present in those sources — if your partners are not quoted in the relevant press, if your brand is not referenced in directories and publications that carry weight — you are far less likely to feature in those answers, however strong your website may be.
There is also a specific dynamic in legal around named individuals. AI engines are increasingly capable of entity-level recognition — understanding not just that a firm exists, but that specific solicitors within it are recognised authorities on specific topics. A partner who regularly provides expert commentary on family law, whose name appears alongside that topic across multiple credible publications, is more likely to be cited by an LLM in response to a family law query than a partner who has no off-site presence, regardless of their actual expertise.
This is one of the most concrete arguments for a digital PR strategy that targets named individuals, not just the firm as a whole. Getting a partner quoted in the right publication does not just build brand awareness. It builds the kind of entity-level recognition that AI search draws from.
What digital PR needs to look like to serve both SEO and AI search
The shift towards AI search does not mean abandoning what has always worked in digital PR. It means being more deliberate about it.
Publication targeting matters more than ever. Not all coverage is equal from an LLM's perspective. Coverage in publications that are themselves widely cited, trusted, and referenced across the web carries significantly more weight than coverage in lower-authority outlets. For legal firms, this means prioritising the Law Society Gazette, Legal Futures, Chambers, Legal 500, relevant national press, and sector-specific publications that carry genuine authority. These are the sources that LLMs have learned from and continue to reference.
Named expert commentary should be a consistent output. Firms that brief journalists and contribute bylined articles under specific solicitors' names — rather than always attributing commentary to the firm generically — are building person-level entity recognition that serves both E-E-A-T signals in Google and entity disambiguation in LLMs. The more a named solicitor appears as a credible voice on a specific topic, the stronger that signal becomes.
Original data and research travel further than opinion. When a firm produces original research — a survey of client attitudes, analysis of claims data, commentary on court statistics — that data gets cited by other publications, linked to, and referenced in ways that generic thought leadership does not. LLMs are particularly likely to cite specific data points, and a firm that regularly produces citable data is building a compounding off-site authority advantage.
Consistency across topics builds topical authority. A firm that earns coverage on family law one month, employment law the next, and data protection the month after is not building strong topical signals in any area. Firms that target consistent coverage on their core practice areas — quarter after quarter — build the kind of repeated, topically coherent off-site presence that reinforces their authority in those areas to both Google and AI engines.
The firms that invest now will have a meaningful advantage
The window for building a strong off-site presence ahead of AI search fully maturing is not unlimited. Firms that have already been earning consistent coverage in authoritative publications for years have a head start. The authority those off-site signals represent cannot be replicated quickly — it accrues over time as coverage compounds.
For firms that have treated PR as peripheral to their SEO strategy, now is the moment to reconsider that position. AI search is not a future trend to monitor. It is already influencing how prospects find and choose professional services firms. The firms building their off-site authority now — through deliberate, consistent digital PR that targets the publications and individuals that carry real weight — are laying the foundations for visibility in a search landscape where off-site trust signals matter more than they ever have.
Digital PR has always been a sound SEO investment. The rise of AI search has made it an essential one.
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