Game PR in the Age of AI: What Actually Works?

What is the best mobile puzzle game? That was the prompt I was using. It was kind of a gateway. And I would have assumed that the answer would have been Candy Crush or Royal Match or something else from I don't know the top five or 10 in the App Store uh best grossing, but it wasn't. It was Monument Valley, a game that came out over 10 years ago in 2014.
Hi, welcome Kaylee. So before we go into AI and just for our audience, I think there's a lot of confusion, at least from the people that I know and who I speak to, about what PR actually is and what that would actually mean for a game stu studio. And I do think that when a lot of people think about PR, it's really in relation to some kind of an event like a fund raise or an exit or things of that nature. But if if I could get from you as somebody who has been working with many game studios as well as a number of infrastructure companies and other types of companies that work in gaming, could you explain for us what

it is that PR actually does?
Absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's so funny to be on the other side of the camera. Usually, I'm the one securing these interviews for clients, which is part of PR. So PR is part of comms. Broadly speaking, comms is creating a narrative for your company or for your game. PR is a subset of that and it's all about securing earned media. So for a game studio, this can mean getting press or a review of your games, getting news hits about new hires, new partnerships, and ultimately telling your story and what sets you apart from other games or other studios. If you want to reach gamers, earned media gives you credibility and proof that someone other than you or your team actually cares about what you're building. I think your audience knows games is more competitive than ever. More than 19,000 games were launched on Steam alone last year, and less than half of those have been reviewed by like under 10 people. So PR

is one way that you can get attention for whatever it is you're building. There's also a B2B side of things which I think is increasingly important. If a studio needs to build a brand around hiring or wants to target publishing partners or investors, your comm's plan that you have for reaching gamers is going to look completely different. The focus is more on B2B media and executive positioning strategy. I think it's important to note that the best narratives are those that are told over time with a steady cadence of news that really reinforces your key differentiators rather than a one-off funding announcement which people are simply going to forget about,
right? And so maybe a simple way to think about it and from what you said is like how do you get attention on something? And so in the games industry it could be at the game studio level. So you you want to do hiring, you want attention for your studio, it could be at the games level because you're launching a product or a game that you want attention to. And it could also be at the individual level, right? Where

there are some folks, especially if you are a vendor in the industry, you want to be thought of as a thought leader. You want to get attention to yourself, blog post, things of that nature, which would then help get attention for the the kind of products that you're you're potentially selling or representing. And so, um, I I I would say that the other thing that I think it's important for the audience to understand and one of the reasons why I'm excited to talk to you, Kaylee, is because I think that one of the things that we've been seeing, especially in the age of AI, is essentially this trend that there's so much like AI slop out there that attention is becoming increasingly difficult. And so that really what that means is that your role actually could could potentially become a lot more valuable to to a lot of game studios in the industry. And um so taking like this one specific example in terms of like games discoverability is becoming a huge problem. It's something that I talk with you know a

fair amount with a lot of people in the games industry is like how do you get attention for for a game for example. And I know that you gave a talk at Pocket Gamers Connect and you asked the audience and if you were to ask chatbt about a specific game, how does that actually work or the kinds of results that you get? And so maybe could you talk about this, you know, how does that work today in terms of game discoverability and maybe the difference now that we're seeing as people increasingly move from search to AIdriven um discoverability?
Absolutely. So, I think the example that I gave at Pocket Gamer Connects is one of the best examples because it blew my mind a little bit. We are pretty early to Gio, which I think we're going to talk about later how we've used it for our agency, but
just sorry, sorry, Kayla, just for the audience, Geo is generative engine optimization, meaning you what does an AI recommend instead of like a search?
Exactly. Instead of geo, it's what is what are the LLM's meaning? Chat, GPT,

Gemini, Claude, etc. or are they listing you for the prompts that you want to be known for? So, when we were first kind of figuring out our own research and our own strategy around this, I just did a lot of a lot of research on my own looking at what the different LLMs were using. And, you know, for Gemini and Chat GPT, a little less so for Claude, you can actually say we'll site your sources, right? So, you can figure out fairly easily where they're getting that information. So, I I was looking at what is the best mobile puzzle game. That was the prompt I was using. It was kind of a gateway, and I would have assumed that the answer would have been Candy Crush or Royal Match or something else from I know the top five or 10 in the App Store, uh, best grossing, but it wasn't. It was Monument Valley, a game that came out over 10 years ago in 2014. Monument Valley 2 came out in 2017. Just for some comp data in the US app store, Monument Valley currently ranks number 11 on

