Digital PR Is How You Get Cited by ChatGPT

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric asks Neil to finally explain digital PR and how it helps with AEO and SEO. Neil gets there via a Huawei phone with a screen on the back, how ByteDance ran AI inside Lark two years before the rest of us, where America really ranks in K-12 education (34th, per Google AI Mode), what China mandates instead, and the FOMO playbook behind Alpha School's marketing. Then the answer: digital PR is the new link building, you're optimizing for the mention, not the link, and you want your product included everywhere the models read. They close on the only marketing advantage that compounds: consistency. Key takeaways◾Digital PR is optimizing for the mention, not the link. That's what the models read◾America ranks 34th in K-12; China mandates 9 years and tracks 40% into vocational paths◾Consistency compounds. Grey-hat wins evaporate, and one channel is never enough Chapters00:00 What is digital PR, actually?00:27 Huawei's phone with a screen on the back01:07 ByteDance and Lark were doing this two years ago02:43 America is 34th in K-12 (Google AI Mode)05:36 Compulsory schooling: US vs China06:14 Alpha School's FOMO marketing10:28 Digital PR: optimize for the mention15:15 Consistency compounds

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:40Speaker 01

  Looking like, uh, dude, I had to show you something before I go into Huawei, because we're talking about iPhones. Huawei.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  H U A W E I.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Uh, with screen.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, check this out. Look at Huawei's, this is cool. They're trying to put screens in the back. I would buy that.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you can see, well, like when you're in the camera and all that kind of stuff, right?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  The camera is better on the back than the front.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  That's cool, but like, what else would you use it for?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  I don't know, but like, that doesn't, if it didn't increase the dimension of my phone, I think that's a cool feature that I would pay for.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  So, digital PR, to go back to your digital PR question, sorry for the sidetrack, but I had to show you that because with all the iPhone releases, people are talking about the Chinese phones and how they're already better and ahead of where the iPhone Pro should be going.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  For a second, right? Because here's the thing. When I showed the ByteDance team how we work inside of Slack with AI, they laughed at me, right? Because they were already doing that like a year or two ago, right? Because they have this thing called Lark, L I A R K. And the funny thing is when we show Americans how we use, mind blown, oh my God, right? It's so amazing, right? Um, and so they are, I would say like, we don't know a lot of these things, but they're ahead in a lot of cases and they're making do. They might not have as much energy, well, no, no, they might not have all the AI tech, but they have much more energy than us. So they're making do with whatever that they have. Um, so I'm saying, you know, whether it's the United States or China or any other country, you don't want to underestimate them. Because look at the phones, they look like they're, they're better than ours.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  I remember, I believe it was the All In, uh, interview with Travis, the ex Uber CEO and founder. He ended up talking about China and he's like, they move so fast, they copy really quickly. And he's like, what's crazy is not only do they copy super fast, but what's interesting is after a while, they've copied everything. Then they start innovating and producing more than what you're, uh, producing. And then you're starting to look at them and be like, wow, we should copy this.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, and here's the thing. How, we're talking about mindset again, okay? The mindset of that culture, because I'm from that culture, right? I know how it is. You're, you're, you're working all the time, you're studying all the time. It's, it's nine, nine, six, sometimes nine, nine, seven in terms of hours, right? Nine AM to nine PM, seven days a week. But there's only so many companies that do that. So if they keep compounding that advantage, how do you beat that at a certain point, right?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  It's tough, even with AI, they're still working all those hours with AI to get even more done.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Yep. So I wonder, have you looked into this as a parent, Neil? Have you looked into how we rank with mathematics versus China?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  We're terrible. We're probably in the bottom, you know, 10%, 20% bottom, I don't know. I know we're not in the top, if I had to guess, I don't even think we're in the top 10% globally for education.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Okay, so let me give you the rankings here. I'm using a Google AI mode for this, okay? So it basically for K-12, okay, Singapore is number one.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm pointing at myself because I'm yellow. Number one is Singapore, number two is Macau.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Number three is China, uh, China, uh, sorry, number three is Taiwan.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Number four is Hong Kong.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  I'm half Hong Kong, half Taiwanese, right? Number five is Japan, number six is South Korea.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Number 34 is the United States.