If you’ve spent any time in digital PR, you’ve probably come across this question.

What address do you send your pitch emails from?

Send from a branded email address, and you might be more recognizable. But that’s not always an option.

Send from an agency email address where you’ve built a relationship, and you may have a foot in the door.

Either way, our data shows that the sending address significantly affects whether the journalist interacts with the pitch.

In this piece, I’ll try to help answer these questions once and for all.

Quick notes on methodology

We analyzed more than 16,000 PR campaigns and 5 million emails sent through BuzzStream over the past two years, comparing agency-run outreach to in-house brand outreach.

List quality is another major confounding factor. I limited this to agencies and brands running very similar digital PR campaigns, such as data studies and reactive commentary.

To minimize this bias, I filtered out massive blasts, affiliate pushes, and outdated lists so we were comparing real PR outreach rather than database dumps.

We calculated both weighted and unweighted open and reply rates across all remaining campaigns.

Weighted rates reflect actual inbox performance across all emails sent, while unweighted rates reflect the typical performance of a single campaign.

Let’s get into it.

Overall Results

Overall, 92% of campaigns are sent from agency email domains.

Here is a table of the overall results:

However, when we dig into the data, we find some surprising differences in how they perform.

Emails From Agency Addresses Get Better Open Rates

Overall, emails from agency addresses have about 15% higher open rates than those from brands.

• Agency address: 41.54%
• Brand address: 35.68%

Because agencies tend to send larger campaigns, weighted open rates will naturally skew higher for them. That’s why I compared both weighted and unweighted rates.

Interestingly, the directional difference held in both cases.

There are potentially many reasons for this, but the main one that comes to mind is that agencies are just better at writing clickable subject lines.

Also, agencies can typically choose whom they work for and decline brands that may not have “news-worthy” content, giving them an advantage by potentially having better content to pitch. (It can also potentially impact brand recognition, which we’ll see may play a role in replies.)

The easiest way I thought to test this was to compare open rates between agencies sending from their own addresses vs agencies sending using brand emails.

This agency impact appears to hold: emails sent by agencies have higher open rates than those sent by brands.

Here’s the table:

So, why do agencies get better opens?

I think it is because of better subject lines.

When I manually reviewed a sample of the subject lines, I noticed some trends.

For instance, here are some of the agency subject lines ​​that illustrate the broader trend we saw in the subject-line data (slightly edited to obscure them a bit):

• “Exclusive: 1 in 3 people say the ‘worst gift’ is getting nothing at all…”
• “Event ticket costs — the price gaps are surprisingly extreme”
• “Urgent: Last-minute tips students are using to secure better course placements”

I see many of the same takeaways from our subject line study that directly connect to those written by agencies.

Concepts like urgency and emotion can go a long way towards helping an email stand out.

Compare that to subject lines sent from brands’ addresses:

• “Regional Connectivity Performance Index – Quarterly Update”
• “New survey: Health symptoms linked with day-to-day caregiving demands”
• “Digital Habits Report – Annual Findings”

Consider a subject line like this: “Regional Connectivity Performance Index – Quarterly Update”.

Give it the urgency/emotion agency glow up, and you’ve got something like this:

“Fresh Data: Regional Connectivity is Up a Surpising 85% in Q3.”

The simple addition of the adjective “surprising” makes it more clickable.

But opens aren’t the only metric we care about, so let’s look at reply rates.

Emails From Brand Addresses Get Better Reply Rates

Emails from brands generate ~60% more replies per email sent than those from agency emails.

• Brand address: 1.07%
• Agency address: 0.67%

Reply rates at this scale are tiny by nature — according to Muck Rack, about 50% of journalists never respond to pitches (good or bad) — so the more important thing to look for is whether a pattern consistently shows up across thousands of campaigns.

In this case, the brand-domain advantage held steady even when slicing the data multiple ways.

Some may look at low reply rates as a non-issue.

But, I think there is something more to this, because even when agencies send from brand email addresses, they get better reply rates:

Here’s the table:

As you can see, the reply rates for anything brand-related are about 0.86-0.87%.

So what’s the deal here? Why do brands get better replies?

I think brands get better replies due to a mix of two things:

1. Brands have built-in authority and recognition—as evidenced by the fact that agencies get better opens and replies when sending from brand domains.

2. Brand domain emails typically provided less information than agencies and left things open-ended with lines like:

• “I can connect you with one of our experts if you need further details.”
• “Would you like the full dataset or additional commentary?”

Should you do this when emailing journalists?

Our experience indicates it’s probably not the best strategy.

You should always aim to provide the journalist with all relevant information in a single email.

In fact, in a fantastic conversation with Hannah Smith, she outlined a process where you attempt to write a story based on everything you provide in your pitch. If you can’t, you’re not providing enough information.

Does Campaign Type Matter?

Another theory I had that was contributing to this increase in response rates was that reactive campaigns and commentary pitches elicit more responses.

In that case, both the agency and the brands would have similar reply rates for reactive campaigns.

But when I dug into that, that wasn’t really the case.

Brands once again had a higher reply rate than agencies.

Therefore, I don’t think it has to do with reactive.

What About Sending From Gmail?

But wait! A third option has arrived.

What if we send from Gmail or a personal email? Won’t that make us seem cooler and more relatable?

Unfortunately, Gmail accounts were used in only 8 of our 16,500 total campaigns, or about 1,797 emails sent.

Open rates were 24%.

(This is extremely small, so it’s not statistically reliable enough to draw strong conclusions. I’ve included it here mainly for completeness, not as a recommendation.)

With that out of the way, let’s wrap this up.

The Best Course of Action? Think Like an Agency

No dataset like this perfectly isolates every variable — industry, story format, list sourcing, and domain authority all play a role — but when the same directional patterns appear across thousands of campaigns and multiple slices of the data, they become difficult to ignore.

Based on our data, the best of both worlds seems to be sending an agency-optimized email but from a brand domain.

Those get the highest open and reply rates.

However, it’s easy to take away from this study that simply changing who you are sending from will get you better results.

That is not the case.

I think the story here is that agencies are better at writing more clickable, actionable email subject lines, which helps increase email opens.

That said, sending from a brand email address as an agency may give you an added edge in response rates as well.

We also didn’t get into the industry or type of content being pitched, which can affect open and reply rates as well. If that is something you’d want to see, let me know!

Want some more tips on sending better subject lines?

Check out this data study, guide, and podcast episode:

• The Art of Writing Subject Lines That Journalists Will Love
• 6 Million Subject Lines Analyzed: What Actually Gets Journalists to Open
• Optimizing Subject Lines with Helena Maniglia

Happy emailing!

The post Should You Pitch Journalists From an Agency or Brand Email Address? [Data from 5M Emails] appeared first on BuzzStream.

Of all the questions PR pros ask, the best time to send consistently ranks near the top.

And since PR professionals send millions of emails through BuzzStream, we have a pretty good sense of when recipients (i.e., journalists) are active.

I dug into the data to really get to the bottom of the best times to pitch journalists, broken down by a few factors: time, domain, and freelancers.

Quick Note on Methodology

For this study, we analyzed both open rates and engagement shares. Although we’ve omitted opens from Apple’s MPP, open rates can still be less reliable. So, we are using reply rate more as an additional confidence metric that journalists are indeed active around that time.

To get the actual open time, first, the user’s send time is marked. Then we track the seconds until the first open. This lets us track open rates in each hour.

First, we broke this down by open and reply rates, but as you can imagine, we end up with skewed data when certain hours of the day have lower send volume.

So, we went with engagement share.

• If an hour has a high send count but a low open share, the audience is not engaging at that time.
• If an hour has a high open share, it means a meaningful portion of all opens occurred during that hour — even after accounting for volume.

So, about 36% of our opens came from messages sent at 8 AM, making it not just effective; it’s when recipients are actually active.

Best Time to Pitch Journalists by Hour

The best time to pitch journalists is between 8 and 9 AM local time for the publication.

Here’s what that looks like as a chart:

Not all that earth-shattering, right?

When I spoke with Rosie Taylor, UK-based freelance journalist and author of Get Featured Substack, she confirmed my suspicions:

“I check my emails pretty constantly through the day, but later emails tend to arrive when I’m in the middle of working on something else, so it’s easy for me to forget about these. Anything that’s already in my inbox when I get to my desk at 9am is most likely to be read and potentially acted on – but I will pause what I’m doing later in the day for a very strong story.”

I highly recommend checking out her guide on press deadlines.

As you can see, the highest engagement rates occur between 8 AM and 9 AM.

Next, I wanted to confirm the days of the week to see if those had any fluctuation.

Best Time to Pitch Journalists by Day of the Week

The best day to pitch journalists is Monday.

Here’s what it looks like as a table:

Journalist activity is virtually non-existent on the weekend.

Last, I wanted to see if freelancers differed much from the in-house journalists.

Best Time to Pitch Freelance Journalists

The best time to pitch freelance journalists is Monday at ~8 AM.

I calculated this by assuming that all Gmail, Yahoo, and other non-media-publisher email domains were freelancers.

This may not always be the case, of course, but for this study, it is the closest approximation at scale.

What we saw is that Monday is still the best day, but there was fairly consistent engagement throughout the week, minus Friday.

Here is the table version of this:

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that freelance journalists are night owls or work irregular hours.

And while this may be true, the majority of them seem to work hours that align with the daily news cycle:

Here is the table breakdown for timing:

Since we don’t know where these domains are based, we need to rely on the data.

We are just using open engagement share because replies are less reliable at a smaller scale, but as you can see, the peaks correspond to 8 AM in both the UK and ET time zones.

So, again, the early time frames appear to be the best time for engaging with a journalist.

The next check I wanted to do is the US vs UK timezones.

Best Time to Pitch US vs UK Journalists

The best time to pitch to UK journalists is 7-9 AM, while US-based journalists 9-11 AM.

Here is the table for US vs UK timing:

We do see a difference here in engagements. I’m not 100% sure why, and this stumped most journalists I asked as well.

It appears that UK-based journalists are early risers.

When comparing the days of the week, there was no difference.

Here is the table for UK vs US day of the week:

Monday is still the day that gets the most engagement from journalists based on opens engagement share.

To help understand a little more of the UK vs US fluctuations, we can actually look at the domain level.

Best Time to Pitch Journalists Based on Domain

The best time to send for each domain still appears to be 8 AM.

To determine the most reliable “best send times” for major publishers, we analyzed the top 50 most-contacted domains and measured their engagement behavior at every UTC hour.

For each domain, we calculated the number of sends, opens, open rates, and open shares.

Here is the table for the best times to contact journalists based on the domain:

To ensure the results reflected real signals rather than noise, we further applied two reliability filters: each domain-hour needed at least 10 opens and a confidence score ≥ 0.40, based on the relative volume of sends at that hour.

As you can see, again, pretty much consistently ~8 AM.

With that out of the way, I can now explain that most of what you just read should be taken with a HUGE grain of salt.

Tips for Identifying the Best Time to Send Emails

You can pretty much ignore all of this at the individual journalist level.

Why?

Because there is SO much variation between journalists, industries, and the publications they write for.

As Rosie told me, “the best day (and best time for that matter) changes depending on which publication and journalist you’re pitching to!

The key thing to take away is there is no magic rule that will work for everyone – you need to get to know the publications and journalists you’re pitching to and work out when is the best time to email them.”

Some journalists live and work in different areas, living in one time zone and writing for another.

Some may be night owls.

With that in mind, here are some tips for the best time to send your PR emails.

Research Job Titles

Biographies and job titles can be telling.

For instance, here is Daisy Maldonado from Good Housekeeping. She’s writing about a fashion topic.

But, only when you click on her name to read her bio do you see that she is the weekend editor.

If you email on a Monday morning, your hot story on Oprah-approved Amazon makeup bags may get easily lost.

Read their biographies

Not all reporters live in the same area that their publication is based either. Biographies can sometimes help get you that information.

For instance, Ruth Graham, writes for The New York Times, but is based in Dallas:

In our webinar on hyper-relevance in outreach, I showed a screenshot from Colin Czarnecki of digital PR agency, Noble, who breaks up his outreach into timezones, which he’s said works wonders for his campaigns.

This is why it pays to research each journalist individually.

Check Publish Dates

Another tip is to dig into publish dates. Sometimes these can give you some intel.

Say I was trying to reach out to Matt Meyer, one of the authors of this story on the Trump government shutdown, from CNN.

When I go to his author page, I can clearly see that all of these previous posts were posted on the weekend.

Although publishing times are solely up to the editor, the publisher, and the publication itself, they may give some insight into the journalist’s publishing cadence.

Some journalists publish only once or twice per month (usually when they are freelance contributors), so that may change your pitching strategy.

Instead of a one-off pitch, these kinds of journalists are the ones you may consider trying to build a long-term relationship with.

Check their Social Media

Sometimes, you’ll get lucky and it’s listed in their bio.

In other situations, it might be a little more nebulous. For instance, Eleanor Pringle writes for Fortune covering news, the economy, and personal finance.

Though there are some hints of previous UK work experience, her bio doesn’t say where she lives.

Digging into her recent articles doesn’t help either, as they appear to cover US-related topics.

It’s only when I look into her LinkedIn profile that I see she actually lives in the United Kingdom.

This is the way to get your emails in front of the right journalist at the right time.

When to Email For Breaking News

For most breaking news, most of this data goes out the door.

In those cases, you want to be first in line at any time of day. There is no need to wait, because it gets crowded—especially for high-visibility breaking news.

As Mark Rofe explained in our podcast on reactive PR, topics with high media interest (such as a celebrity engagement or an interest rates announcement) will likely be the most competitive.

