Digital PR trends in 2025

In the age of AI, we’ve seen digital PR becoming a much more important part of the digital marketing process. Of course, PR has always been important, but with an increased number of people using tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini to handle their everyday searching needs, us and other digital marketers have been keen to figure out where these tools pool their recommendations from.

Although reliable strategies for appearing in these results are hard to pin down due to the nature of AI, brand mentions and placements have remained a common denominator.

With PR being such an important force, it helps to stay informed of the trends shaping modern approaches. Here, we run through some trends in digital PR, that every marketer should be aware of in 2025

Data-led stories

Data is (or at least should be) at the forefront of everything a digital marketer undertakes. It can help make decisions, guide strategies, and even compel journalists to give you a link.

BuzzStream recently surveyed over 150 PR professionals, of which an overwhelming majority of them claimed that pitching data-led content was a tactic that they use while conducting PR digitally.

We echo this wholeheartedly. Some of our strongest PR campaigns have been made and backed up by robust data that we’ve collected from multiple sources. Whether it’s survey data, search volume trends, or simply marrying two data sources together to make another interesting story, data is a form of validation that helps ease a journalist’s mindset while they evaluate their thousands of emails.

No-follow links increasing

Since 2024, we’ve started to see some reluctance in the PR space toward the nature of linking. Often, journalists will be happy to provide a link back to your site, but on the basis that the link is tagged as nofollow.

Side note: if you’re wondering what a nofollow link is, and how it differs from a traditional link, read our guide to backlinks written by Liberty’s Senior Digital PR Specialist, Emma-Leigh Hull.

For many years, Digital PR teams have been trained to constantly hunt links without nofollow tags, as these are the only way of ensuring link equity is passed on to a target website. At least, that’s how it was.

With more publications refusing to give links without nofollow, it calls to question whether these links are even worth achieving. Thankfully, this whole situation was addressed in a Google blog post in 2019, where it states:

“When nofollow was introduced, Google would not count any link marked this way as a signal to use within our search algorithms. This has now changed. All the link attributes—sponsored, ugc, and nofollow—are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search. We’ll use these hints—along with other signals—as a way to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use links within our systems.”

So, while nofollow does indicate to search engines that no endorsement (or link equity) is to be passed on, Google still considers them while assessing a website. Exactly how is unclear, but this does confirm that nofollow links do have their place.

Brand mention + links

Calling back to the need to appear in AI search results, it isn’t just links that matter in digital PR. Sometimes, not receiving a link can also be beneficial.

Why, you may ask? The plain answer is that while search engines may use links more prominently than brand mentions to inform algorithms, AI chatbots (at least for the moment) will mainly use brand mentions to inform their responses.

Depending on the question you ask, you may trigger a chatbot to conduct its own internet search in order to find a suitable answer to your query. For example, if you ask a chatbot “where should I buy my next mattress from in the UK?” it will then do a few things:

• Run a search for mattress retailers
• Filter these down to UK only
• Assess which brand it then recommends based mainly on trust signals

One of the steps in the assessment process revolves identifying how much a brand is mentioned favourably across the web, and where from – not just how many times that brand’s website is linked back to.

Resurfacing TikTok

As a sweeping generalisation, TikTok, or at least the trends on there, are more commonly catered towards a younger audience. This means that while something may trend on TikTok for a while (sometimes things that are relevant to your brand), you may not hear about them until a clever PR specialist has used their initiative to effectively cross post that content into the right publications.

Sometimes, these trends require an expert’s input to explain to the average person what they mean and stand for, which is where you come in. Being aware of these trends and picking out ones which may relate to your brand can be useful in getting coverage. Topping this up with expert comments can further increase your chances, adding an authoritative voice to your outreach.

Give your brand a voice

In our Digital PR team, we’re always keen to experiment and try new things in exchange for coverage. This has given us strong success over the years, and we’ve developed great relationships with journalists as a result. If your brand is lacking in links or brand mentions, contact us for a chat about our services and the coverage we can get.