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Right? How do you beat that education system? How do you beat that work ethic? Because we get distracted by all these things, right? All these other things in the workplace, we're just leaving at that, yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  But what people forget about the US is, it doesn't mean the US is screwed. It means the average is screwed. The US has amazing mathematic programs. Sadly, for people who are privileged and have money.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, and so this is, this is the thing. The rich will get richer, and not only that, the rich will get richer because they have intelligence, like you have infinite intelligence behind them too.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Dude, uh, the school I go to, my kids go to, I've met some really interesting people there. Uh, it's a great school. Quite a few of the parents are from China. And when I asked them, what made you move? They're like, school, we moved to the US to go to this school here. And I'm like, wait, what? And one of the parents I was talking to, they got one of their kids in, so one of their kids went here. One of their kids was still in school in China, they would fly back and forth. This is dedication. Uh, the kid now just got into the school that's nearby, another amazing school. They're older, so, and then now both their kids here, and now they're full-time just living in the US.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Well, you know how it works. Our university system is better, right? But our K through 12.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  No, this is for K through 12.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Okay, well, we just kind of.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  But this is for, uh, private, so that's what I'm saying, for the privilege, right? Like if you have money, but the competition for these schools, even if you have money, for every, I, I don't know what the ratio is, is, but some people joke that it's harder to get into than Harvard. Because everyone has money, everyone has letters of recommendations, like it's extremely hard. People move from all over the United States.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Supply and demand.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  And this is the interesting that I found. A lot of the parents that I've talked to move their primary home, even if they live in Southern California, closer to the school. So in other words, they're changing their life for the school.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  Yep, this is interesting. I didn't know this was true, Neil, so, uh, and then we can, we can move on to the, the digital PR thing. But compulsory schooling, do you know what this is? So the US mandates 12 to 13 years of compulsory education. China legally mandates nine years, primary and lower secondary, with roughly 40% of upper secondary students, uh, sorting into specialized vocational tracks, which I believe that should be how education is. Because I do believe at age nine or 10, for you or me, we probably could have started going into business or marketing. Because we, we just hired a 15-year-old, right? And I can tell, like, he, it's, your, your brain might not be fully formed yet, you might not be fully developed, but he's already got the capabilities to do it. And I believe we should change to just 12 to 13 years of forced education.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  No, Alpha School already did it. You, you see their entrepreneur program.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  He's from Alpha School.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Oh, he's from Alpha School. Uh, they have an entrepreneur, they have, I think, three different versions when you're older. One of the versions is, is if you don't make a million dollars by the time you graduate in revenue for your business, they'll, they'll refund your whole tuition.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  So when people join the company, you're required to put, there's a photo sharing channel that we have where you share like introductions, right? So he joins, say, hey, guys, I'm 15 years old, um, here's the computer I built, blah, blah. My goal is to make a million dollars by the time I'm 18. I'm like, fuck yeah, because that gets everyone else to like have to step up as well. I'm like, if he can come in and do it, you better, you better have that motivation as well.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  So it's really cool to see that.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's great. I, I mean, but I just, I, I hope there's going to be more Alpha Schools. And you know more about Alpha School than I do. We should talk about that real quick, because I think the marketing behind it is genius. It's like, I know this guy, Nat Elyson, he kind of runs the million dollar program, right? Where, um, he's like, hey, like if, if you don't make a million dollars or whatever, you get your tuition back or something like that, right? Um, I think that's great marketing because it's training kids to lean into their entrepreneurial tendencies. And that's not saying everyone's going to be an entrepreneur, but it's to say that age doesn't matter. And I think that's a great alternative to standard schooling that we have. But did I miss anything there?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  No, you, you know that, uh, what's really interesting on how they do marketing, they pre-market before they go into a, a city. So let's say Las Vegas, I know Las Vegas well because AI used to live there, but my co-founder, Mike, lives there currently and he has two kids.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Well, he has two now?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Uh huh, so Alpha School has it where, uh, they start marketing everything that they're doing, the programs, and they're creating all this content, they're putting it around the web, they're doing podcast interviews to get the brand out there. Then for them to come to your school, they're looking at demand. They get the community to help. Oh, you love what we're doing? You like this? Are you willing to put down a deposit and be one of the founding families?