For more help with this, check out our guide on reactive PR.

How ListIQ Can Help Determine the Best Time to Send

Say I’m searching for journalists talking about mortgage rates:

I want to make sure that I select job title, bio, recent articles, author page, LinkedIn, and location.

Then, it spits out a Google Sheet with information and links out to quick checks to drastically speed up the qualification method.

For instance, here I know that Kim is a Utah-based reporter, which puts her in the MST time zone.

Then, there’s a PBS reporter covering the U.S. housing market, but based in Los Angeles.

If I email him, I’m going to ensure it hits his inbox around 9AM PST.

Every Journalist is Different

Although we have the data, the takeaway here should be that you can use it directionally.

Email is getting crowded, so it’s important to lean on relationships that you build up over time.

Engage with journalists on other platforms, like social media or Substack.

The post When is the Best Time to Pitch Journalists? (A Study of 4.5M Emails) appeared first on BuzzStream.

AI can do a lot of things.

Can it find email addresses for your digital PR campaigns?

Eh…sort of.

I am tempted to add this to my tactics in my How to Find Someone’s Email Address post, but it has big holes.

To test whether AI Mode can find email addresses, I queried it for 500 journalist contacts to see what it delivered and how and where it sourced the information. Ultimately, we ended up with 475 valid entries.

Here are my findings.

How Accurately Can AI Mode Find Email Addresses?

AI Mode confidently found email addresses 44.1% of the time.

That’s not all that great.

However, there are still some more accuracy issues.

Are AI Mode’s Emails Verifiable?

Just about 70% of AI Mode’s emails are Valid according to Neverbounce.

Just because they found an email doesn’t mean it’s necessarily correct or valid. And getting too many bouncebacks can certainly hurt your sender reputation.

I used the email verification tool Neverbounce to verify validity. They break emails up into roughly four categories:

“Valid” means you won’t get a bounceback, so it’s as close as we can get to it being a real email.

“Accept all/Unverifiable” is less reliable. It just means that the email server will receive emails for any email address within the domain, regardless of whether the address exists. (You may know them as “catch-all” emails.)

“Invalid” and “Unknown” are pretty self-explanatory.

There’s no hard evidence on how often Accept-all email addresses are actually legitimate. Though in one of their help articles, Neverbounce says:

“We have noticed accept alls tend to bounce at half the rate of your original invalid percentage. So for example, if you had 10% invalids within your list, it is possible up to 5% of your accept alls will still bounce. This is a very important to be aware of when it comes to sending to accept alls.”

So, when AI does provide an answer, it’s mostly at least a valid (or accept all) email address.

AI Aims to Please by Providing Pattern Matches

Sometimes, AI Mode can’t find an email address, but it offers a “likely” answer.

For instance, when searching for Sarah Levine’s email address at Katie Couric Media, it returned a likely address based on patterns.

Unfortunately, we can’t always trust those pattern-matching tools. As we found in our analysis of our email finder tool, they are rarely correct for journalist emails for two reasons:

• Journalists move (often).
• Larger companies often own media sites, so the email domain doesn’t match the target journalist’s email domain.

This step typically requires another verification through Neverbounce.

How Accurate Are These Pattern Match Guesses?

When I ran these pattern match guesses through NeverBounce, I found that they were valid or Accept All about 62% of the time.

Nine were outright wrong, and five were unknown.

When I asked Digital PR Strategist at Fractl and Resolve, Taylor Raymond, about this, he confirmed my feelings:

“While AI Mode can sometimes surface real emails when they’re public, it’s worth checking where it pulled them from. Sometimes it’s a legit author archive or company site — other times it’s pattern recognition or info lifted from sales and PR tools that may be outdated.

When it’s clearly from a public source, I’ll trust it; otherwise I review the source before assuming it’s right.”

If you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole and understand how and where it finds answers, stick with me.

Is AI Mode Even Allowed to Find Email Addresses?

I didn’t want to bury the lede by putting this section first, so let’s step back and understand the rules governing AI and the sharing of personal information.

Technically, AI systems and their developers are bound by the same data protection and privacy laws that prohibit the sharing or exposure of personal contact information without consent.

Google’s own AI Principles say: “We will design AI systems to avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias, and to avoid misuse of personal data.”

And to Google’s credit, it does seem to try to keep that intact. If I asked for a Gmail address directly, I received this (which actually refers to another Vincent Nero):

Or this:

(That said, AI Mode still found 22 Gmail addresses out of the 210 it found.)

And, some of the time, even when I asked for an email address in general, AI Mode would often start with a response like this:

But after following up with the same question…it quickly breaks its rule:

It seems that if an email address is publicly listed, Google assumes it is fair game.

So, from there, I started digging in a bit more.

How Does AI Mode Find Email Addresses?

AI Mode isn’t doing anything magical when it comes to finding contact info. Based on what we know, Google’s technology essentially divides your question into subtopics and searches for each one simultaneously using publicly available information.

So, while you may see similar sources to a regular Google search, AI Mode can sometimes uncover some addresses hidden deep in the search results.

We don’t know the exact questions it asks, but you can get a sense for how deeply it looks when you see this:

You can also get a sense for how it thinks through topics based on these follow-up prompts:

Based on the citations that AI Mode provided, here are the places it looks to find email addresses and when it will confidently give you an answer:

If it is visible on a web page

AI Mode can detect email addresses on web pages.

Sometimes they are dead obvious, like on an About or Contact page:

Other times they will be in bylines:

But, I also saw email addresses getting pulled from things like PDF documents:

It can also go deeper into social media…

AI Mode can find emails in social posts

AI Mode can see email addresses that are in old social posts like Tweets or Facebook.

It’s unclear how far back AI can go with social posts, the one in the above screenshot is almost one year old.

The Tweet below is from almost 2 years ago:

Here’s one from LinkedIn from a year ago:

(For what it’s worth, even with all of the talk of Reddit, I didn’t see a single citation from Reddit in my analysis.)

It can get around obscuring with [at]…sometimes

Although many people try to obscure their email addresses from spammers using [at] in place of @ (myself included), it seems that AI Mode can see right through your games.

For instance, in the aforementioned author from The Verge, Sheena Vasani shares her email address on her website but it is somewhat obscured:

But AI Mode easily found it:

However, I also tested this out on myself:

On my end, though, I definitely have it published in our finding email post where I’ve slightly obscured the pattern:

Next, let’s look at what it can’t do.

AI Mode can’t pull emails from JavaScript

It can’t seem to see email addresses rendered with JavaScript. For instance, Sheena Vasani has a link right in her bio, but AI Mode couldn’t find it.

It is indeed in the source code:

But AI Mode doesn’t seem to look for it:

I saw this again with Bryan Alexander from USA Today.

Instead of pulling the email address for me, it gave me a guess based on the pattern.

So, even though the email address is linked on the page, AI Mode will miss them.

AI Mode Gives Different Answers Virtually Each Time

This is a critical takeaway and may impact all of the data you just read. AI Mode will change up the answer often.

For instance, here is AI Mode giving me a pattern-matched guess as the email address for Matt Denis of American City Business Journals.

But, open a new window and ask the same EXACT question and I much more confident answer, with different citations.

When you look at the citations, you can see that AI Mode pulled the About Us page from the Jacksonville Business Journal:

The degree to which it changes its answers from question to question is fairly shocking.

So, next, let’s look into alternatives.

Why Use ListIQ Instead of AI Mode for Finding Email Addresses

When we get into the data, we can really start to see the advantages that ListIQ has over AI Mode fact-finding missions.

Higher Coverage and Reliability

Overall, ListIQ found about twice as many addresses as AI Mode.

Metric	AI Mode	ListIQ
Emails Found	210	365
% of Total (476)	44.1%	82.0%
% Valid	69.3%	70.4%
% Accept-All	22.2%	27.1%

Right now, these results for ListIQ vary for different industries and journalist types, not to mention we are constantly tweaking the technology to get smarter and smarter as the industry evolves.

Deeper Understanding of Media Ownership & Brand Relationships

ListIQ finds the hidden connections that only a PR professional with extensive knowledge of the current media landscape can uncover. It’s not a sales tool (or search engine).

For instance, ListIQ found Wilder Davies’ email address as wilder_davies@condenast.com.

Even though he is here writing for Bon Appétit, ListIQ knew to uncover the Conde Nast address because Conde Nast owns Bon Appétit.

The result we received from AI Mode was slightly different.

“The specific email address for Wilder Davies at Bon Appétit is not publicly listed, as he is a staff writer. He also writes for Epicurious, which is a sister publication. His email address is listed as wilder@epicurious.com in contact databases, which is a valid contact method.”

While the reasoning sounds correct, when I tested the email address, it was not:

So, it’s about understanding and researching the correct information, not just pattern-matching or guessing.

Scalability

The main takeaway for me is that ListIQ can find more addresses at scale.

You simply need to perform a Google News search:

Then tell ListIQ what information to find:

And it delivers them all to a Google Sheet, allowing me to gather their verified email addresses quickly.

But ListIQ also does a lot more.

It also gathers information such as the author’s job title, recent articles, author page, and whether the author is still active at the publication.

In short, AI Mode can surface valid emails, but ListIQ is purpose-built for digital PR.

It knows who still works where, which domain to use, and whether the address will actually deliver.

The result isn’t just more emails, it’s more accurate media lists.

The post Can AI Mode Find Email Addresses? (A Study of 500 Journalists) appeared first on BuzzStream.

One of the questions I get asked frequently is how much digital PR costs. However, the answer is always a lot more nuanced than people are led to believe.

Although digital PR is trying to distance itself from a focus on “links,” the standard metric that most clients or stakeholders gravitate towards is cost per link.

We have our link-building pricing breakdown, but I wanted to dig in further.

So, I surveyed ~70 agency leaders and freelancers/consultants who offer digital PR in the space to develop our 2025 cost of digital PR report.

In this post, I will outline the key costs, and then we’ll break down the findings by several different metrics.

The “Digital PR” Misnomer

Before we get into all of this, I need to clear something up.

I based most of my survey outreach on LinkedIn and website services. So, when a site or profile says it provides “Digital PR” services, I reach out to them.

What I’m finding, however, is that many people are now grouping “guest posting” in with digital PR:

Here’s another example:

This is actually skewing some of the data that we are seeing—especially in the US.

Really, when I say digital PR, I mean earned media through pitching journalists from top-tier industry news publications for coverage.

That said, not all guest posting is the spammy, paid kind that you see in those shared guest posting spreadsheets.

Some marketers use guest posting as an opportunity for thought leadership. Other sites accept guest authors to help build out their content and showcase third-party expertise and experience.

But to me, that isn’t quite what I think digital PR is based on our definition. You’ll see that this has an outsized impact on some of our results.

I also wanted to mention that reactive PR/proactive PR can sometimes get grouped with responding to journalist requests. For what it’s worth, an overwhelming majority of digital PR professionals that I speak to tend to call reactive its own strategy.

Average Monthly Contract Size for Digital PR

The average monthly contract size across all respondents is approximately $5,458.

In general, contracts rarely seem to exceed $10k per month.

As you can see, about half of the digital PR monthly contracts are under $5,000 (52.5%), followed by 38% in the $ 5,000- $10,000 range.

As you’ll see, costs tend to scale based on creative effort.

Let’s look at the cost per link next.

Cost Per Link for Digital PR

The average cost per link for digital PR across all respondents is $597.

Although cost per link is an outdated PR metric, it remains one of the most common ways to report and sell any type of service that involves links.

Based on our findings, about one in four have a cost per link below $300. Then, there is a spread of approximately 15% across the ranges: $300-$500, $500-$700, and the upper echelon of $750-$2,500.

Still, it is surprising that roughly one-third of respondents don’t know their cost per link. (This answer was much more prevalent from freelancers/consultants.)

This aligns with our State of Digital PR 2025 findings as well.

Chloe Osunsami, Head of Digital PR at Aira, added:

“I understand that cost per link is attractive for reporting to senior stakeholders, as PR value has been hard to quantify – and historically this was seen as one easy way to do so.

However, as digital PR moves further away from just looking at link volume and towards the quality and relevance of brand coverage as a lead metric, it will become more common for PRs not to know the cost per link.

This is something PRs and stakeholders will need to become more comfortable with, and instead, adapt to looking at correlations with broader (business-focused) lag metrics, or taking a blended search approach to reporting, to help justify budgets.”

Will Hobson, VP of PR at Rise at Seven added:

“Cost per link in my opinion is a race to the bottom when it comes to Digital PR. Each KPI should be tied to business goals not just the sheer amount of coverage our campaigns get.

Once you show how our Digital PR activity impact wider SEO strategies larger retainers from $20-50K P/M become available. Digital PR shouldn’t be used in isolation but as part of a wider search strategy that takes place across multiple channels.

We have the ability as Digital PR’s to talk to various stakeholders in a business, bringing together SEO, PR, Social, Brand and more”.

Based on this, we can now examine the types of services and how they affect pricing.

Costs For Types of Digital PR Services

Costs vary depending on the services you receive.

In our study, we looked at four main service offerings that are closely associated with digital PR and how common they are amongst the agencies surveyed:

(Guest posting may be surprising to see on here, which I’ll get to later.)

When we grouped the costs by types of service, they broke down like this:

(Note, these are technically category-weighted midpoints, not necessarily mathematical averages.)

As you can see, hero digital PR content, such as data studies or lengthy blog posts, tends to cost 3-4 times as much on average as other services.

This is not all that surprising, given the effort that goes into some of the larger hero content.