paid. Monument Valley 2 sits at number 16 on Google Play paid and it doesn't appear in App Store paid top 25 at all. Neither game is anywhere on the free downloads list or top grossing. So what this shows us is app stores measure popularity, but LLMs measure something completely different. It's a mix of authority, context, and citation quality. And getting recommended by AI or GEIO is a completely different strategy from topping the charts. And it's also a different strategy from SEO. A lot of people like to think, oh, it's just a evolution. And there are some similarities, but it's also very different. So, what's interesting here is if you ask Chat GPT, Gemini, or Perplexity what the best pub puzzle game on mobile is, all three say Monument Valley, which is very rare that the LLMs actually cite the same answer. We'll talk about that, I think, a little bit later. But what's behind those answers is also interesting. It's almost

entirely listicles. So listicles are, you know, they're pretty basic, best of lists that BuzzFeed made quite popular in the early 2010s, but we still see on a lot of gaming sites, a lot of blog content. So when I was first doing my research, we tested this on chat GPT, and the answers for best mobile puzzle game was drawing on 24 sources, citation sources. So this is basically where the LLMs are getting their information. And 18 of those were best of listicles. They included list of goals from Pocket Tactics, Pocket Gamer. Five were Wikipedia and only one was Reddit and Gemini and Perplexity. It was the same thing, but they were actually looking at different listical sites. Perplexity leaned on Mini Review, Pocket Tactics, Gamespot, Games Radar, and a couple of YouTube videos. And Gemini went even more narrow. only four sources for its whole answer and they were PC Mag, Thinky Games, Kak to Kotaku and Polarium

which is the game publishers own blog. Thinking games is a really niche puzzle website that I think most people don't know about never heard of. None of them actually are reviewing Monument Valley. They're roundups that happen to just list it. And so I think this is the lowest hanging fruit or the cheat code for game studios and that's target listicles because they're the most cited content at 21.9% and 40% for when someone is close to buying. And why is that? They're opinionated. They're well formatted. They're really easy for the models to digest. And I also think part of this cheat code is it doesn't have to be the biggest one. When I had this talk, a lot of people were like, "Okay, well, how am I supposed to get my, you know, game on an IGN listicle, right? That just doesn't happen out of thin air." But you don't need IGN. It could be a niche site like the uh Cozy Game one that I mentioned above or it can even be on a

publishers's blog or even sometimes we're seeing a couple of marketing agencies have listicles on their blog and they're ranking for different prompts as well.
Got it. And so part of like getting attention or listing um higher for LLMs is understanding what the sources are and then also just trying to understand how you would like maybe publish your own content but then also um be able to contact maybe some of those uh some of the publishers that are publishing those listicles and and trying to get uh ranked. How successful are you or um how I guess the question I have is like how able are you to be able to impact somebody's listings a AI listings? Can can you give us an example of maybe you know working with a specific company and then being able to get them the kind of coverage to increase their their their listings by AI?
Yeah, I can. So, we work with Pocket Worlds. Pocket Worlds is the publisher.

High-Rise is the mobile game. I know you have had Anton on in the past on the podcast. So, Pocket World is the developer of the mobile virtual world High-Rise. We've been their agency of record for three years. High-Rise found that a lot of their players found them after they aged out of Roblox. So, we worked with the Pocket Worlds team to create a list of prompts that we thought their target users were likely to search. This included best mobile virtual world, best games to make friends, and then also like Roblox alternatives for adults, Roblox alternative for X and Y. For most of these prompts, I'm sure no one's surprised that Roblox completely dominated. But after our geo work, we've actually outranked Roblox for 10 out of 12 prompts, including best mobile virtual world. It's high-rise. If you look in the US, of course, it's different um in different locations. And we were able to do this really fast. Some of the prompts were able to rank within one month, but that was because of an earned media base that we had. I

think it's important to note that our strategy was really a mix of earned media and owned channels. And by that, I mean blog optimization. The blog posts that we created to rank in these prompts saw over 350,000 impressions over four months on Google and over 60,000 AI impressions on Google AI overview. So it was significant in terms of discoverability and traffic,
right? And for our audience who may not be familiar with some of these PR terms like owned media versus earned owned versus earned media, could you explain that to the audience?
Yeah, of course. So for earned media, that's media you have to go out there and earn. So that's PR. It's not paid. It's not marketing. And I want to talk a little bit about what we did for High-Rise because because they had this base, it made it move much faster simply because the credibility was there and there were a lot of citation sources. So for High-Rise, we've had creator profiles and Forbes. We had an interview about how the company approached trust