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Oh, cool. Founding families.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Uh, can you help us recruit more? Because unless we have X amount of founding families, we won't open up a school in that area. So then you are now marketing Alpha School to all the other parents. Cause if you have kids, your kids play with other kids.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  And you're incentivized because you have money in there.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Yes. So now you are marketing Alpha School for them. You don't get a discount or any, from my understanding, you don't get a discount or people don't care for it. It's not substantial enough where it would make a difference. You're going out there and doing this just so you can have this within your city. It's pretty much creating evangelists before they enter in your city. And this is causing them to create enough of a waitlist and a deposit before they enter. And the moment they enter, they're filled up because they've already done all the marketing ahead of time before they spent the money on the building, the rent, the teachers and all of that. So now you don't have a business model that's just juicing up tons of cash.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  This is a high status marketing. That's what FOMO marketing, high status marketing, and you'll do anything for your kids.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Only so many slots. A school isn't like.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  A big school.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  No, yeah, it's not, it's not like where you can fit a thousand kids and all these cities have a lot of kids. So you gotta get in and it is FOMO because if you're not in there, you're gonna miss out. So you better go and help them early on.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  And you'll do anything for your kids.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  How much does it cost a year? Sixty-five grand? Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. Is that what it is? All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called MP Digital.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also Neil has SEO tools such as UberSuggest and Answer2Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  I think here is like either sixty, seventy, it depends. They, they base the pricing, not just a blanket pricing. It's based on the city you're in because rent costs more, let's say in Beverly Hills, they're working on opening one up than it would in East Hollywood, right? So they base the pricing based on their costs as well.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  I think this is interesting because the, the promise, I believe, someone can correct me here, but it's if, if your kid doesn't have a million dollar a year business, by the time they're eighteen, they'll give you all your money back.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Not a million dollar a year, from my understanding.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Million in profit?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  No, from my understanding, you have to generate a million in revenue.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  By the time they're, they graduate.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think, I could be off on this.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Oh, so aggregate revenue, I see. That's still good though.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  That's still really good. It's, it's not about if they hit a million or not. It's about teaching them the skills and the grit and the grind.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  And then they'll be able to do whatever they want. And so I believe whether it's Alpha Score or something else, I think this will start to trend upwards more. And do I think it's gonna be a privileged thing? Yes, I do. But I think it's, it's good if, if you can afford it. So.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. Digital PR Neil. So what is digital PR actually and how does it help with AEU and SEO?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Sure. So, uh, think of getting websites. Let's say you're,

• 12:09Speaker 01

  you're a business that sells, I don't know, um.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  Massage oil.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  No, not massage oil. That's a bad example. I know more entrepreneur topics. What do entrepreneurs buy?

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Uh, computers?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Uh, sure, computers. Let's say you sell like these AI computers with tons of RAM and servers and all that kind of stuff. Your ideal websites to talk about you would be Entrepreneur, Forbes, for like the business and the executive types. Uh, also for, it would be CNET. I don't know too many of the tech sites. CNET, TechCrunch, Ziff Davis.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Davis, yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Right? Some of those websites talking about you. So digital PR is like, all right, how can we get these websites to talk about you, review you, build relationships with the journalists? But it's also going out there and be like, oh, they have a listicle on this, or this webpage breaks down the best servers for running, um, your own instance of some new LLM that's hot. I don't know what the latest hottest LLM is.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Astra, ChatGPT six.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Okay. Um, no, I'm talking about on your local device and not using.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  Oh, Quinn.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Okay, Quinn. So then if they have an article just for that, and they're mentioning some of the servers that you can do, you'd be like, hey, these servers aren't actually set up for running Quinn as efficiently because you're talking, the memory usage is just the bare minimum. So when you're doing X, Y, and Z, you actually need this much. We actually have a computer that solves this. Check this out. If you can include it in this article, that'll be great. It's like the new version of link building. If they link, great. If they mention your brand, great. You just wanna be included everywhere where people are talking about, uh, products or services that are ideal for you. And you wanna make sure they're mentioning and talking about you in a good way.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  But it's not like old school link building where it's just like, hey, can you just include a link? You want them to actually talk about your product and service and dive into it and break it down and talk about why it's better than some of the alternatives. Like the more, it's just like a PR person pitching a magazine to get included and do an exclusive or just getting an article or a mention in there. It's kind of similar, but you're doing it online and you're optimizing for the mention. And of course, why not get links at the same time? Cause everyone's like, you just need mentions anymore. Well, if you get a mention and a link, that's better than just getting a mention, right?

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Yep. So go ahead and finish up.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  So when it's, when you're doing that, relevant sites, very detail oriented on how they're describing you, getting the mentions, getting the links, all of this stuff really influences LLMs. And the key, and this is the pattern that we're seeing shift. Eric and I have been on this talk track for a long time before everyone's like, spray and pray and just get any website to mention you. Now, people are trying to focus on getting the right type of sites that are industry-related, mentioning you and talking about you. Because everyone knows that it's easy to get Joe Schmo guest posts on whatever random site, get them to mention you. It's not as effective, we believe, in the long run for a good website. And if you're really good at digital PR, you're not just gonna be like, let me just get placed anywhere. You're gonna be like, what are we trying to get mentioned on the LLMs for?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Oh, the best, uh, computer for running, you know, your own instance of Kimia. Or did you say it's Quinn or Kimia or whatever?

