Your PR Team and Your Content Team Are Solving the Same Problem Separately

Two teams at most companies chase the same goal without knowing it. One pitches journalists. One writes blog posts. Both are trying to convince Google and AI models that the business deserves to be found. Almost nowhere do they compare notes.

That gap costs more now than it used to. Brands are 6.5 times more likely to show up in AI answers through third-party sources than through their own content. Press release citations in AI tools grew five times over just six months. The old view, that PR builds brand and SEO builds traffic, no longer covers what’s actually happening. Both feed the same signal: whether a model trusts you enough to mention you.

Most teams still work in separate lanes. PR treats SEO as an afterthought, something to loop in once a campaign is finished. SEO treats PR the same way, asking for a link after the story runs instead of before it’s written. Both miss the moment when combining data would have made the asset stronger.

The fix is not a merger. It’s a shared list. Put every source PR has flagged, every domain SEO tracks for citations, and every publication showing up in AI answers into one spreadsheet. Sources that appear on more than one list matter twice as much. Pitch those first.

The fix also means splitting work by what each team does well. Structured, technical placements, fixing broken links, submitting to listicles, monitoring AI citations, suit SEO. Relationship-based placements, expert commentary, analyst briefings, award submissions, suit PR. Neither team needs to take over the other’s job. They need to stop working from separate maps of the same territory.

Review sites, forums, and expert quotes all feed the same trust signal AI models rely on. A business that treats these as separate departments’ problems is leaving citations on the table that a single shared list would have caught.

Start with one shared spreadsheet. Merge your source lists. See how much overlap you already have.

beket.ai tracks where your AI citations are actually coming from, so your PR and content teams can stop guessing and start working the same list.