and safety and Business Insider. We've gotten hits in Variety and Games Beat. And we also helped them win the Fast Company's most innovative gaming award in 2024. And not only did this earned media add credibility, it also gave them the basis for their Wikipedia page where all the claims need to be cited, right? The the Wikipedia, the companies with Wikipedia pages or the games with Wikipedia pages where it's organic, it's because you have been in the news. And when I talked about owned media, that's channels you own. So that could be your company blog, your company Substack, your company podcast, the content that you put out in the world,
right? And for some of the game studios out there that may be thinking, okay, well, sure, maybe I could list better in in AI, but is there any data or evidence that suggests that actually ranking higher by an LLM actually converts users?
That is a great question and unfortunately I do not have the absolute

best answer for that because conversion is really hard to track especially as you know a third-party vendor, right? So what I can tell you when it comes to conversion although I want to say that this isn't you know oh I got you in the LLM number one on chatbt so that really resulted in more paid users. What I can tell you based on the data is that AI platforms are pulling 9.5 billion visits a month globally up 70% year-over-year where Google search is remaining static and AI does beat discoverability for when it comes to new brands 35% versus 13%. While we can't prove that the number one results does result in more paid users, we do have show we do have data out there that shows that AI's top picks the user's top pick in 74% of cases. And 88% of people just accept the short list that AI gives them and doesn't do like any kind of second prompt. And so I think that data is coming. I also can

tell you about how it's worked for, you know, my own company because I I do have those insights, but unfortunately I don't for games yet. Right. And I I know just thinking about my own usage, if I just were to use common sense, I I I don't think I've done a Google search in a long time now. So everything for me is is is through LLMs these days.
Yeah. I think like most people is under a certain, you know, under 30 or under 40, right? So, I I'd love to now kind of shift and talk more about your agency, High Vibe, which um I thought was interesting because it's a business that you built based on word of mouth. And there are a couple of what what I consider to be pretty interesting aspects of of your business. First of which is that, you know, you didn't have a website for the first year of your business. And so, one question I have is like how did you actually get the business started? like how were you able to get your first customers? And um this the the other

thing I want to ask you about is that it does seem that you have a pretty big focus now on GIO which is the generative engine optimization and I was wondering if you could talk to us about you know why you are so focused on GIO and why your the strategy of the of your agency is now focused on GIO versus other potential initiatives.
Yeah. So I this isn't my first agency. I do want to start by saying that because I I don't feel it would tell the whole story if I was like yeah I launched and was you know profitable from day one. I had an agency before with two co-founders that was extremely successful. We hit a million in revenue with our first year. We had raised money. We are very well connected in the esports space. Like a lot of startups we failed or I mean it's it's still existing but I I left it. there was some co-founder conflict. I had a different direction and part of our exit agreement in addition to a payout was I got to

take the clients that I wanted to take with me. And so I was working with Overwolf at the time who we still work with and I was also working with Big Craft Ventures and I was able to take my my right-hand person from that company who is still my right-hand person. So we had a really good setup and a lot of our clients actually up until this year 80% of our clients came from word of mouth. I really believed I wish I still believe this that if you do really good work you you don't have to do significant bisdev. Of course every every I think industry has gotten more competitive now and so yeah I thought you know let's let's explore a different area. I don't want to be like, you know, cold calling people on LinkedIn or sending, you know, weird email outreach. So, what is something that I can do and optimize that's going to bring the right people to my agency? And we started early on Gio. Part of it was I had a feeling that it would be a good a good channel for business development for us, but also it

allowed me to experiment because I knew like I can't sell this to my clients if I can't prove that it doesn't work for us. So we started with some geo optimization of our website. We started with some press of course because earned media perspective and now and I did check this on Friday so it changes all the time but if you're in the US and you look for best AI PR agency we're number one on Gemini and we're number three in chat GPT and the leads that we've gotten from that have been incredible. We're working with a company. I can't tell you the name of it because it's an NDA, but let's just say it's a it's a global Chinese company that every single person has heard of and they have uh found us on Perplexity. And the quality of leads that we're getting too, I think maybe part of it is because it's still early adopters AI, but we're getting a lot of really interesting tech and AI companies coming out of the valley who are finding us because they're looking for something boutique, right? We operate in a very boutique way. I don't like how big

agencies operate. we're never going to be that. But also, we have our finger on the pulse. And it's not just geo. That's part of it, what we're talking about today. But the media landscape has changed also. We still get clients tier one coverage, which means, you know, the tech crunches, the Fortunes, the Forbes, the Wall Street Journals of the world, but depending on your industry or who your target users are, we're also going to the AI substacks like superhuman, right? a profile in superhuman if you have an AI tool is going to be more impactful from a bisdev standpoint than an article in techrunch. So I think we're cutting edge with our geo strategy, but we're also cutting edge one in the way we operate, how we've built agents internally, not to do any of the work that I think matters the most in PR, which to me is writing and storytelling, but to do all the logistics, the reporting, the accounting, that type of thing, and to better understand and capitalize this new media landscape.
Right. And so I wanted to now ask you