Journalist requests (such as monitoring and responding to HARO, SOS, or Qwoted requests) seem to be on the rise these days, and on average, they are among the lower-cost digital PR services.

If you’re unfamiliar with any of these types of services, we’ve outlined them all in our digital PR examples post.

Guest posting has the lowest cost per link, though, as our previous analysis showed, this may be undervaluing the service (by a lot). Based on our analysis of guest posting sites, the average cost of a guest post through a vendor is $1,459.06.

Next, let’s consider the average contract length.

Average Contract Length in Digital PR

Most contracts (about 75%) are more than 6 months long.

Just a quarter fell into the three-and-under bucket, and looking deeper, those are from freelancers and consultants.

Overall, the larger agencies demand more extended contracts.

When asking around, Matt Foster, Senior Digital PR Manager at Distinctly, told me:

“There’s often a balance that needs to be struck between giving Digital PR teams sufficient time to demonstrate impact on visibility, and marketing teams wanting to maintain budget flexibility. While most teams would (and should!) prioritise long-term partnerships, the 6-11 month contract length probably strikes this middle ground.

Anything below 3 months can be a red flag, in my experience. Such a short agreement doesn’t provide space for long-term strategic collaboration, and is in contrast to the goal of building brand authority and delivering sustained value across key services.”

Does Digital PR Guarantee Links?

Overall, about 50% of digital PR agencies guarantee links as part of their services.

This is a regular hot-button issue on LinkedIn.

That said, upon further investigation, this is heavily influenced by those offering guest posting services, which makes sense.

So, the takeaway, unsurprisingly, is that the more creative or earned the tactic is, the less guaranteed it is.

Now that we know the monthly contract size and cost per link, let’s step back a second and understand how brands are actually charging clients.

How Do Practioners Charge for Digital PR Services?

Our survey shows that about half of digital PR practitioners charge on a monthly retainer basis.

Digging into the data a bit more, we see that about 90% of agencies use the monthly retainer model.

Based on our data, the hero digital PR campaigns tend to command the highest monthly retainers.

Then, looking into the types of services, we can see that hero campaigns command the highest retainers:

Surprisingly, they also carry very high link guarantees of 62.5%

Tom Chivers, Digital PR Specialist at Sabot, says:

“While there are no guarantees when it comes to Digital PR (it is earned media after all) retainers are one of the best ways to achieve sustainable links over time. 

“Project-based work might deliver a quick burst of links, but it’s often necessary for PRs to have a ‘bedding-in period’ where they figure out what works vs what doesn’t.

“A well-structured retainer gives both sides room to experiment and ultimately deliver more consistent results.”

What Outcomes Does Digital PR Charge For?

Most digital PRs charge for nofollow links (74%), while fewer charge for syndicated links (68%) and unlinked mentions (64%). 

Years ago, I would never count unlinked mentions, social media links, or even syndicated links because there was less evidence that they impacted rankings.

These days, unlinked brand mentions do seem to play a role not only in Google’s algorithm (as per the Google Leak) but also in AI citations, as per our conversation with Louise Linehan of Ahrefs.

Here’s what our survey respondents say:

Social mentions are rarely monetized, which I’d expect to change in the near future, given the exposure of sites like Reddit to AI.

Digital PR Costs from Freelancers vs Agencies

Digital PR agencies charge about 50% more per month than freelancers/consultants.

This is unsurprising, as most agencies charge a premium for their depth of service, not to mention the additional people involved.

Agencies also have longer-term contracts.

In general, we can see that agencies tend to offer more of the larger, time-intensive digital PR services, like hero content and reactive PR.

Freelancers, meanwhile, lean heavily on journalist requests and guest posting, where deliverables are faster, more direct, and easier to quantify.

Next, let’s look to see if the geographic differences play into this:

Geographical Differences (U.S. vs UK vs World) in Digital PR Costs

We see that the U.S. actually has the highest digital PR contract sizes:

But they also have the lowest CPL. Most US respondents placed their CPL in the $0-$500 range, whereas most UK respondents placed theirs in the $500+ range.

One reason for this might be the services that they offer, so let’s look here:

As we can see, the UK and other regions typically offer higher-priced services more frequently (hero content, reactive/proactive PR), whereas the US skews more toward journalist requests and guest posting.

This is also reflected in the link guarantees by region:

I’ve tried to answer that UK vs US question a lot over the years. I reached out to Domenica D’Ottavio, Director of PR at Journey Further, which is another agency that spends a lot of time in both markets.

She told me:

“Working across both the UK and the US has shown me that you can’t copy-paste a PR strategy across the Atlantic.

The UK favors creativity and speed. One big national idea can travel far and gain wide coverage.

In the US, success depends on precision: vertical targeting, localized data (often city-specific), and relationships built over time. It takes longer to land coverage, but once trust is established, journalists tend to come back.

Anecdotally, UK clients can be braver and more open to creative risks, while US clients, typically larger brands, operate within more complex internal approval structures that can slow things down.”

Where Digital PR Pricing Is Heading

Right now, there are a few reasons costs may rise.

• Journalists are being laid off
• Publisher site traffic is dropping as people move to alternative platforms for their news (like social, Youtube, and AI)

At the same time, there is strong evidence that getting mentioned in high-quality news sites can increase your exposure in AI citations (which is on everyone’s mind).

So, more agencies and brands are flocking to digital PR.

Ultimately, there is much more competition for far fewer journalists. This means that agencies that once saw hundreds of links, are seeing lower numbers.

So, the value of a link is at an all-time high.

James Brockbank, Managing Director, Digitaloft, told me:

“Digital PR costs are, without a doubt, headed higher; at least digital PR that drives an actual impact on real business metrics and commercial goals is. 

Links and mentions have become a commodity to some extent, but there’s lots of providers out there offering cheap services that have absolutely no impact on the metrics that actually matter to a business. 

The flipside, of course, is that costs will decrease because of AI.

Tools built with AI promise reduced costs for agencies and brands, allowing them to automate or assist in time-consuming tasks.

But there are both innovative and dangerous ways to use AI.

ListIQ is one of those innovative tools that can help save time when building media lists, for instance. It speeds up a manual process while still allowing oversight.

Philip Ghezelbash, Founder of SaaS Backlinks, told me:

“For SaaS brands, the value of digital PR isn’t just in coverage. We look at how each link or mention contributes to trials, signups, or rankings. Pricing conversations will evolve toward that kind of performance transparency.”

It becomes dangerous when AI tools take too much of the process out of the professional’s hands in an effort to cut costs.

These have recently drawn the ire of digital PRs and journalists alike online.

So, the future direction of digital PR costs depends on many factors. The best you can do is stay keyed into the trends.

The post How Much Does Digital PR Cost in 2025? (Survey) appeared first on BuzzStream.

Survey data is one of the most effective ways to generate news and secure press mentions. However, coming up with a catchy survey topic is one of the most challenging tasks for digital PR professionals.

To understand what makes a successful survey, I turned to YouGov, which is one of the key producers of online surveys. (This isn’t a sponsored post; I just really like the stuff that YouGov does.)

Another reason I like analyzing YouGov is that most of their surveys are single-question polls, allowing you to really dig into why they work.

If you’re unfamiliar, YouGov publishes daily survey data, much like Pew or OnePoll.

Operating in both the US and the UK, YouGov maintains its own panel of respondents, enabling it to gather information quickly and produce timely surveys that capitalize on trending topics.

For this post, I analyzed their current list of about 2,350 surveys and identified six main categories that can help drive your survey campaigns.

Notes on methodology: For this analysis, I excluded all content that wasn’t in article form (which removed several hundred surveys).

For everything that wasn’t categorized initially (which is all of business.yougov content) I manually assigned them to the existing categories that YouGov has already established using keywords in the title.

Top 25 Surveys by RD

First, here is a list of the top surveys based on the number of Referring Domains (RD) as per Ahrefs data:

Next, I went through the YouGov dataset and split their surveys into a few buckets based on some trends I was seeing:

• Most/Best vs other
• Timely vs evergreen
• Emotions
• Category (from YouGov blog)

Most/Best vs Other Breakdown

After combing through the surveys, it appeared to me that there were two distinct types of surveys – those that ranked, compared, or crowned a winner of some kind, and then everything else.

But, the full breakdown looked like this:

Metric	Most/Best	Other
Number of posts	475	1875
Total links	21,858	67,998
Avg links/post	46	36.3

Although there were fewer Most/best posts overall, they tend to get about 10 more links on average per post.

There are two reasons for this:

1. These most/best are the kinds of headlines that readers share.

These lists tend to draw debate and conversation. For instance, my wife hates pumpkin pie, so I immediately sent YouGov’s survey on the best Thanksgiving pie 

2. These tie to some kind of keyword volume and get links over time as people search. (This is known as passive link building.)

For instance, here is a post on What countries do Americans like the most which has accrued 51 RD.

When you look at the search volume, you can see that it gets about 90 searches per month and YouGov ranks #1.

So, whenever researchers, journalists, or bloggers search for this keyword, they see YouGov, grab the stat, and cite it in the article.

Next, I noticed, as with the Thanksgiving pie survey, that some YouGov surveys leveraged trends.

Timely vs Evergreen Breakdown

When you look at YouGov’s content, they fall into two flavors: timely hits vs evergreen staples.

The timely content includes topics such as elections, holidays, and other significant news events. Evergreen content is material that remains relevant and timeless, such as “America’s favorite sandwich.”

Metric	Timely	Evergreen
Number of posts	1,060	1,290
Total links	45,432	44,424
Avg links/post	42.9	34.4

Overall, the timely posts got about eight more links on average.

I should note, however, that I based my analysis on a title analysis, so in some cases, even if the topic is evergreen, they position the content around a holiday in their write-up.

Either way, this highlights the value of newsjacking and reactive PR.

Journalists are more likely to share a study or survey if it relates to a current trend.

Though there is a give and take.

Typically, surveys that leverage news trends have a shorter life span.

Let’s take a look at what the link velocity looks like (or links gained over time) for a timely post vs an evergreen.

Here is a post leveraging breaking news.

It has a shorter shelf life and will decrease (sometimes rapidly) over time:

An evergreen topic can look like this, with consistent growth over time:

These evergreen pieces are typically (but not always) kinds of surveys that tie to search volume, which we saw in the previous section (most/best surveys).

The mix for YouGov here is potent in that timely surveys feed the immediate news cycle, while evergreen surveys consistently get organic links and coverage over time.

Next, I want to get into the emotion, which I believe is absolutely key for every survey.

Emotion Breakdown

This breakdown was less straightforward. First, I had to come up with some core emotions and then try to fit all of the posts (even the evergreen ones) into emotion buckets.

This broke down into these five categories.

Core Emotion	Posts	Avg RD	Total Links
Excitement / Joy	378	49.0	18,524
Fear / Anxiety	72	42.5	3,059
Disgust / Disapproval	16	40.1	641
Curiosity / Surprise	1,369	36.1	49,377
Controversy / Anger	515	35.4	18,255

To understand a bit more, here’s a bit of my methodology:

• Excitement/Joy has words like favorite, best, popular, enjoy, watch, and listen. These include fun lists, sporting events, and foods, among others.

• Curiosity/Surprise are more about the why, what, and how. These make the reader want to click.

• Controversy/Anger have social and political connotations, as seen in words like Trump, Biden, election, ban, and support. Everything that might feel combative.

• Fear/Anxiety has worry, risk, threat, fear, anxiety, recession—all of the stuff that causes unease.

• Disgust/Disapproval has bathroom, dirty, gross. These spark visceral reactions.

Excitement/Joy has the most links on average for a few reasons.

Those posts tended to feature listicles centered on topics such as food or sporting events. These were a lot of the evergreen topics I mentioned in the previous section.

Then, I based these emotions on keywords, but there is a TON of crossover happening. Most surveys draw out multiple emotions.

For instance, the Thanksgiving pie survey I mentioned earlier can bring joy and excitement about the holiday season, but it can also draw controversy.

Some surveys that are exciting for some cause anxiety for others.

So, the takeaway here is that all surveys need some kind of emotional trigger to help with shareability.

In the next section, I’ll point out how all of these play together.

Category Breakdown

Lastly, I would like to delve into the category breakdown. Most URLs have categories in them, except for the business.yougov content, which I’ve categorized manually.

Overall, there are 11 categories.

Categories	Posts	Avg RD	Total Links
Travel	26	67.2	1,747
Economy	63	46.8	2,951
Entertainment	122	45.8	5,590
Society	426	43.8	18,653
Sports	89	37.5	3,338
Politics	1,032	36.8	38,004
International	66	36.8	2,426
Consumer	261	33.8	8,833
Technology	199	32.0	6,360
Health	63	30.2	1,905
Sport	3	16.3	49

As you can see, politics topped the list for most posts and overall links, but travel got the most links on average.

Below, I attempted to give a further analysis of the top 6 categories based on the number of posts (and total links). I’ll discuss the construction of the surveys, as well as emotional ties, to help give you a sense of what makes an excellent survey.

1. Travel

Travel is somewhat of an outlier, given that it had only 26 posts, but it had the highest average RD count overall.

The ones that did well did really well on average.

The top travel post, Adults under 30 are more likely than older Americans to have a current U.S. passport, got 411 RD.

Here, they leaned into demographics like age, race, and education level:

This is one of the few that I’ve seen that digs into race and education, which may be part of its success.

