Talk 1. Digital PR’s Role in Traditional and AI Search in 2026 and Beyond
📢Sophie Coley, Head of AI & Strategy & Steve Baker, Head of PR at Propellernet

 

 

 

 

 

As AI search fundamentally reshapes how audiences discover information, Digital PR has evolved from a link-building tactic into a critical influence layer across both traditional and generative search.

This session explores how PR strategies now need to operate across three concurrent timelines: contributing to immediate SEO impact, mid-term brand visibility and long-term influence on AI training data, all at once. We’ll also touch on emerging implications for the rapidly approaching agentic era.

Key Delegate Takeaways:

• The dual mandate of modern Digital PR – How PR campaigns should now serve both traditional SEO (via high quality, earned links) and AI search visibility (by securing brand mentions alongside key messages in AI-friendly media titles and also securing links into pages that are relevant to key fan-out queries)
• Strategic citation building – Why “According to [Expert] from [Brand]…” structures and placements in AI-licensed media (News Corp, Condé Nast, The Atlantic, FT, Guardian) are the gold standard for Digital PR that’s aiming to influence LLMs
• Fan-out query optimisation – How AI models break prompts into multiple sub-queries when searching the web for information, and why PR-driven links to pages relevant to these fan-out queries can deliver short-term AI search visibility
• Training data influence – Understanding the lag between media coverage and LLM knowledge bank updates, and how to secure long-term AI search visibility
• The (near) future: Agentic AI – Early signals on how autonomous AI agents will discover and evaluate brands, and how brands should prepare.

Talk 2. From Coverage to Context: How Digital PR Builds Brand Distinctiveness in AI
📢Laura Smith, Head of Client Strategy at ICS-digital 

As AI reshapes how brands are discovered and recommended, a new gap is emerging — the gap between how brands are remembered by people and how they are retrieved by machines.

Behavioural science research from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science shows that distinctiveness drives memory — and memory drives commercial choice. Yet while humans and AI systems both rely on patterns and associations, they form and retrieve meaning through different signals.

As AI increasingly mediates discovery, brands risk becoming memorable but not retrievable – and therefore invisible in AI-driven search – or vice-versa. In this session, we’ll explore how Digital PR can bridge this human–machine memory gap, strengthening brand distinctiveness through authority, contextual ownership and consistent signals.

Key Delegate Takeaways:

• Understanding the Human–Machine Memory Gap – How AI systems retrieve brand meaning differently to people — and the implications for visibility, recommendation and growth.
• How Distinctiveness Drives Commercial Choice – Why mental availability and contextual cues shape buying decisions — and the role Digital PR plays in building them.
• Using Context Mapping as a Strategic PR Advantage – How mapping priority themes and keywords to deliberate brand contexts strengthens both human memory and machine retrieval.
• How Coverage Reinforces — or Dilutes — Brand Meaning – Why the framing and repetition within coverage matters — and how consistent contextual signals improve retrievability.
• Digital PR Within a Wider Distinctiveness System – How DPR aligns with technical, content and authority signals to strengthen brand retrieval across the discovery ecosystem.

Talk 3. Closing & Expanding Authority Gaps With Hyper-Relevant Digital PR To Improve SEO Rankings & GEO Visibility
📢Amanda Walls, Head of Organic Media at Cedarwood Digital

In an AI-first search landscape, authority is no longer built through volume, it’s built through precision. While many brands focus on acquiring coverage, few are systematically identifying and closing the authority gaps that are actively suppressing their rankings and limiting their inclusion in generative search results.

This session explores how to use hyper-relevant Digital PR to not only close competitive authority gaps, but expand them strengthening topical signals, reinforcing entity associations, and improving both traditional SEO rankings and GEO visibility in AI-driven search environments.

Key Delegate Takeaways:

• How to identify the authority gaps that are holding back rankings – Learn how to move beyond surface-level link gap analysis to uncover domain, topical and entity-level authority deficits that are impacting your organic performance and AI citation visibility.
• How to design hyper-relevant digital PR that strengthens ranking signals – Understand how to prioritise niche publications, contextual relevance and topical reinforcement over raw domain metrics — building authority clusters that improve ranking stability and competitive positioning.
• How to expand the gap and increase GEO visibility – Discover how strategic Digital PR can move you from parity to dominance — reinforcing entity signals, improving AI Overview inclusion, and building an authority moat that competitors struggle to replicate.

* Further talks to be added

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