about um the impact of AI on your business. And I I think there are some broader general themes that are at work here. And I think you guys are a great example of how AI is impacting the the entire world. And so um one one theme is how AI impacts different business environments. And I think GIO is a very good example of how you're you're taking an existing problem because of the proliferation of AI and because of the impact on AI to society. There's this discoverability issue that you're kind of leaning into. And then the second theme is how AI is impacting your specific business. And I would say that one really interesting trend for me is the ability of AI to empower businesses including very small businesses in terms of their capability to to build products. And I think that there is um kind of like an a changing environment with respect to SAS products, right? Where now anyone can create something

like like a product. And so, um, even like a PR agency, someone a a business that isn't typically associated with like software development is now able to create a product. And I thought a great example of this is your own product PR coverage.ai. And so for our audience, I was hoping you could talk about, you know, kind of the general impact of AI to your business and then um and then to talk about PR coverage.AI, AI what is it and what was the thinking behind launching this kind of a product?
Yeah. So I feel like anyone AI doesn't solve every problem nor is it going to but a while ago I read something that what is like your biggest pain point or the thing that just frustrates you the most that's repetitive that you don't want to do and for me it's reporting. We do meticulous reporting for all of our clients. That's how we prove the value of what we do in PR. Like any kind of soft marketing skill is really hard to

justify ROI, especially when you're working with CFOs, especially in this kind of economic climate. So, we do very meticulous reporting, as I mentioned, and we were paying a software company that was just truly terrible. We couldn't customize anything. We had to use their metrics of how they wanted to do reporting, not how we wanted to do reporting. And some of the metrics were crazy. It would say like estimated audience size. And it sometimes it would be like numbers like three billion. And I can't in good faith send a report to a client or I said yes, three billion people saw your coverage. That's just it's unhinged. So I always knew if I could solve one thing in PR, it would be reporting. And actually before AI even wasn't kind of up and coming, I had talked to a dev shop to price out an MVP to replace the software. And they quoted me like 60 to 80,000 for an MVP. And I just didn't pull the trigger at the time. Like it was too much to invest in not knowing if it was going to work.

Flash forward, AI comes around. I am able enough to be like a little bit dangerous in claw code and I was able to build a MVP of the technology that I wanted. And then when I realized like okay I'm just enough to be dangerous but not enough to do this in like a secure and scalable way so I can roll this out to other agencies. I did bring on a CTO someone I know from my days in San Francisco whose background is technology and fintech and he had just wrapped a project up. So he's been supporting us as the co-founder and CTO of PR coverage. So what we built is essentially a two things. It's a reporting platform for PR agencies or in-house people to basically say this is the amount of earned coverage that I I got for you my client. And we include the metrics that I think matter which is audience size domain authority. You can customize it in any way. So I could do it in your branding, I could do it in my branding. But the one thing that completely sets us apart is we have an

AI visibility score. No one else has this. It means for every piece of coverage I can tell you is that piece of coverage being referenced as a citation in an LLM. So what this looks like in practice is we had a client, they're called ACTI, they built an agentic keyboard. They had two kind of goals. They said we want to be in Techrunch. We want the exclusive and we want to own the category agentic keyboard. So if anyone types that prompt, we want to come up. We did get them in TechCrunch. We are able to see this in the press release. It was included in TechCrunch. And now if you go to any LLM and type in Aentea keyboard, Techrunch is the number one source that comes up. So we can prove that in our reporting that we have high AI visibility through that Techrunch article. There's a second probably more complicated part of the software. It's very similar to profound, but from a PR perspective, meaning you can look at your or your client's share

of media, share of voice, you can compare how you rank in the LLM versus your competitors, and then you can dive deeper into the citations, which is so interesting for me from a PR standpoint because then you can reverse engineer who you want to reach out to. So I can see, okay, this game studio wants to rank for this. Their competitors are ranking. Oh, those articles that were cited in Pocket Gamer are ranking. Maybe I'm gonna pitch Pocket Gamer, our next exclusive, so we can make sure to rank there as well.
Right. And so there's there's a reporting aspect to it. Now, I think you guys also did like a gaming leaderboard type of thing as well. So, is that a separate product or is that part of
That's just for that's for fun. It kind of shows you um our product in action. I'm happy to share that with you here.
Oh, yeah. If you can, that'd be great. So we built this geo leaderboard for gaming. The question we wanted answers is pretty simple. When someone asks AI what game to play, what games get named and who decides that? We ran a set of