The survey also took a look at political leanings:

And how Americans see US passports from other countries:

When I started to dig into the kind of coverage it got, it seemed that this piece picked up a lot of coverage because of the SAVE Act, which deals with citizenship:

You can see it covered here as well:

Initially, this piece didn’t receive a lot of coverage, but it gained momentum as it progressed. But something as universal as a passport definitely lends itself to getting coverage. (Unsurprisingly, the third most-linked piece in the travel category was also about passports.)

In addition, numerous emotions are intertwined with this passport data, including national pride, traveler rights, and even stereotypes.

You can tell by looking at some of the articles in which it was mentioned:

Let’s take a look at the next most-linked piece, which is a lighter topic but again entirely universal: In-flight drama: Where Americans sit on airline etiquette

Here, YouGov leaned right into the controversy right in the question, where they are drilling down “unacceptable” behavior:

This was the only question they asked, and really all they needed to tell a good story.

And you can see from some of the coverage, it played really well:

It got coverage from NPR, Dailymail, and Business Insider.

2. Economy

The category with the following highest average number of links was also a small one.

Here, a significant outlier skewed the results.

YouGov’s most-linked piece of all time was part of the economy category: One-third of first-time American homebuyers got financial help from their parents.

The poll only consists of one question: when it came to owning your first home, how, if at all, did your parents help financially?

I believe the two reasons for this survey’s success stem from its timeliness and emotional appeal.

It was released May 25, 2022 amidst skyrocketing housing prices and mortgage rates in the US.

The single question also cleverly taps into emotions like frustration and anger felt by prospective home buyers without access to financial help (or even current homeowners who purchased on their own terms).

However, because housing prices have not stopped rising, this survey remains evergreen and you can still see links coming to the post.

The above is a post from 2023 that still references the study.

3. Entertainment

The fourth-most linked category was entertainment/culture. These tap into celebrities, movies, TV, and other culture-related topics.

Their top survey in this category was Who’s listening to The Joe Rogan Experience? Men, mostly.

In it, they break down gender and age:

Followed by attitudes:

This type of survey falls more squarely into their consumer profile data offering, although it came on the heels of headlines that found Joe Rogan was the most popular podcast in the UK.

So, YouGov was clearly taking advantage of a trend here.

Here is a survey that capitalizes on the popularity of true crime: Half of Americans enjoy true crime, and more agree it helps solve cold cases.

Here, this was broken down into gender:

They drilled down even more into gender with a secondary question:

And then a third angle:

Followed by yet another gender breakdown:

These gender angles seemed to really help tell the whole story of the product, but the takeaways from news sources were still mainly centered around the emotions that true crime shows elicit.

Here, YouGov got coverage within features on the controversial nature of true crime:

Here is one from Arizona State University:

It’s unclear if YouGov pitches these, but by providing data around a hot-button issue, they earn organic coverage.

Another, more entertainment-based survey that also had a timely slant was about Bachelor Nation, titled “What type of person is part of Bachelor Nation?”

Here, because the content itself is more of a profile, they did look deeply into the ages:

These age breakdowns seemed to be key coverage points once the Golden Bachelor rolled around several years later.

Here they are mentioned in a New York Times piece:

4. Society

These posts focus on societal issues, lifestyle choices, and feelings of identity.

The top performing survey, entitled Millennials are the loneliest generation really embodies the category:

Created back in 2019, this post only focused on three of the main generations.

The emotional hook of being lonely is ingrained into the question itself: How often, if ever, do you feel lonely?

By applying a common emotion, it becomes instantly relatable to readers and thus more shareable.

This survey is divided into several sections, each with subsequent questions. For instance, it dug into why it’s challenging to make new friends:

And where they make friends:

As I mentioned, most current YouGov surveys (except the large tentpole studies) appear to have abandoned the multi-question format and focus more narrowly.

Another survey from this section was what are Americans looking for on dating apps?

This clearly leans into the emotion of love. In general, I’ve always found content about relationships to be fairly linkable.

These are broken down generationally:

And then, because relationship content does lend itself to gender angles, there is a gender breakdown:

Here’s another relationship-based survey: How many Americans have cheated on their partners in monogamous relationships?

This one asks some really controversial questions that can easily draw out some strong emotions. And again, you clearly see the men vs women angle:

Here is another survey that carries a different kind of emotional hook, entitled, Many Americans believe ghosts and demons exist.

They do tie this to Halloween, but it does a good job of eliciting some emotions. For instance, look at how it was covered in Lifehacker:

There’s also curiosity:

It’s also evergreen enough that it has received some organic pickups:

Interestingly, there was no age breakdown for this content. Yet, they did go with a political breakdown as a potential angle for coverage:

Here’s another significant survey that draws some interesting emotions: Many Americans don’t always wash their hands after using the bathroom.

Again, the timely hook here is that this was published during the 2020 flu season (before the COVID pandemic was in full blast).

Any content related to germs appears to perform well, as it has an inherent emotional hook of disgust built into the topic.

They did go one level deeper and asked about some consumer goods preferences:

Though based on their coverage, this angle wasn’t covered really at all.

5. Sports

The next category I’ll cover here is sports.

The first on the list is around March Madness: Americans say March Madness Final Four is one of top three most exciting sports events of the year.

The first question presented is an overall look at sports:

Then, of course, we have the age breakdown:

The emotion here is a clear one of excitement. People LOVE sports in the US—especially college sports.

The next survey I wanted to highlight is the best Major League Baseball mascots, ranked by Americans.

This was an extremely niche study that functioned almost like a city index study when I examined the coverage.

For instance, they were able to get on some general sports news sites, but mostly they got local coverage from areas that were in the top 10, like

Detroit’s WRKR:

As we’ve seen already, these types of most or best lists elicit emotions, especially from avid sports fans.

For instance, my personal take on this is that the survey is entirely flawed because Mr. Met beat out the Phillie Phanatic. As such, I’ve already shared my anger with several of my fellow Phillies fans and ranted about this on social media.

6. Politics

YouGov’s strongest category, from a total links and total posts standpoint, is politics.

They’ve generated over 38,000 RD from 1,032 surveys.

Most of these capture something within the current zeitgeist or media coverage, making them easy to share because they are top of mind.

The top example is Trust in Media 2024: Which news sources Americans trust — and which they think lean left or right.

Here they provide a comprehensive analysis of all media sites and asked Americans for their net trust.

Then, they of course broke it down by political leaning:

The post goes on to look at liberal and conservative takes, some age breakdowns of media types:

This is very much a deep dive, in the same vein that Pew Research takes, which is actually much deeper than a lot of the content on YouGov.

The “Trust In Media” study is actually something they release every year, and clearly, the deeper they dug, the more links they were able to establish.

The following example has almost as many links and doesn’t go nearly as deep.

Another example is Daylight Saving Time: Americans want to stay permanently ‘sprung forward’ and not ‘fall back’.

In this case, there were only two questions.

First on the elimination:

Then, on how deeply they want it eliminated.

The fact that this was tied to a major recurring event gave it some inherent coverage. Then, layer on the trending politicization of the topic, and it could lean on the breaking/reactive side as well.

Another survey that received a lot of coverage is Two in five Americans say a civil war is at least somewhat likely in the next decade.

The survey topic was frequently discussed in the media around that time in the US.

This survey is another that has some extra emotional layers, such as fear or anxiety, and was clearly effective, as it was the sixth most-linked survey on YouGov.

Since this was already politically charged, they built that into the survey breakdown:

Interestingly, there was no age coverage on this one.

7. Consumer

I’m skipping international because, even though they are categorized as such by YouGov, the grouping is comprised of some of their earliest surveys and encompasses multiple categories.

(Plus, consumer has a lot more insights. )

These surveys are mostly tied to some form of consumerism.

They are typically surveys on popular brands or products, but for the most part, they still have some kind of timeliness.

Some are very timely, such as one of their most popular surveys in this category, where American Eagle’s Sweeney ad splits opinion.

(For those unaware, this ties into a Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad that was very controversial when it launched.)

Clearly, there is some emotion charged into this one, as it has become very politicized.

You can see that it took the full demo breakdown of political leanings, age, and even race.

But, others are a bit more evergreen consumerism angles, like America’s Favorite Sandwich:

These tap into everyday products that users engage with frequently, making them somewhat evergreen.

What is missing from these is a clear emotional hook. However, if you look closer, it is there.

For instance, America’s favorite sandwich also has the other side, which is the most hated.

This type of content can easily spark drama in the office.

The presentation is also worth mentioning.

Although this is something very 2019-esque, I love it when a data visualization actually visualizes the thing they are presenting.

(It reminds me of an all-time favorite survey piece from Porch—via Fractl—called ‘Food Fights’, which took common arguments about food and weaponized them into an incredibly shareable survey.

If you haven’t checked it out, I definitely recommend it. Back to YouGov…)

Here is another entitled Which toppings make America’s favorite burger?

The survey breakdown asked a few questions, first establishing if burgers are liked:

Then the toppings:

Then, how they are cooked:

Again, when you look at the coverage, this kind of “best” vs “worst” is very popular (especially on radio stations, apparently).

Another survey, The unwritten rules of eating out: What Americans think about restaurant etiquette, virtually writes the emotional hook right into the questions.

As you can see below, they clearly distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

These are things that can clearly draw the ire of anyone who has eaten out, such as not paying for a dish but still eating it all. (As a former server at a restaurant, I concur that this is the most frustrating thing ever.)

Perhaps because the survey question is so strongly emotionally charged, they didn’t go with the age breakdown.

In all of these instances, another factor contributing to their success is that they’ve also gained links over time, as they are evergreen topics.

For instance, in a post entitled Expert Tips for Making Your Veggie Sandwich Shine, from Mashed, they mention the YouGov survey in passing (rather than the entire piece being a feature about the survey).

This kind of organic pickup is widespread amongst this set of surveys.

What Can We Learn

Based on these few thousand surveys, here are my takeaways that digital PRs should be able to bring into their workflows.

1. Always have a timely angle

Almost 50% of the content features a timely angle built into the headline. And about 59% of the surveys on YouGov were politically charged, which isn’t always suitable for every brand (nor should it be).

That still leaves almost 40% of the surveys that clearly leaned into timely angles, like:

• “AI doomsday worries many Americans. So does apocalyptic climate change”
• “It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story tie for America’s favorite Christmas movie”
• “Half of Singaporean gamers gaming more in a COVID world”
  

Some aren’t timely on the surface, but can tie into events, like “About half of Americans believe ghosts and demons exist”, which has a Halloween-timely hook.

When creating a content calendar, begin by identifying relevant events within your niche.

These can include social media days, such as National Taco Day, holidays like Thanksgiving, or industry-specific recurring events like the World Cup, Apple’s WWDC, or the Federal Reserve’s FOMC Meetings in the US.

Brands should then also monitor major trending news events (and anniversaries of such events) to inform their survey data.

A tool like Google Trends can help uncover trending topics:

Not every survey can connect to a trend. Read more about it in our newsjacking guide.

2. But don’t sleep on evergreen topics

Most evergreen topics can generate links over time, especially when tied to highly searched keywords with high intent to link. (Yes. Keywords are still a thing.)

Surveys that crown a winner (best mascot, most admired woman, favorite sandwich) average 10 more links per post than everything else.

The secret to this is authority.

A brand can’t come out of nowhere and expect to get cited in AI and news publications.

It needs a solid methodology, a proper survey sample size, and some insights from experts in the field.

However, it also needs to establish trust in the industry through routine surveys, which will help demonstrate that it is a consistent and trustworthy source of information.

We saw that YouGov has been successful with their yearly surveys, such as their Trust in Media reports.

They’ve also leveraged this established authority to build digests, intelligence reports, ratings, and trackers.

But you need to walk before you can run.

3. Always have an emotional tie

All of the content on YouGov has some emotional tie. Some are more obvious than others, like “The holiday stress gap: Is the festive season more stressful for women than men?”

The emotions I covered were

• Excitement/Joy
• Curiosity/Surprise
• Controversy/Anger
• Fear/Anxiety
• Disgust/Disapproval

Excitement/Joy and Curiosity/Surprise outperformed for YouGov on average because they’re fun, quirky, and easy to share.

Controversy/Anger and Fear/Anxiety generated huge totals by sheer volume.

Even niche Disgust/Disapproval (bathroom habits, hygiene) works because of its visceral hook.

But there are so many others.

One of my go-to resources for survey content has always been Kelsey Libert’s post from Fractl on the Role of Emotions in Viral Content.

She shared this image, which helps show the wheel of emotions:

Pick, choose, combine.

4. Use age, gender, and politics to expand reach

The three primary demographics to make sure you always capture are gender, age, and political leaning.

With those at your fingertips, you can always turn surveys into stories driven by generational divides, gender gaps, and politicized arguments.

You shouldn’t be out there forcing a story, but remember, the idea is to elicit an emotion.

For instance, you won’t find political leanings (or gender or age) on American’s burger preferences:

But legislative districting certainly calls for it:

Use the trending news as a guide.

These divides can drive home a point and turn a survey from an interesting one into a fiery one.

5. You may need fewer questions than you think

YouGov’s sweet spot is single-question polls with a precise angle, often followed by a breakdown (age, gender, political affiliation). This format makes the story instantly scannable and headline-friendly for journalists.

However, there is an aspect to this where YouGov’s authority lets them get away with a bit more.

I don’t recommend slicing your surveys down to just single questions, but 3-5 questions can sometimes give you enough information for a compelling story (as long as you are capturing the aforementioned demographic data).

And, as we’ve seen, specific topics warrant more in-depth examination, such as YouGov’s investigation into AI concerns, which had eight questions.

You need to make sure you are bringing new information to the table.

6. Consider building relationships with newsletters

One thing I noticed in analyzing a lot of the coverage was that YouGov was often cited in newsletters, like Substack.

