Digital PR agencies in Bath.

A typical UK digital PR campaign runs on a 6-12 week cycle from brief to coverage. Weeks one and two cover ideation and data sourcing. Weeks three and four are analysis and asset build. Outreach starts around week five, with first pickups landing weeks five to eight. Root Digital benchmark data puts the average time from publish to first earned link at 38 days, with secondary coverage accumulating across the following 1-3 months.

Traditional PR is reputation-led: brand storytelling, crisis comms, spokesperson management, and relationships with trade and consumer press across print, broadcast, and online. Success is measured in coverage quality, sentiment, and share of conversation. Digital PR is story-led with an earned-media goal that explicitly includes backlinks and search visibility. Campaigns are usually built around original data, surveys, or a timely angle. Most credible UK agencies do both, but the disciplines need different skill sets and different KPIs.

No, and the difference matters. Link-building is transactional: outreach to anyone who'll publish a link, often via guest posts, paid placements, or networks of sites. Digital PR earns coverage by pitching a real story to real journalists who choose to write about it on editorial merit. Links are an outcome, not the product. Google Search Central's spam policies explicitly treat link schemes as a violation, and PBN-style activity dressed up as PR is now easy to spot.

AI Overviews now appear in around a quarter of Google searches, and ChatGPT and Perplexity have become routine answer engines for product research. That has pushed digital PR's centre of gravity from pure backlink chasing toward share of voice and citation frequency in AI answers. UK practitioners (Bottle, Rise at Seven, Aira) now report on branded search growth, mention volume, and share of answer alongside the links-and-coverage scorecard. The underlying craft hasn't changed.