prompts across chat PT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, um, and Gemini. We did it for RPGs, indie games, cozy, mobile game studios, and indie studios. We did it across three prompts because we wanted to know who is the category leader, not just a one-off. And then down at the bottom, you can actually see where the citations come from. So, let's just do Cozy for instance, and we want to know what cozy games are coming, what citations are coming from ChatgPT. We see YouTube here as a vast majority, which is really interesting. We can get into, but GameSpot as well. and then you could link to what they actually are. Um, so this is I think a really good just at a glance overview of what our tool does. It's not gaming specific. We just use gaming for uh this case,
right? And I'm wondering like so if you're a game studio and you've got like a cozy game or you've got an RPG for example and you use this um how would

you recommend that the game studios engage and actually action this data and uh is there anything unexpected that uh that any of these leader boards have shown you?
Yeah. Yeah. There's so much unexpected. Um I also want to say that we we cross referenced this leaderboard against sensor tower data for both app stores and the gap is more than I expected. So, we also did this, we didn't publish it, we're we're happy to for like board games and racing games. And what's really interesting is there's really zero overlap between the free games and top grossing games. Uh, but a lot of the paid games are ranking. And to be clear on this, like I'm not saying that AI is looking at the paid chart. I don't think that's what it does at all. What it does is AI names games that that are getting press coverage and those are largely paid games and like why we think that is there's no buyer guide for Monopoly go right it's just there's nothing to

advise on you simply tap install but for paid games there's you know buyers guide there's just a lot more kind of listical formats one thing that I thought was really interesting for the cozy games which I can show you here is so we have cozy games. We go down to sources. Let's look at overall YouTube. 25% of the citations are from YouTube, which is really high. YouTube often ranks. But what's really interesting is there's this one YouTube video. I'm not going to click it here, but it got 86 citations. So essentially like I would say about about half of the citations are coming from this one this one like piece of content from a creator named Sid Mac. And so it doesn't matter what kind of press you're in if you want your cozy game to rank for best cozy game. Creators are a much better route. And this and this proves it. It's

one influencer who has 500,000 subscribers, like not even in the millions, is creating content around the top cozy games. And that is what is ranking for every single LLM, not just one, which is incredibly rare. So, how can game studios use this today? Whatever genre you're in, and look at what is ranking and is it something that you can get in? Maybe it's IGN and it doesn't make sense, but maybe it's a real niche niche blog and you absolutely could get coverage there. It's also really different for game studios and indie studios. A lot more of the citations are B2B related and a lot of it, no surprise, is earned media like tech spot built in which is all about companies, right? And so for hiring um for any kind of publisher deals, I would look at getting featured in TechSpot, getting featured at Builtin, really making sure your employees are giving you reviews at like top companies. Who

would have thought that was a thing? But it is a significant citation, right?
Great. So yeah, I guess from a game studio perspective, if you can see how games are are getting ranked in the LMS, you can try to understand who the influencers are and reach out to them. And then from there's kind of like two levels as you had mentioned at the beginning of our conversation which are like getting attention to games as well as the game studios. And so could you show us an example in as far as a game studio is concerned like how they would uh leverage PR coverage.ai AI to understand more about their business if for example they wanted to um use that for recruiting or to just get more attention to their studio.
Yeah, I would do. So I would set up an account, put your game in, but also you have the option to list like what prompts do you want to rank for or perceived competitors and they could also be adjacent competitors. Let's say there's a game studio that's just of a different scale but you think how they've been communicating around new hires is incredible. You can put in the

prompts, you can put in your competitors, and you can see what citations are ranking in what LLMs. And once again, you can reverse engineer that. One thing that I found really interesting is, of course, every LLM sites and is weighted differently, but what we're seeing a lot more of is LinkedIn come up [clears throat] as a as a citation, like significantly more. And so, you know, there's this whole concept of have actually have you heard about it? Is this a PR thing of founders going direct? Have you heard about this movement?
I think I know what you're talking about, but I'm not sure. So, if you could explain that, that'd be great.
Okay. So, there's a concept of founders going direct, which means cutting out third party media and just talking to their audience themselves. Uh, this was created and coined by a Lulu Chang Messervi who was actually on Activision Blizzard's board and then they brought her on as chief comm's officer when uh

during the acquisition and one of the interesting things that she did is yeah she would talk to media sometimes but she would also just go on X and kind of say whatever she wanted to say and she's really popularized the concept of founders telling their own story and I think this is in a lot of different spaces, but especially in early stage startups, whether it's game studios, whether it's AI companies, it's really hard to stand out in the beginning. What sets you apart from everyone else when it's early stages and you don't have very many users and you haven't raised money, no one is going to want to tell the story of your vision, how you tell it is yourself, whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's on Substack, whether it's on Tik Tok. And that is increasingly getting picked up by the LLMs. And we've also seen opportunities come from it because there are a lot of journalists who are on LinkedIn. If they see something that you say that you think is interesting, they'll reach out. You can have follow-up interviews. So, I hate how corporate this term is, but there is a flywheel effect of PR,