Here is a personal newsletter called Weekly Fixations, where I found a YouGov study linked:

These kinds of newsletters provide a great source of content distribution.

Simply search for keywords like your “industry + newsletter” or “link roundup” or “monthly roundup”.

Building relationships with these kinds of newsletters means doing the work to subscribe and engage with their content before simply asking for a link.

7. Pitch to the right journalists, not all journalists

Although we don’t know if YouGov pitches this content to journalists, at this point, it’s unlikely, given that they are an established data entity (except perhaps for their annual reports).

However, we don’t all have that luxury. Most brands need to pitch to get coverage.

But blasting out a press release to thousands of journalists won’t get you anywhere these days. Even the general lists that you get from media databases can cast too broad a net.

We conducted a study that found smaller, more targeted campaigns vastly outperformed large, generic blasts.

Most brands need to go out and build hyper-targeted media lists because every journalist covers third-party data studies.

Finding them involves reviewing recent articles, reading bios, and other information about each author on your list.

For example, say I’m trying to find a journalist who covers third party surveys about thanksgiving pie. I may want to search Google News with a search query like intitle:“most americans” thanksgiving.

This should uncover articles written in the same format as what I want to cover.

Typically, I’d have to go through each result and research down to see if the journalist (and publisher) is a fit for my survey.

I’d probably skip Pew (since they produce their own surveys) and CBS News (they mention in their article title that it’s a CBS News poll, so they likely wouldn’t be open to sharing mine.)

So, I’d open the Axios report to start my journalist list building process:

And it is indeed a third-party study:

However, I now need to locate the author’s bio.

She appears to be a breaking news reporter, which doesn’t feel like a fit.

Let’s look at some recent articles to see what she’s covering these days.

It feels like all politics and policy. So, my post would need a political slant to really fit in her wheelhouse.

Then, I’d want to dig around in her social channels and find her email address.

Typically, this can take ~10 minutes for a single journalist.

Building Media Lists for Survey Posts with ListIQ

With ListIQ, I can complete this research process for 100 journalists in the same amount of time it takes me to research one journalist manually.

I’d enable ListIQ within my Google News search.

Then I’d tell ListIQ which articles I’d like to evaluate. I’d deselect Pew and CBS News because we are avoiding them.

Then, on the right side, I’d tell ListIQ what information I’d like to find out about the journalists covering my selected articles, like their job title, bio, email address, and so on.

In under a minute, I’m provided with a Google Sheet of all of the author information for each article selected:

Now I can quickly see who is relevant for a survey based on information like their bio, recent articles, LinkedIn profiles and other fields.

However, I also have some information about authors who are no longer at the publications, which allows me to exclude some from consideration.

All of this took me minutes instead of hours and can drastically improve campaign accuracy, resulting in more links over time.

The post What To Learn from Analyzing 2k+ YouGov Surveys appeared first on BuzzStream.

Several lists of the top sites that appear in ChatGPT are circulating at this point.

It’s getting so noisy at this point that I’m not really sure what these lists mean. After all, each study employs a different sample size and approach to the types of queries that comprise the study.

This is both good and bad. On the one hand, we get a more diverse group, and on the other, we don’t know who to trust.

That said, after reviewing these four reports, some sites appear to be universally visible.

In this post, I’ll show you the sites I’m seeing, what we can learn from these lists, and then dive deep into those that potentially overlap with OpenAI data partnerships.

Methodology:

I used studies from four different sources —Ahrefs, SEMRush, Profound, and Wellows —to compile a list of over a million queries.

To facilitate comparison, I added rankings where they were not initially present. I also added the percentage of total citations based on the provided dataset, if not offered.

1. Top 10 Sites Appearing on ChatGPT, according to Profound

Published June 2025

Profound is an AI visibility tool. Their database is one of, if not the largest. According to their study, their list of sites is based on a total of 680 million citations and displays the ranking as a percentage of total citations.

Here is what their top 10 looks like, broken down by percentage of citations.

What to learn from this?

They don’t get into their methodology here for the breakdown of the kinds of citations, but as you can see, Wikipedia is by far the largest source of citations.

Wikipedia accounts for almost half of the citations among the top 10 domains..

Then there is a steep drop-off to Reddit, Forbes, and G2.

Wikipedia is the largest source of free information on the web. It is also one of the primary sources of training data used in LLMs, such as GPT.

It’s also one of the hardest ones (at least I’ve found) to manipulate. However, it stands to reason that all brands should strive to establish a Wikipedia presence if possible.

Next, we’ll look at another extensive list from Ahrefs.

2. Top 10 Sites Appearing on ChatGPT, according to Ahrefs

Published September 2025

Ahrefs studied over 9.6 million queries and compiled the top 100 cited domains, making it the most extensive list available.

Although they list the top 100 in their dataset, I would like to focus on the top 10 so that we can compare the lists later. (Also, as you get further down the list, you end up with domains that are fractions of a percentage of the total makeup of the list.)

Note: I’ve added the percent of total (total mentions ≈2.88M).

What to learn from this?

As you can see, Reddit citations make up almost one-third of the list.

Then, Wikipedia also tops the list, followed by an incredibly steep drop-off to Amazon, and then many publisher sites.

You’ll notice a similar pattern in most of these studies (except for one), where Reddit dominates.

And this is definitely reflected in search results:

In March 2024, Reddit announced a partnership with OpenAI. The way they put it in their announcement:

“OpenAI will bring Reddit content to ChatGPT and new products, helping users discover and engage with Reddit communities. To do so, OpenAI will access Reddit’s Data API, which provides real-time, structured, and unique content from Reddit.”

Therefore, it certainly appears to be the case.

The following dataset, however, didn’t include any Reddit or Wikipedia data, so let’s explore that.

3. Top 10 Sites Appearing on ChatGPT, according to Wellows

Published July 2025

Next, based on the size of the study, is Wellows’ report, which analyzed 7,785 queries and 485,000 citations.

Wellows is essentially an AI agent that helps users build content.

Their post lists the top 50 sites, but their top 10 looks like this:

What to learn from this?

As you can see, there is a distinctly different look to this list: it’s missing Reddit and Wikipedia. The two sites don’t even appear on their top 50 list.

So, while Reddit may have the partnership, it seems like they certainly don’t show up everywhere.

Since this data comes from Wellow’s Kiva users (Kiva is the platform that helps generate content), their dataset may be biased as to the kinds of queries users ask, which is why you are seeing sites like Techradar, Cnet, and PCMag.com.

When I spoke with Masab Gadit, Founder of Wellows, he told me, “In our research, around 73% of the queries we analyzed were commercial in nature, and in that set, we didn’t see Reddit being cited much.

SEMrush, on the other hand, published different findings, but my assumption is that it’s influenced by the type of queries they used, their approach seems to be more from a niche/industry perspective, while ours was more content-type driven. So I see these as complementary rather than competing perspectives.”

That said, keep an eye on Techradar, because as you’ll see, it is also included on a few other lists.

4. Semrush AI Visibility Index

Published September 2025

Semrush has also released a study called the Semrush AI Visibility Index. It’s an incredibly well-designed analysis, though somewhat smaller in comparison to the other sites.

What I really like about their index, however, is that they analyzed what looks like a total of 2,500 prompts and responses across five major industries:

Note: Semrush reports these as index values (not percentages), so higher numbers = more visibility within that vertical.

As you can see, Reddit and Wikipedia top every list except for the “Digital Technology and Software” industry, where Wikipedia is third.

What to learn from this?

Once we get into the industry breakdowns, we encounter significant diversity in the other types of sites, aside from Reddit and Wikipedia, of course.

For instance, when searching for SaaS comparisons, users are most likely shown sites like G2, which is one of the most well-known software comparison and review platforms.

The Most Recurring Sites Cited by ChatGPT

Although all of these sites show up at a much different rate in every study, if we just look at the sites showing up on the list at all, the most commonly recurring sites on ChatGPT are:

Or here it is visualized:

To clarify, this is based on appearance across studies: Forbes (4), Reddit (3), Wikipedia (3), TechRadar (3), and Business Insider (3).

By visibility when present, Reddit and Wikipedia dominate.

(Note: Wellows’ dataset skews commercial/content-type and didn’t include Reddit/Wikipedia in its top 50, which explains the 3/4 count.)

What do all of these sites have in common?

They are all well-known sites with universal brand recognition.

Just by looking at the overlap here, we can get a pretty good sense of how and where ChatGPT tends to fill the gaps when Reddit and Wikipedia aren’t enough.

However, as you may or may not know, OpenAI has data partnerships with many publisher sites. In the next section, I aim to investigate whether these partnerships lead to increased exposure.

Do Sites with OpenAI Data Partnerships Result in Greater Exposure in ChatGPT?

While some sites are suing OpenAI over their use of their content, many publishers have struck data partnerships with OpenAI. Here’s a look at the list of all of the data partnerships as of the time of publication:

1. Associated Press
2. Axel Springer
3. Le Monde
4. Prisa Media
5. Financial Times
6. News Corp
7. Reddit
8. Dotdash Meredith
9. Vox Media
10. The Atlantic
11. Condé Nast
12. Future plc
13. Hearst
14. The Guardian
15. Axios
16. The Washington Post
17. Time USA

Or, here it is visualized:

In a previous study, I compared this list with data from a Ziff Davis study that looked into sites used to curate ChatGPT datasets. There, the overlap was minimal.

For this study, I wanted to determine whether publisher sites (or sites within the media companies) under these partnerships received any preferential treatment from OpenAI.

First, I had to break down the sites that exist under these media companies (for instance, Future PLC has 50+ sites under its umbrella).

Then, looking at the top 10 in every list, I put together this matrix to show which study cited each brand and the rank in which they appeared:

(Since SEMrush had broken it down by industry, I averaged the results to obtain the raw counts of the rank.)

If it’s marked N/A, there are no sites in the top 10.

Here it is in visual format:

When you roll this up to the publisher group level, not the site level, here is what it looks like:

Note: Averages are based only on appearances, not on absence.

Alternatively, if you prefer a visual breakdown…

Ultimately, there was less of a connection than I thought there would be.

Out of the 17 confirmed partners, only 8 have any Top 10 visibility in the studies.

And of those 8, many came from the SEMRush study, which provided more industry-specific insights.

And the visibility that exists is middling.

What Can We Learn From All of This?

Ultimately, these lists are starting to tell the story that many SEOs and marketers need to know. It’s not about partnerships or hacking the algorithm.

Reddit and Wikipedia are Almost Universally Visible

Clearly, Wikipedia and Reddit dominate across almost every dataset. And afterwards, there is a steep drop-off in visibility.

For example, in Profound, Wikipedia accounts for nearly 8% of all citations, while Reddit accounts for ~1.8%, and everything else is a fraction of a percent.

This means a small handful of sites command a disproportionate share of visibility.

The Type of Query Changes the Picture

Given that Wellows has no Reddit or Wikipedia entries in its dataset, we can see that query set design matters significantly: the kinds of prompts you ask, who is asking them, and how.

In the SEMrush industry breakdown set, the industry-specific breakdowns revealed new sites that we hadn’t seen in other lists, such as G2 in SaaS and Investopedia.

Forbes is the Most Recurring Site (behind Reddit and Wikipedia)

It doesn’t account for a massive percentage in the lists it appears on, but Forbes is actually the most commonly recurring site across all the lists (behind Reddit and Wikipedia).

Then, Techradar.com and Businessinsider.com. (Nothing against Techradar, but that one surprised me the most!)

So are these the ones to pitch if you want to show up in citations?

I wouldn’t think that way.

So What Actually Matters for Visibility in ChatGPT?

It appears that all the same factors we consider as SEOs also matter for visibility in ChatGPT, as well as a few new ones we may want to incorporate into our purview.

The existing skillset:

• Building topical relevance (we saw topically-relevant sites show up in SEMRush’s industry-specific study).

• Naturally raising domain authority (we saw Forbes, Reuters, and other high authority sites showing up across the board),

Newer skillset:

• Managing online reputation on forums and review sites (clearly, Reddit plays a big part in this, as do sites like G2).

• Then, when we add Wikipedia, I think that citations from there speak to the need for brand awareness and ubiquity.

These don’t sound like rocket science, but I think because we have such limited data, we are all grasping at whatever strategies we can and trying to scale them.

However, what I’ve outlined are the fundamentals of marketing.

To show up in ChatGPT and survive in the AI era, we simply need to be good marketers; it’s that straightforward.

The post Top Sites Showing Up in ChatGPT (Across Multiple Studies) appeared first on BuzzStream.

Just over a year ago, Google’s Helpful Content Update torched most of the guest posting sites I had been tracking. Like many SEOs, I assumed guest posting was finally dead.

But here’s the twist: it’s not only not dead…it’s trending?

The reality is that while most link builders are turning to digital PR, many still rely on guest posting.

uSERP’s State of Backlinks 2025 report found that 12% of SEOs considered it the most effective approach, trailing behind digital PR’s 20%.

The term, however, is a far cry from what it once meant.

Now, for the most part, guest posting has become a paid strategy where a vendor writes and places links within an article on a site with which they have built partnerships. (I wrote a bit about it in my guest blogging post.)

In my original link building pricing research in 2024, I gathered a few thousand price points via shared guest post spreadsheets and found that what was being sold was about 90% low-quality, high-priced junk.

(And by low quality, I mean sites with weak traffic, low DR, or both—but more on that below.)

So today, I decided to conduct extensive research on guest posting on a much larger scale than I had before to see if this was still the case.