• 15:31Speaker 00

  Kimia is fine.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, whatever one you want.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  And if you know this is booming, you can get a lot of business for it. You're asking these questions to LLM. You're asking, you're looking at the sources that they're already citing this exact article and URL. And you're hitting those people up and trying to convince them to include you as well. Cause that's the quickest way to get mentioned on that list.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  So what I would say with all this is that just, SEO back in the day was Google, right? There was no LLMs or anything like that. Today you have these ultimate pattern recognizers, whether it's Astra or you know, ChatGPT, Anthropic, whatever it is exactly. What are they gonna look for? You don't think they can get around the fact that you're just spamming a bunch of other websites? Like that might've worked before, but now it's like, okay, they're gonna look for patterns, right? It's like, oh, does the site look relevant? Oh, are other people talking about that website? Oh, can I see what text is surrounding a link coming back to you? Obviously you would just choose that.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Other people included because of the random junk sites, you know that, oh, it doesn't help us much at all.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  And so it's just a better, better, better pattern recognizer than what Google was before. And Google's Gemini is, is pretty strong on its own. And so you gotta think, like, if this is evolving, like what naturally would it be looking for? And digital PR, you might say, oh, this is nothing new. It's like, it is nothing new, but what's, what's old is new again, right? And this is what works out well. And so even a year or two ago, when, when people were, were spamming their, their own websites with a bunch of these like, you know, comparison or listicles, um, that worked really well because the LLMs didn't catch up yet. Now they're catching up more. I'm not saying that doesn't work, but they're getting smarter and smarter by the day. And I have Astra six on my iPad now. So I'm gonna go work on this right after we finish.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Dude, one last thing before we finish, cause we're about time and we actually finished really well on time because.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  No, we have a couple more. I have one more episode.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But, um, yeah, we started at, uh, oh, three. But, um, when we,

• 17:18Speaker 01

  when we started talking about LLMs back in the day, you and I were like, they're much more sophisticated than traditional search. Yet marketers believe that you can use the same old spammy tactics that used ten years ago. Cause they're not sophisticated. So you're like, wait, you think you can use the old school tactics to spam Google? And you know, they stopped working on Google because Google are more sophisticated. These LLMs are more sophisticated than Google and they're evolving at a very rapid rate. You don't think that you're gonna go through all those same learnings again? So why not just skip the spammy stuff and just do the right stuff from day one? Cause it's gonna last long and you're gonna do way better in the long run. But yet marketers, for some reason, it, it doesn't click for a lot of them when they already know LLMs are much smarter.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  So we've been doing this podcast for, it's gotta be like eleven years now or something like that, right? Some eleven or ten years, okay? We've always said this in the beginning, do the black hat stuff in a white hat way, okay? This is the perfect example of that. It takes a little more effort, but it works a lot better than just spamming everything. And yet people still do the same thing over and over.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  And I wanna clarify what Eric's saying. He's not saying use black hat tactics. He's saying learn from the black hat tactics and do them in legitimate, long-term strategies. He's not saying do the black hat tactics on legitimate businesses. He's saying learn from the black hat strategies and do them in legitimate ways. Even if it takes more time and money and energy, it's more worth it in the long run because the results will continually compound versus having a short-term effect where you're getting that like dopamine and then it just goes away because it doesn't work anymore.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And by the way, a perfect example of this, I, I've looked at, you know, whether it's Neil or myself, the evolution of our marketing over the years. There'll be some years where like I'm good at YouTube and some years where I suck. And then there's some years where I'm good at this channel and then the same thing for you, like it kind of ebbs and flows, right? But the one thing that we've been consistent with is that we've been consistent, right? That's the one advantage. It's just, this is how you outlast other people by just continuing to do. And by the way, when you try doing the black hat stuff, we, we, we've like experimented, early days, I'm not speaking for Neil, but in the early days, I've tried the gray hat stuff. You, you, you lose everything for all your efforts. You might as well just do it the right way. It compounds a lot better and you learn as you go through your career. The five, ten, fifteen years goes by really quickly and then you see the benefit of compound interest. And even, by the way, I'll look at Neil's traffic, right?

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Neil, people were poo-pooing on Neil for losing his traffic. Doesn't matter because he's built so much infrastructure around all the other stuff that it doesn't matter, right? And that you're, you're impervious to just one channel going down. Whereas everyone else has been on one channel with all the black hat stuff and they lose it all. So that's the lesson. Keep being consistent. That's how you win at marketing.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  All right. Goodbye.