executive positioning, or going direct and of geo, right? It all feeds into each other. I I gave an example. This is kind of the other way around on LinkedIn earlier this week. So, as you know, we work with Overwolf. We've been with them for 6 years. I saw on LinkedIn that there was a writer at Campaign Magazine, which is a tier one brand publication, writing about the evolution of the CMO role. I thought Shahar, the CMO of be a perfect fit because he's taking on investor relations. He's really expanded his role. We pitched her. We got him an interview. He interviewed, she posted the story. He posted the story on LinkedIn along with his thoughts from that interview. and it has about a 100,000 impressions on LinkedIn which is quite high and if he would have just posted his thoughts which were really insightful obviously without that thirdparty validation of being in campaign I don't think he would have gotten that kind of impressions and if you look at the

evolving role of the CMO on different prompts perplexity already is citing his LinkedIn post from last week
right now and I think that's something pretty interesting that you're mentioning because to the point that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation there's kind of like getting attention to the game studio to the game and then also you're saying founders but if we look at AI for example there's like some very specific people like employees I mean for plot it's Boris Chney everyone follows him but for open AI it's like Tibo for SpaceX it's potato but yeah there are like people who are becoming famous and representative of a certain company or a company's products. And so that's also a pretty interesting recent trend.
Totally. And I also think it doesn't have to be I mean the companies you're citing are you know the hottest companies in the world. And I think it's easy to say like oh if I was you know chief comm labs I would be going on you know benders on LinkedIn. But it doesn't

have to be like that. If you have something insightful to say that you encounter in your day-to-day life and it's not just AI slop like please if anyone can take anything away from this episode do not use AI to write thought leadership you lose everyone it actually it's better to just not post anything at all but if you have insights from what you see and you can post it no matter what your job you are going to grow your own following and it's going to be beneficial for your career and often for the company that you're a part of.
Right. Okay. Great. So, I think um it'd be great if we could now get a little bit more operational and I I think that so I I feel like our audience may have kind of a high level understanding of PR and we've talked about the impact of AI to PR, but I'm wondering if we can now get even more operational and specific with certain case studies. Now, you had mentioned working with High-Rise and Anton as as a specific example, but

could you walk us through like what your specific working relationship is with whether it's a game studio or a vendor in the gaming space and like how have you worked with them and what kind of results have you seen? Yeah, I mean, High-Rise is the best example for GEO, too. But I can talk about uh broader, more long-term comms, which I really actually think speaks to, you asked me earlier on of like PR in the moment versus kind of PR long-term. And I think that the best companies have always leaned into telling a narrative over time, like kind of like telling lore for games. And we've seen comms have like major impacts on moments or coining terms. When we started working with Overwolf 6 years ago, no one knew what the term in-game creator was. When I had pitched this to journalists, they would think of Twitch streamers or, you know, YouTube uh people who are promoting games on YouTube. So it's a huge heavy lift on the PR side to educate

especially business media or more mainstream media on this term which you know for I think all of your listeners know but when we talk about in-game creators we talk about mod authors we talk about people making in-game apps or overlays that can help you get better at your games. It can even be you know server owners too can be kind of in-game creators if they're creating different experiences. Um, one of our early early wins with them was through Business Insider. We were profiling a creator of in-game apps and it was so funny. It took multiple rounds of questions with the journalist who was brilliant, but like they just didn't know the space at all to figure out like what this actually was. But the story eventually went live. Um, it included the term the language in-game creator. And then we had additional profiles like with Washington Post. We did this really incredible story about a a Minecraft a Minecraft mod pack maker who had been working at TGI Fridays and had been able

to like build his own company by doing like Minecraft mod packs. That was in Washington Post. We did mod stories in Forbes. And then one of the things that Overwolf does is they announce how much they've paid out to in-game creators each year. And last year it was a banner year 2025. We got to announce that Overwolf paid out 300 million to in-game creators and we got the CEO on TVPN which are you familiar with it? It's I mean OpenAI just bought them. Yeah. Right. So it's very it's techy but it's very mainstream news. Right. It's broadcast and was on there to release the news and Forbes covered it and it just we kind of take for granted now that mod authors are in the news. It's not just Overwolf, right? I think like GTA has obviously changed a lot of things and how they're accepting of uh you know in-game creators now it's it's the industry has evolved but how we explain what a specific company does or um kind of like a subset of gaming