The Data Source: A Massive Marketplace of 26,000+ Sites

This time, I decided to take a different approach to gather my data and discovered a massive link marketplace database of 26,632 sites.

After consulting with other well-respected SEOs, the database in question appears to be the source of many other resellers.

I’m not going to reveal who it is, nor do I think it’s essential, as most of the placements that you find carry the telltale signs of buying links: exact match keywords, low-quality content, etc.

So, what does this 26,000-site marketplace tell us about guest posting in 2025?

How Good Are Guest Post Sites, Really?

The first thing I want to understand is the quality of guest posting sites.

We can assess quality in a few different ways, but I always like to start with traffic.

Most Sites Have Low to No Organic Traffic

The traffic breakdown is estimated monthly organic traffic as reported by Ahrefs.

As you can see, just under 41% falls in the 1.1k-10k traffic range.

More surprisingly, about 19% fall within the 0-100 range, with 11.36% of the sites receiving no traffic.

If I dive into the organic traffic patterns, I can gain a deeper understanding of what is going on:

Most of these 0-100 sites were either hit hard by Google’s Helpful Content Update, or weren’t good sites to begin with. (And yet, as we’ll see, they still charge top dollar for these sites.)

But traffic is not the only way to determine quality.

I evaluated the list using Ahref’s Domain Rating (DR) next.

DR Isn’t Enough—Most Sites Sit Below 60

DR is cited as the number one metric used by link builders and digital PRs in our State of Digital PR study and Editorial.link’s State of Link Building study, so I feel safe to report using this metric.

As you can see, most clump between DR 20-59, with the most in the 30-39 range.

At this point, the average guest post site has a DR of 45.4 and 89,544 monthly visitors.

However, I want to drill down the quality a bit more, inspired by Ahrefs’ Best Links filter found in their Site Explorer.

Only 4.6% of Sites Are Truly High Quality

With Ahrefs’ Best Links, you can filter links by both traffic AND DR, which isn’t an exact science by any means, but can get you closer directionally.

The way I originally did my guest posting sites study was that a high-quality site had both DR 65+ and 20K+ monthly organic traffic.

With that breakdown, we see that just 8.2% of sites are high quality.

For this study, I decided to expand on that a bit.

Everyone seems interested in acquiring top-tier links (i.e., news publications) these days, in the hope of gaining entry into AI, so I wanted to break out top-tier links into their quality categories.

I also wanted to give a mid-tier option.

Based on this, I’ve broken this down into quality using these criteria:

With these traffic tiers in place, here is a more detailed breakdown of quality.

Wow.

Just 4.6% of all domains are High-Quality and Top-Tier combined.

More than 85% of linkable domains fall into the Low-quality tier.

Many domains that rank well in DR are still classified as Low-quality due to their low organic reach (and vice versa).

For instance, 53.1% of the DR 71+ sites fall into the Mid- and Low-quality category because they have under 50,000 monthly organic traffic.

Don’t Forget Relevance—It Still Matters More Than Metrics

Is it possible for a site to be below DR 40 and be a quality site? Sure. Perhaps it’s a new site that’s gaining popularity.

Or maybe it’s a highly relevant site.

In an earlier post about quality links, I discussed the importance of overlapping with relevance. I would argue that a highly relevant DR 35 site is better than an irrelevant top-quality site.

Unfortunately there isn’t an industry standard metric for relevancy (yet).

For now, you can gauge relevancy by comparing it to your industry.

Which Industries Dominate Guest Posting? (Spoiler: News & Media)

Most sites have several categories associated with them, but I tried to take the most relevant overall.

Below are the top 10 industries in the guest post database.

Overall, news and media makes up 20% of the inventory, followed by Business & Finance sites, then Tech & Science.

Since we’ve established quality previously, we can now examine the distribution of quality sites across various industries.

As you can see, most industries fall around the average of 85% low-quality sites, with some reaching as high as 90%.

If you’re interested in the numbers, it breaks down like this:

The most Top-Tier and Quality links are in the News & Media section, but you also have the highest number of lower-quality sites to wade through.

Again, keep in mind that these are the top 10 categories, not the entire database.

Now that we have the overall view, let’s dive into the pricing breakdowns.

Let’s Talk Price: How Much Do Guest Posts Actually Cost?

Before we delve into answering the burning question of how much it costs for a guest post, I would like to explain the pricing briefly.

Since this is coming from vendors, there is markup involved, and every vendor is different.

For this study, I’m assuming that the database I pulled from marks up the price by at least 75%.

With that in mind, here are some answers to your burning questions.

The Average Cost of a Guest Post in 2025: $365 (If You’re Lucky)

The average estimated guest post cost is $364.76 (before an assumed 75% markup from vendors). However, buying from a vendor brings the average cost to $1,459.06.

The average estimated cost of a quality guest post ranges from $692 – $957 (before an assumed 75% markup from vendors). Buying directly from a vendor is $1,211–$1,675.

High Quality = High Cost: Pricing by Quality Tier

Breaking down the pricing by quality helps show how pricing accelerates as you climb the quality ladder:

The bar chart illustrates the exponential price growth as quality increases.

There is a modest increase from low to mid. However, the transitions from Mid to High and High to Top are steep jumps.

But anyone who has tried to go this route knows that there are certainly industries that are harder to build links in than others.

In guest posting, it’s no different.

And so, the more complicated the industry, generally, the more expensive it is.

The following section will provide a recap of this industry breakdown.

Guest Post Prices by Industry: What’s Expensive and What’s Not

Based on our data, I wanted to examine the most expensive and the least expensive industries.

Most Expensive Industries for Guest Posting

The most expensive industries are Crypto & Blockchain at ~$516 and Real Estate & Property at ~$492, followed by News & Media at ~$417.

Least Expensive Industries for Guest Posting

When digging into the least expensive options, we find that on average, you can get a Food & Drink or Fashion & Beauty guest post for around $350.

So… is guest posting still worth it?

Key Takeaways: Guest Posting Is Pricey, Risky, and Mostly Low Value

Overall, I have identified a few key takeaways. For those of you familiar with my work, my thoughts aren’t all that different from my original analysis or my thoughts on link buying.

Buying premium links is expensive

The average cost of purchasing a guest post directly from a Top-Tier site is $957.

But most brands rarely have access to these connections, which is why you pay the vendor markup.

That brings me to my next point.

And even more expensive if you do it through a vendor

If you don’t have connections to get guest posts placed yourself, you’d be paying upwards of $2,800-$3,800 per link for a Top Tier site.

Some Top-Tier links in the database cost $10,000 each.

To put that in perspective, our State of Digital PR Report found that Most digital PRs (66.5%) operate with budgets below $10,000 per month.

So, the price of a few risky paid links can be offset by earning premium links from news sites, which also helps build legitimate brand awareness and trust.

Most links available are low quality, and still expensive

As the analysis revealed, more than 85% of the domains were identified as low-quality sites. As a reminder, this means that they are both below DR 40 and have an estimated monthly traffic of less than 10,000.

The average estimated guest post cost is $364.76, but it can be as high as $1,459.06 when buying from a vendor.

The average estimated cost of a quality guest post ranges hits $957.o8 for top-tier links before the markup, $1,675 on average if buying from a vendor.

I asked James Brockbank, Managing Director of Digitaloft what to make of all of this and he told me,

“What really stands out here is the average cost of a ‘top-tier’ link comes out at an average of $957.08.

Whilst I don’t believe that cost-per-link should ever be used as a way to measure the success of any link building activity, as its got nothing at all to do with the impact the links have on real business metrics like revenue, in this instance we can at least compare this to earning links with digital PR.

If you’re buying top-tier links at just under $1k, you’re way overpaying on what you could, in my experience.

Pay for 10 guest post links and you’ve spent just short of $10k. Put that same budget into digital PR and you’ll without a doubt earn more, higher quality, links on sites that your audience is reading and which you’d never be able to buy a guest post on.

Use PR to earn links and you’re not paying ‘per link.’ I’ve seen campaigns earn 2x, 3x or even more links than that on a similar budget.

But it’s the impact that matters the most. If you’re buying guest post links from a link vendor, that in itself is a footprint. If you can see a list of sites that sell links, so can I. And so can anyone at Google. Do we really think these link lists aren’t known to Google?

It’s one main reason why earned links come out top every time. They build your authority and reputation, and PR is a surefire way to protect your brand from the impact of algorithm updates. Obviously bought links? They might work today but there’ll come a time when you wish you’d earned them by doing things that build your brand and drive links as a byproduct of this.”

Guest Posts vs. Digital PR: What’s Worth Your Budget in 2025?

The reality is that most guest posting links are still overpriced, underperforming, and low quality.

Most of these guest post sites exist only to place links.

For instance, the site below costs $1,500 for a guest post and is DR 39.

The other part of this is that Google can easily nullify all of these sites in an instant (like they did with Helpful Content Updates in the past).

The very few sites on these databases that do meet quality standards are costly and often inaccessible to the everyday brand without vendor connections.

Meanwhile, digital PR offers something that purchased guest posts never will: both credibility and long-term value.

When Google shifts the rules again (and it will), links earned through high-end news coverage are far less likely to be devalued because they are typically associated with the most trusted sites that don’t exist to simply place links.

Beth Nunnington, Founding Member & Global VP Digital PR at Journey Further, agreed:

“I’ve said for years now that buying links – even under the guise of guest posting – is risky and drives very little value. At best, Google will ignore those links, at worst it could penalize you and hurt your business. These findings don’t surprise me, but I welcome them as it helps to shine light on bad practice in our industry.

You can’t game the system, especially in an AI-driven search world. Trust and authority isn’t bought, it’s earned – by both people and machines.”

One of the things the Google leak showed us was how much Google valued links from that got engagement.

That’s why we’ve been making significant investments in digital PR (as evident in our newly released AI-enabled media list building tool, ListIQ), and we’ll continue to make those investments moving forward.

The post The Cost of Guest Posts Based on 26k Sites [New Data] appeared first on BuzzStream.

As research continues to emerge, showing the power of press mentions in AI search results, many continue to rely on journalist request platforms.

However, with numerous platforms available, including social media, it can be unclear which one is best suited for your industry.

Thanks to Elvis Sun and the team at PressPulse.ai, I was able to examine their compilation of journalist requests from the past couple of months.

PressPulse curated the most relevant media opportunities from all across seven top journalist request platforms from May to June, including: Qwoted, Featured, Help a Reporter Out (HARO), Source of Sources (SOS), Help A B2B Writer (HAB2BW), Substack, Twitter/X, and LinkedIn.

(If you’re unfamiliar with any of the platforms listed above, I cover them in detail in my HARO alternatives post and my post about responding to journalist requests.)

This study breaks down the number of requests, the industries that make these requests, and, finally, which platforms map best to each sector.

Quick Note on Methodology:

For social platforms, Twitter/X and LinkedIn, it looks at requests with the same hashtags I looked at in our journorequest study: #journorequest, #prrequest, #mediarequest, and #bloggerrequest.

Additionally, when totaling the media outlets’ requests, we examined the top 20 outlets for each platform to gain a better understanding of their composition.

Quote Request Platform Recap

If you are already familiar with each of the platforms mentioned in this post, feel free to skip this part. But here is the quick breakdown:

Qwoted – A quote platform that acts more like a matchmaking platform. You can set up expert profiles, set topic alerts, and pitch journalists directly on the platform or via email notifications.

Featured – Another platform, Featured differs from others in that there is no direct communication with journalists or editors. You simply submit short expert answers that can be slotted into roundup, tips, or Q&A pieces across a network of niche and trade publishers.

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) – This is the OG service, which is fully email-based. Every day, you get an email digest of reporter requests broken down by category.

Source of Sources (SOS) – Created by the original creator of HARO, Peter Shankman, this is essentially the same as HARO: a daily email digest of journalist quote requests.

Help a B2B Writer (HAB2BW) – Think of this as HARO meets B2B. HAB2BW has both an email feed and an online database where B2B/SaaS content marketers look for expert input.

Substack – This is a generic newsletter platform, but many journalists use it to crowdsource sources.

Twitter/X – This is where PR pros find real-time #journorequest, #bloggerrequest, #prrequest, and others. You typically DM or email reporters based on their request.

LinkedIn – This is where reporters, creators, and editors drop source requests in posts or comments, similar to Twitter/X.

With that out of the way, let’s get into the data!

Which Platforms Get the Most Journalist Requests?

Qwoted has, by far, the most queries coming in every month, followed by Featured, and then Twitter/X.

When I asked why Qwoted dominates the space, Shelby Bridges, Head of User Success at Qwoted had these insights, “Qwoted’s popularity with journalists is because it’s not just an email listserv, it’s a real-time network.

It helps reporters get what they need, fast.

And Qwoted’s more than a place for expert source requests–journalists can delve into story ideas, press releases, job postings, and more.”

Qwoted also seemed to gain traction as HARO was falling off (more on that later.)

But raw numbers aside, there is some overlap between platforms.

Overall, there is about an average 17% overlap rate.

But to help understand which overlap with each other, I’ve created an overlap matrix where each cell shows the percentage of combined opportunities (from both platforms) accounted for by their shared outlets.

In other words, if I combined all the opportunities on Twitter and LinkedIn into one big pile for instance, what percentage of that pile comes from outlets that show up on both platforms?

Therefore, the higher the number, the greater the overlap.

Based on the general numbers and overlap data, here are my takeaways:

LinkedIn and Twitter have the most overlap

There is just under 82% overlap between LinkedIn and Twitter, meaning their combined opportunities come from the same outlets.

They aren’t the exact requests, but they are from the same outlets.

So, if you’re already monitoring requests on Twitter, you may not need to look at LinkedIn (or vice versa).

HARO overlaps the most with other platforms

HARO has the most overlap with Qwoted (35%), then with SOS (31.5%), and then slightly lower with Featured (22%).

I asked HARO’s CEO, Brett Farmiloe, why he thinks there is so much overlap, and he said, “We’ve found that many platforms view HARO as the original source of journalist requests.

Some even monitor HARO and cross-post queries to their own audiences.

It’s a reflection of HARO’s reputation as the most well-known and trusted resource connecting journalists and sources.”

Determining which is best for you may come down to the kind of platform you prefer.

Qwoted and Featured are real platforms where HARO and SOS are essentially email lists.

Help a B2B Writer and Substack have zero overlap

HAB2BW and Substack have virtually no overlap in requests, so they may be great opportunities to gain some coverage where your competitors haven’t.

Substack requests typically come through as part of newsletters from journalists.

Above is Casey Clark’s Substack, where she puts out media requests.

Help a B2B Writer has both an online platform and an email subscription service (both free).

Help a B2B Writer is obviously more B2B industries and websites, though, so it may not be a fit for everyone (we’ll get to the complete breakdown of industries later in this post.)

Media requests shouldn’t just be judged by their frequency and quantity. We also need to understand quality.

In the next section, we’ll look at the authority of these websites.

Which Platforms Provide the Highest Authority Coverage?

PressPulse provided a breakdown using Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, which approximates the website’s overall ability to rank for keywords.

Based on our data, here is what the breakdown looks like:

Here are my takeaways:

Qwoted and SOS provide the highest-quality opportunities

Qwoted provided the highest number of 80+ DR sources, with sites like The Epoch Times (DR 83) and Newsweek (DR 91).

SOS also has a high frequency of high-quality opportunities, including sites such as Forbes (DR 94) and USA Today (DR 92).

Overall, the platforms that deliver the most high-DA opportunities relative to their overall volume are Qwoted, Substack, and SOS.

One thing to note here is that Substack’s requests usually come from a single Substack for each journalist, but the journalist may write for multiple outlets.

LinkedIn and Twitter/X provided the most mid-tier links

Most of LinkedIn and Twitter’s requests came from the DR 60-79 range, which is still fairly high quality. These are sites like New York Family (DR 72) or The Indian Express (DR 79).

Based on our previous study, the vast majority of quote requests from Twitter/X originated from UK-centric sites.

Over one-third of HARO requests are low DR sites

Just over 38% of HARO’s media requests come from the 0-9 DR bucket.

HARO (formerly Connectively) saw a big decline in quality before it closed its doors last year.

From all accounts, it was riddled with spam and low-quality requests and the low DA bucket we see may still be a lingering effect.

Since then, HARO’s CEO, Brett Farmiloe (whom we highlighted in our podcast episode after HARO’s relaunch), has revived the platform and been working to revamp its image.

Brett told me that it is something they are looking to change with a focus on quality.

“Quality is our top priority at HARO, which is why every request is manually reviewed before approval.

As part of that process, we evaluate the Domain Authority (DA) of the publication using Moz.

We require a minimum DA, with rare exceptions—such as podcasts that meet a threshold of listenership. While meeting the DA requirement is important, it doesn’t guarantee approval, as we consider several other factors as well.

That said, I’ve been really impressed by the volume of high-quality requests coming through HARO. We’re now sending three emails a day—Morning, Afternoon, and Evening editions—and each consistently features trustworthy outlets that sources are eager to be featured on.”

So, things are definitely on the up and up there.

That said, low DA also doesn’t always mean it’s a bad opportunity. It can sometimes be a brand-new site.

For instance, here’s a site that is around DR 20:

On the surface, that may not seem particularly enticing.

But it looks to have started gaining traction around January 2025.

Suppose a site is relevant and looks like a real opportunity that can provide value to readers and customers. In that case, it can still provide value from an SEO perspective (not to mention a business perspective).

So, next, I want to understand the industry breakdown of the media outlets from which these requests are coming.

This should help us better understand and strategize around relevancy.

Which Industries Dominate Media Request Platforms?

Based on our data, here is a breakdown of what industries the quotes are coming from:

As you can see, Home and Lifestyle have a significant presence, and then the other industries drop off.

Here’s what that means:

Home and Lifestyle category/industry dominates

Approximately one-quarter of the overall quote requests originate from “Home and Lifestyle”.

Of these sites, the top ones that appeared frequently were sites Homes & Gardens, The Spruce, and Real Simple.

For instance, here’s a quote from an interior designer in a Home and Gardens story about colors that go with light grey.

We asked Greg Heilers of Jolly SEO about why they think Home and Lifestyle dominate media requests, and here’s what they had to say:

“Many quote request platform users on the journalist side cater to a B2C audience.

Looking at the dominance of Qwoted over all other platforms, it’s clear that the prevalence of Home & Lifestyle topics on Qwoted impacts the entire landscape.

More broadly speaking, similar to Business and Finance websites, these segments provide an opportunity for publications to update their content regularly, which is also conveniently what Google wishes to promote: fresh, relevant, in-demand content.”

Business and Finance Sites are also popular

Business and Finances account for 16% of the top media outlets. These include sites such as Forbes, GoBankingRates, and Business Insider.

This aligns with much of the feedback we’ve received, indicating that because finance changes rapidly, there tends to be a lot of breaking news and a need for expert sources.

It may also be in part because these topics fall under the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) category, which Google tends to scrutinize more closely for factors such as experience, expertise, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T).

For example, here’s a quote from a finance expert on GoBankingRates about signs you’ve made it to the upper class.

Note, many freelancer requests didn’t mention a specific outlet, accounting for almost 23% of the industries mentioned.

Elvis of PressPulse helped clarify a few reasons why journalists may not mention an outlet:

“1. Journalists care about getting authentic comments fast, so not adding a specific outlet can act as a quality filter (if you say you’re writing for Forbes, you might attract lots of poor emails).

2. People who work in PR agencies say it’s important to know the name of the journalists on the quote request. Sometimes they know which outlets the journalists write for and for which topic, without the need of asking the journalist for this information.

3. Sometimes the outlet is in their social bio, you can dig for this info even if it’s not present (we use AI to do this for the Twitter opps that have no outlets in the request itself).”

Not all platforms are created equally. Upon examining the data, it appears that writers and journalists from these industries tend to utilize different platforms more frequently than others.

Next, let’s examine the industry breakdown by platform.

Do Requests on Specific Platforms Tend to Favor Certain Industries?

It appears that specific platforms tend to cater to certain industries.

Based on these notes, here are the main takeaways:

Business and Finance account for about a quarter of all platforms

Business and Finance industry ranges from 23.90% to 28.40% for Featured (23.90), Qwoted (24.30), Substack (28.40), SOS (29.40), and HARO (31.20).

So, if you are in either industry, you should have luck about a quarter of the time on any of the platforms (except for Featured and Twitter, where they are virtually non-existent.)

Home and Lifestyle make up almost half of Qwoted’s requests

Home and Lifestyle sites account for 47.6% of the top requests for Qwoted.

As we saw previously, the Home and Lifestyle category 23% of the entire top inventory, so it’s no surprise that the platform with the most extensive inventory, Qwoted, holds many of these requests.

Marketing and PR sites have some of the highest concentrations

Marketing/PR sites, such as SmythOS and Marketer Magazine, dominate the list for Featured, accounting for 36.5% of the top requests.

This is also the case for HAB2BW, with 35% of the top requests categorized as marketing and PR sites.

Based on the overall breakdown, here is where I would spend my time based on the industries I’m working in:

Now that we understand the industry landscape, quality, and quantity of requests, the next thing I want to examine is the types of placements these media outlets offer.

Do All Quote Request Platforms Offer Links?

Not all quote request platforms offer links.

According to the data, only 21.9% of the quote requests explicitly provide follow links.

But let’s dig a bit deeper into each of the platforms.

Based on our study, here are some of the takeaways:

SOS provides the most links

SOS requests have the highest amount of follow links at 36.26%.

SOS also has the highest combined total of links (follow + nofollow) at 43.94%, with Qwoted as their closest second at 40.17%.

I asked Peter Shankman, the owner of Source of Sources (and original creator of HARO),

“Well, I think one of the main reasons is because at SOS, we actively prohibit overseas SEO shops from using our service.

That way, reporters don’t get tons of BS spam responses that are only created in hopes of a backlink. When reporters get real content from real people, they’re willing to provide a backlink.

It’s simple. Give reporters what they want (and not garbage AI crap) and they’ll help you out.

Other services simply don’t care as much to do this.”

While links aren’t the end-all be-all of PR, they have proven to be a significant driver of not only exposure in search results, but can also lead to clicks.

If your quote or insight connects closely enough with your brand, you could feasibly drive traffic to your site.

HAB2BW has the most unknown link opportunities

When reviewing HAB2BW, you’ll notice that some of the requests explicitly state that you’ll be given attribution.

However, more often than not, they don’t:

When I reached out to Jimmy Daly, the founder of Superpath and owner of Help a B2B Writer, he said, “We don’t always include this in the request, but it’s included in the form that writers fill out when they submit a request, and we also send an email reminder about it.

In general, I think we do a good job of educating writers that attribution is expected.

Perfect? No.

But, HaB2BW isn’t a full-blown SaaS (that’s on purpose), and so our ability to enforce certain things like this is limited.

I don’t have data on how many requests turn into articles with attributable quotes. If I did, I’d be happy to share it.”

(For what it’s worth, in my experience over the years, Help a B2B Writer does very often lead to backlinks.)

As I mentioned, however, backlinks are becoming less of a driving force in the industry. They are even less correlated with appearing in AI Overviews, according to a study by Ahrefs.

In my opinion, any mention of this is worthwhile these days.

Use Media Requests As a Supportive Strategy

Media requests, journalist requests, expert quote requests — call them whatever you want — are still a viable strategy today.

If you’re looking to incorporate it into your strategy, we have several tips for responding to journalist requests.

That said, I don’t think there is enough quantity to make it your entire strategy.

There is more competition in the game than ever. You need to diversify your strategies. Try newsjacking, survey posts, and city index studies.

Don’t forget the importance of building relationships with journalists.

Responding to requests can sometimes help you connect with journalists, but many of the platforms are more transactional and less personal than an email pitch.

The post The Data Behind 7 Top Journalist Request Platforms [New Study] appeared first on BuzzStream.

As publications continue to cut staff and more SEOs flock to digital PR, the competition for journalists’ attention is fierce.

Even if you are newsjacking a trending topic, chances are several PR teams are doing the same.

To put yourself in the best position to succeed, you need data to inform your decisions.

To get to the bottom of what makes the best subject line, I’ve analyzed over 6 million email subject lines from digital PR campaigns.

A Quick Note on My Analysis

I’m prioritizing open rates as the leading metric of success. I polled PRs, and there was a split on where the focus should be:

Realistically, click data is the ideal metric; however, click tracking is not something PRs typically include in their emails, as it may lead to the email being flagged as spam (or the journalist adding the click tracking link to their story).

Although there are concerns about inflated open rate metrics due to Apple MPP and Gmail image caching, I still lean on open rates as the leading indicator in this study, given the large sample size. (Though as you will see, in most cases, open rate and reply rate align.)

What is the Ideal Word Count for a PR Email Subject Line?

Based on our research, the 9-13 word range achieves the best open rate at 40.20%, although it’s only slightly higher than the 14-30 word range with 39.97%.

Keep in mind that depending on the email client and platform, recipients can only see a set number of words before the subject line gets cut off.

So, let’s quickly look at the breakdown of the character usage in email subject lines:

The ideal length, based on open rates, is more than 71 characters, with an open rate of 40.71%.

(We do see a spike in reply rate of 8.61% with the smaller subject lines, but upon closer examination, the number of emails sent at 0-40 characters represents just 1.48% of the total sample size.)

Seventy-one characters align with the average 14-30 word count.

Why does this work so well?

If we look at the breakdown of character limits based on Email Tool Tester data as they relate to average number of words seen, this 14-word, 71+ character aligns with ithe deal viewing window for desktop Gmail recipients:

To further support this, we surveyed our digital PR users’ data to understand where and who they email; Gmail addresses were most frequently used.

Therefore, it appears that optimizing for desktop on Gmail yields the best engagement.

However, there are some strategic ways around character limits.

One way is to front-load your subject line with the most eye-catching information.

In the next section, I decided to look at some phrase patterns.

How Should You Phrase Your Email Subject Lines?

Upon reviewing our data, I noticed some clear patterns in the subject lines.

In our data, subject lines starting with “Study finds” achieve the best open rates and reply rates, at nearly 41% and 1.25%, respectively.

Second was “Data reveals” with a 37.55% open rate and a 0.88% reply rate.

The phrasing is one thing, but I’ve also noticed that our users tend to use structural patterns, such as brackets or special punctuation, in email subject lines.

Next, we’ll see how that kind of structure impacts opens and replies.

How to Structure PR Email Subject Lines?

Based on our data, the subject lines that led with brackets saw the best open rates (52.08%) and reply rates (2.24%).

Even trailing with a bracket seemed to help open (49.42%) and reply rates (1.60%).

The brackets may serve as a visual cue to help stand out in a crowded inbox.

This made me think of some other visual cues that I’ve tried in the past, which led me to consider emojis.

Do Emojis Impact Subject Line Engagement?

And while emoji usage accounted for only a small percentage of our data, approximately 4%, it seemed to perform slightly better than others.

I was expecting to see a more drastic difference between emoji usage vs non-usage, but they don’t seem to have a significant impact on journalists.