that's really I think a lot of the work of comms and what we do as PR professionals.
Okay. So, I thought maybe um we could close by just talking about, you know, so if you are a game studio or a gaming founder or somebody who wants more attention to something, um what are some of the things that you should start doing? Um, and and maybe you could separate it for if if you're doing if you're if you're trying to build an initiative around a game or for a game studio, but if you could list maybe the top three to five things that the game studio should be thinking about or what they should act, what they should action, what would those things be?
Okay, I'm going to split this up from like a geo perspective. So, ranking for AI and a PR perspective because while they complement each other, they're completely different strategies. Okay, so from the geo perspective, as I mentioned, I think the lowest hanging fruit, which will have the most impact, is to get into your genre's specific

listicles. Once again, it does not have to be IGN, Gra. Just look at who's writing about the best cozy games, best rogike roundups that AI actually sites. Could be small, specific, no one's pitching them. Reach out like a real person. Don't use AI to generate your outreach. talk to them and say, "This is why we think we should be on the list. Can you come play my game?" Like build a relationship or draft your own listicle on your own blog because it works. You can rank for that if you have some, you know, general kind of SEO and geo skills. But now with Claude, like everyone has this, right? It's possible. Um, treat Reddit, YouTube, and earned media like treat Reddit and YouTube like earned media. So, actually, we didn't go into this. Have you been seeing on your LinkedIn how Reddit is dropping so much in chat GPT?
I pretty much turned out of LinkedIn because it's all like AI sloped now. So,

I [laughter]
like now I I hated LinkedIn. It was so cringeworthy. And now I feel like I am a LinkedIn power user, which is so freaking embarrassing. If you would have told me this a year ago, I'd have been like, there's absolutely no way. But I've had some really incredible opportunities come out of LinkedIn. So, I guess
that is going to be one of my things is like actually get on LinkedIn and just like embrace the cringe. But so, Chat GPT heavily cited Reddit as of like two weeks ago. Reddit accounted for almost 4% of chat GPT search citations, but as of August 14th, that dropped by 86% according to Prompt, which is huge, right? And it impacts a lot of things. I mean, it's not just GEO, but also Reddit stock has tanked because of it. So, what this teaches us is you can't be too reliant on one like one specific source because

once the once the LLMs change how they weight things, like all that work could be gone. So, I think that's important to say, but that wasn't even where I was going with this. Treat yet Reddit and YouTube as earned media. um one creator video can outweigh a tier one article. The perfect example is that Cozy Games article. Um you know, she is a well-known creator. She has uh 500,000 subs, but it's not 5 million. I would personally reach out to her to see what kind of influencer deal she has. So, Reddit could be as impactful as earned media and YouTube. Um build your studios reputation different from the game. We talked about this. Different sources, different questions. I would think when I work with any client, the first thing that I ask them on our initial calls are not like what are your comm's goals? What newsworthy beats do you have coming out? It's what are your business goals for the next quarter and for the year? And then we create a calm strategy to help amplify those business goals or

help reach the target audience of those business goals. So, you know, maybe you're going to go on a hiring spree. Then you have to think about how are we positioning the studio? What are the benefits that we offer? What makes us special that people would want to work here? And then adding and incorporating that content into your own channels like your blog or like your hiring page and then also your earned channels. So anytime you're executive does a podcast, you should talk about the company culture or what sets you apart. Add those key messages from there. Um, one other I think key takeaway which we didn't touch on but I can is to own the narrow query before the broad one. An example of this is I we have a new client who's a game hosting platform or a server hosting platform and when we did our initial audit we found that they rank for a very narrow part of that Minecraft server hosting great but not broad of the just server

hosting in general but narrow is actually better to start with. That's where their audience is and then we can build out by there. So we start narrow and then go broad. Don't just think like, you know, a broad example of that is like, I don't I want to be the guest game studio, but if you can be more specific of like, I want to be the best game studio for cozy games for women between 24 and 30, you can really reach that specific target audience. And then start like well before launch because compounding, just like with a stock market and retirement, compounding is real. It's interesting. A lot of the citations are of older games. I mean, Monument Valley was a perfect example, but another example that we see a lot is if you were to ask the LLMs, what's the best web 3 game? They often will come up with Sky Mavis' Axi Infinity and The Sandbox. Those games were launched in 2017, 2018, so they've been around for nine years. Um, we did Sky Mavis' PR for

five years. There were months, you know, in the peak where we had thousands of pieces of coverage and that compounds. So, of course, maybe there's a new hotter web 3 game. I don't know. I don't know if anyone's building web 3 games anymore, but that's not that game's not going to rank. It's still going to be Axi Infinity in the sandbox because you're competing with hundreds of thousands of pieces of coverage between 2017 and really the crash of 2023.
Um, so start now. Also, I think a lot of people hear about AI or geo and it just feels too big or you feel too late because there's people who see themselves as experts. Like I don't see myself as an expert on this. Like I think we were we were really early. We did a lot of things right, but we still spend a lot of time and attention to defend that number one Gemini ranking and it gets harder and harder and we're trying to experiment more with different pieces of content and different earned media. So

just start and chip away at it. But it is kind of amazing to see how fast you can actually impact your ranking. I think for gamers or just competitive people overall, like I find I find probably too much joy in uh going up that leaderboard, right? This is like where I'm channeling my competitive gamer energies these days, which maybe is sad. Let's not let's not look at that too much. And then from PR and comms, do your founders or any spokespeople because as you mentioned, it doesn't have to be founder level, but do your founders or your spokespeople have actual thoughts about their industry, about what's happening? Get those people to write it down. And for the love of God, do not use AI for your executive positioning. I'd rather see something like off-the cuff with some errors in it. And it's funny because the um LinkedIn content that I've done that's performed the best is definitely the LinkedIn content I didn't think about. I

didn't overthink. I just I had a piece that it didn't go viral. It probably got like 20,000 views which is my highest. But there was a client who I adore but they suggested a media list that they clearly just did in Chachi PT or Gemini. And the LLMs are terrible for media list. Never use them for media list. They had a journalist on there who died. They had a journalist on there who had been been at the outlet for six years. They had a journalist on there that like would never have covered that topic at all. It took a lot more time for me to go through and explain like why this was a terrible fit than if we would have just built the media list ourselves. But I wrote a LinkedIn post about that of like how do you handle when your client gives you a chat PT media list? And it really resonated with people because there was this real problem and I was so just kind of initially pissed about it and then it's like so I just wrote the content and that's what appeals to people not these not these thoughtout algorithms of like I learned this and

this is how it relates to B2B sales. So how can you be authentic? How can you be real? how can you put your real thoughts down and then figure out what format is best for you whether it's you know LinkedIn podcasts Tik Toks and then finally what data do you have internally through your game studio your infrastructure company that you can use to tell stories about trends right I think a lot of journalists really like to have to have data driven journalism data driven stories and I think a lot of companies are probably sitting on like a minefield field of data. So, what are you comfortable sharing that's not going to get anyone in trouble that can speak to what you are seeing in the industry?
Yeah, I think one of the points that you're making about not using AI. I mean, I I probably still try to leverage AI, but to to I think the point that you're making is that a lot of people are now there's like a negative association with AI written stuff. And so um there's almost like what I call AI

masquerading where it used to be that you try to take certain patterns from AI like the M dashes or everyone thought this but actually that like there's these specific patterns that AI uses and so people are trying to get rid of that or now some people are actually intentionally putting typos in so that people think that it's not AI things like that but um I think
no I would go deeper I would go deeper so Lulu Chang Messvy who we've talked about was a problems officer um at Activism. She did a podcast recently. And one of the things that she said that really resonated with me is like is AI makes everyone average. So if you're below average, great. Use AI to tell your story. It's going to bring you up. But if you're above average, it is going to dumb you down. And it's not just the if that, then that. Like it's not it's not simply the cadence. It is really telling your story or what you want to say in a blunt way which is
right
boring and it puts you like with

everyone else even if someone can't tell from the get-go that's AI generated like really use your brain to write your story
right yeah I think the point I was trying to make is that like the to the point that you're you were mentioning about data um I think there are so many people now who are used to just skimming and so when you're skimming through stuff and you see something it's like oh this is AI I then you just like skip through it, right? One of the reasons why I turned out of LinkedIn because I'm like, "Okay, another AI post, another AI post, another AI post." And so I've just like opted out of it. But the to the point that you are making, if you have a propriety piece of data or if you have some authentic insight that you're able to just, you know, um express in a very simple way, then I think that's what's going to like have someone like stop the scroll, right?
[laughter]
So you don't just scroll through, you stop and you actually um engage with that content.
Absolutely.
Cool. And so with that, I guess um to end this uh Kaylee, if there is somebody

out there who's uh potentially interested in PR services or wants to reach out to you, maybe they want to try out PR coverage. They can just go to that link. But in in in terms of like getting in contact with you, how would they do that or to just to find out more about High Vibe?
Yeah. So, we are actually our website's live, but we're doing a refresh right now. That's just, you know, our brand has changed over time as as our services and our offerings, but you can check me out at high vibe.com. You can email me at kayieh highvibr.com. And as I mentioned, I'm a LinkedIn power user, so I'm also responding to LinkedIn messages. You can find me at Kaylee Moore.
Sounds good. All right, Katie, thanks for telling us more about your business and the insights. And for our audience, we will catch you next time. Thanks, Kay. [music] Thank you. [music]

[music]
Hey, hey,