If you’re interested, the beer emoji performed the best (53.57%):

So, perhaps there are some stories and industries where it’s worth testing.

Emojis aside, there are some other ways to stand out in an inbox, and that’s personalization.

Let’s look at that next.

Does Personalizing Email Subject Lines Help Stand Out?

When we say the word “personalization”, many factors come to mind. I wrote about 8 different personalized email outreach techniques used within the email body copy.

For subject lines, the most common two ways of personalizing that I’ve come across are mentioning the recipient’s name or publication within the subject line (or both).

Mentioning a Website/Publication

When mentioning the publication, rates appear to skyrocket with a 50.81% open rate compared to 39.25% when there isn’t any mention.

However, only 1% of our users mention a website in their outreach subject lines. So, there may be a missed opportunity here (albeit a small sample size).

The ones that did seem to include it when they mention “exclusives”, which we’ll get to later in this analysis.

Mentioning a Person’s Name

Based on our data, mentioning a name has a lower performance rate (38.45%) compared to subject lines that focus on the story.

Mentioning a name can come off as over-personalized and too templated, which may put journalists off.

In our dataset, less than 1% of users put the name into the subject line. The ones that are mentioned are again mentioned in conjunction with “[Exclusive]”.

It seems like the Exclusive is a way to get journalists’ attention, so let’s look at that next.

Do Exclusives Perform Better?

When comparing open rates, exclusives have a clear advantage in opens, at 54.16% as compared to those without (37.16%).

This may seem obvious once you see the numbers.

But if it’s so obvious, why don’t more PRs use exclusives?

Overall, just 13.38% of pitches in our dataset mention exclusives.

I know that some PRs feel that exclusives limit coverage, but given the ever-shrinking pool of journalists and publications, I believe that exclusives may be the key to success in this context.

But, there are a few more angles I’d like to highlight before we draw some overall conclusions.

Does Title Case or Sentence Case Matter?

When I was with Siege Media, we conducted a study and found that sentence case performed best for the types of link building we did in 2016.

For those of you who are unsure, here’s the quick key:

• Sentence case doesn’t capitalize every word.

• Title Case Capitalizes Every Word.

So, let’s see if this trend still holds:

Based on this data, it appears that title case outperforms sentence case, with an open rate of 40.75% and a reply rate of 1.46%, compared to 35.03% and 1.01% for sentence case, respectively.

This is a minor detail that seems to have a significant impact.

Over 78.43% of our users use sentence case, while the other ~22% use title case (a very small percentage use all caps, which I don’t recommend).

Next, I wanted to consider something that might come into play when journalists are scanning their inboxes: reading comprehension.

Does Reading Level Impact Subject Line Open Rates?

I hypothesize that, given journalists have less time, they will be more inclined to open a subject line that is easy to read and comprehend.

I analyzed our dataset using the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score, which ranges from 1 to 100 (with 100 being the most complex), based on word complexity.

As you can see, the best open rates begin at the 10th-grade reading level (40.54%) and peak at college and beyond (41.22%).

To help illustrate the range, here are some examples:

• 5th Grade – Bringing Back Y2K – How to get Zendaya’s Coachella look for less

• 8th-9th Grade – AI Tools Are Changing How Teens Study — But Are They Helping?

• College+ – Urban Migration Trends: Why Gen Z Is Reshaping Housing Demand in Midwestern Cities

While recommendations from the UX research site NNGroup recommended writing web content for the 6th grade reading level, it seems like that doesn’t carry over to subject lines, at least not for journalists.

I assume this is because educated journalists most likely have a higher literacy level than the average reader.

However, realistically, this may ultimately come down to how a journalist or publication writes its headlines.

Best practice when pitching is to try to emulate the headline writing style of your target journalist. Therefore, it is possible that more publications are being pitched by journalists who write in a more formal style.

(I may also do some digging into the headline writing style of major publishers to see if there is any correlation. Let me know if you think this is a good idea for a post!)

Upon breaking down the usage, it appears that more PR professionals prefer a reading level of 10th-12th grade.

College+: 17.67%

10th-12th Grade: 28.86%

8th-9th Grade: 24.92%

6th-7th Grade: 16.58%

≤5th Grade: 11.97%

So, there is some alignment there, but PRs may be able to go even higher.

Recapping Findings at a Glance

Based on the data in our study, the perfect subject line would have these features:

Feature	Example
Between 40-71+ characters	44% of renters are skipping lease clauses for costly rentals
Between 9-13 words	Study reveals 55% of Brits don’t get a good night’s sleep
Uses brackets up front	[New Data]: Data breach from a top healthcare company
Uses “Study finds” or “Data reveals”	Study finds 7 in 10 Gen Zs can’t find Arkansas on a map
Uses Title Case	These U.S. Cities Rank Highest for Rent Inflation
Offers Exclusive	[Exclusive] First Look at New Email Outreach Product
Mentions a Publication	[Exclusive for The Verge] Phones use this new technology even though it’s banned
Reading Level: 10th Grade+	New Data Reveals Surprising Shift in Media Link Practices
Optimized for Desktop	Google Mentions Are Up—But Not Where You’d Think
Avoids Over-Personalization	Flight Hacks That Travel Pros Won’t Share
Provides Emoji (Optional)	Cities With The Best Breweries In the USA

You could follow these perfectly, but really, it comes down to relevance.

If you aren’t reaching relevant journalists, none of the wording or structure matters.

The Perfect Subject Line is Relevant to the Beat

The best way to stand out is to deliver a pitch that is relevant to a journalist.

We’ve found that a highly targeted approach to building email lists yields the best open rates, replies, and coverage rates.

Furthermore, both Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2025 and Cision’s State of the Media 2025 highlight that journalists ignore non-relevant pitches.

Journalists will sometimes go as far as to block you from subsequent pitches when they aren’t relevant, limiting your pool even further for later campaigns (not to mention giving the PR industry a bad name).

So, before you craft your subject line, be sure you are taking the time to understand a journalist’s beat and if they are still actively covering it.

For instance, say I’m looking for journalists who cover the Love Island reality TV show.

To understand what Lisa Ezquibias of People Magazine covers, I’d start with her bio page.

Unfortunately, I don’t find much there, so I’d look at her recent articles.

With recent articles, I have a better sense that she’s covered two Love Island stories recently.

This process helps guarantee a more targeted result.

The downside is that it’s incredibly time-consuming.

I can do this in a fraction of the time at scale with BuzzStream’s new media list-building tool, ListIQ.

Here’s a Google News search for the term “love island”.

I ask ListIQ to generate a media list for me based on these search results.

Then, I can easily see details like bio, job titles, and recent articles for multiple journalists at once:

It also provides me with social media information and verified email addresses, so I can easily contact them with a subject line perfectly tailored to their beat.

This deep analysis is required to stand out in journalists’ crowded inboxes.

The post 6 Million Subject Lines Analyzed: What Actually Gets Journalists to Open appeared first on BuzzStream.

Every digital PR pro has felt it.

Some emails vanish into the void, while others spark instant replies.

But is it random, or are certain types of sites just more responsive?

After analyzing over 8 million emails sent since the beginning of 2023 by our digital PR power users, I was able to track how different recipients engage with PRs.

Jump down to methodology and definitions.

Which Domains Get Emailed by PRs the Most?

Here is a breakdown of the top 50 domains in our list based on the number of sent emails.

As you can see, recipients using Gmail dominate the list, (which we’ll see later may be indicative of freelancer use.)

Keep in mind that many of the top domains on this list (excluding Gmail) are part of large networks.

For instance, ReachPLC owns over 70 individual sites, but each journalist uses a @reachplc.com email address.

So, to get a better sense of the story, I’ve broken it down into site type.

Open and Reply Rates By Type of Site

We’ve broken these email domains into site types:

Niche Media – Publications that focus on specific industries or topics like tech news (TechCrunch, Wired), lifestyle sites (BuzzFeed, Hello Magazine), or vertical business journals (BizJournals, Retail Gazette).

National News
Large-scale, country-wide news organizations and major newspapers with broad reach across national or global audiences (e.g. FT, WSJ, BBC, Daily Mail).

Local News
Regional and community-focused newspapers, TV stations, and online hubs (Seattle Times, Arizona Republic, Newsquest titles, local TV affiliates).

Freelancer
I’ve grouped all personal email domains (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) as freelancers.

Here is my main takeaway from the site type breakdown:

Freelancers Have Lowest Opens but Highest Replies

As you can see, the freelancer bucket is characterized by low open rates but high reply rates.

Here’s the breakdown:

As you can see, Gmail dominates with a reply rate of 4.88 and the highest number of emails sent at over 330K (keep in mind that Gmail is the most popular email provider), making it a true workhorse.

But why don’t freelancers open emails?

My one thought, based on my podcast conversation with Rosie Taylor, is that as a freelancer, her focus is much more divided than when she was in-house covering stories.

Aside from reading PR pitches, she also pitches to editors and bolsters her income through consulting, corporate training, and writing her own Substack newsletter, Get Featured.

But when you do catch a freelancer’s eye, they seem to be more interested in replying.

National News Pubs Get A LOT of Pitches

Technically, BuzzStream users send to more national news than other kinds of publications, but I think the fact that national news dominates so wildly tells the story beyond just BuzzStream.

Obviously, there are many more national news publications than local ones, but for PRs, this helps put into perspective what we face daily.

And as publications cut journalists from their roster, cutting through is getting more difficult. And as more link builders shift over to digital PR, there will be even more noise going to journalists.

Next, I wanted to examine the geographical breakdown to see if anything was interesting about how newsrooms around the world interact with PRs.

Open and Reply Rates Based on Region of the World

The regional breakdown is somewhat self-explanatory, but I wanted to mention that global sites do not have a clear country-code focus.

These are sites like BuzzFeed, Insider, and large aggregators.

Here are some of my takeaways:

AUS/NZ and UK journalists appear to respond the most

When compared to other regions, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK respond to emails more frequently than others. I reached out to a few experts in the space who I knew had a good background in Australian digital PR (and UK) to get some insights.

Former podcast guest, Ellie Sumner of Australia-based Prosperity Media, told me:

“When it comes to reply rates, I’ve consistently found them to be higher in Australia, too. Journalists here are more likely to get back to you if they’re interested, often wanting to collaborate, whether it’s arranging quotes from spokespeople, setting up interviews, or sourcing local case studies.”

Though she also told me that “Australian journalists are more likely to open emails that offer strong local relevance or exclusive angles.

Traditional reactive stories or generic pitches don’t tend to perform as well.”

Victoria Schmid, digital PR expert at KURU Footwear, told me that replies come from Australian PRs because they are looking for sources:

“When working in Aus, I found a lot of journalists who were interested in the story would reply asking us to find someone to interview or set them up with a source.”

Lastly, Amanda Walls, founder/director of digital marketing agency Cedarwood Digital, said,

“I would say that the Australian opens are super high because the Digital PR market is less diluted (so they are getting less press releases in their inbox).

We know that Digital PR is still very much in its infancy in Australia compared to the US/UK and is likely why the open rates are so much higher (simply a lower volume of overall emails).”

US open rates are higher than the UK

For some insights into the US vs UK, I spoke with Carrie Rose, founder and CEO of Rise at Seven.

“There are literally 10X more journalists in the US than in the UK.

UK journalists are time-strapped, producing high-volume stories, and therefore opening PR emails is more challenging for them.

 In the US, however, more time and more of them, therefore, increases the average open rate.

UK journalists are a bit more ahead when it comes to where they get their stories, using TikTok, Reddit, or data to drive story ideas.

The US is still more reliant on PRs.”

I also reached out to Beth Nunnington, Global VP of Digital PR at Journey Further. She told me:

“It’s no surprise the UK sends more emails since journalists there produce more content daily. While a tailored approach is essential in both markets, it’s even more critical in the US, where a selective media landscape means pitches really have to stand out, which likely explains the higher open rates.

“The UK’s higher reply rate suggests outreach converts better in that territory, as journalists rely more on PR support to meet their publishing demands.”

It appears that a combination of workforce size and overall need for PR influences engagement rates.

So what does this all mean for PRs?

The Need to Find Personal Email Addresses

Really, the bigger takeaway for me is that there is an increasing need to cut through the noise.

And, given the fact that personal email addresses seem to have the best engagement rates, they are probably the best bet for PRs.

But finding them can be tough.

We observed in some earlier research that traditional email finder tools don’t perform well in uncovering journalist emails.

They are especially ineffective at uncovering personal email addresses because most of them are pattern-matching tools (i.e., they try to find the email pattern used by everyone at the target pub, like firstname@domain.com).

I’d recommend using ListIQ to help find personal emails because it only picks up verified addresses that it locates on the web, such as on journalists’ portfolio websites or social platforms.

For instance, say I wanted to reach out to the author of this Forbes article about yoga:

Email lookup tools have discovered those patterns:

But since the author is marked as a contributor, I know that she’s not a staff writer, so she’s not going to have an @forbes.com email address.

Instead, I add the URL to a Google Sheet and enable my ListIQ Chrome Extension.

Then I ask to add columns like bio and email address to the sheet, and ListIQ finds me the address, which happens to be a personal email address.

This is the kind of targeted approach that will become increasingly necessary to find the relevant journalists in 2025 and beyond.

Methodology

We only included campaigns with 25 or more emails and filtered out bounces and follow-ups. Only the top 10% of domains—those receiving 455 or more emails—were included in the final analysis, which lowered the overall number of sent emails to 4.9 M.

The post Do Certain Sites Engage More With PRs? [Study] appeared first on BuzzStream.