Session: PR Is Your New Power-Up: Ranking In A World Run By AI - Kalie Moore, High Vibe PR.

Our [music] [music] next speaker uh is the session that was actually uh originally supposed to run before this one. So that'll be Kayie Moore from High Vibe PR. Uh talking about PR is your new power up uh ranking in a world run by AI.
I'm Kaylee Moore. I'm the founder of High Vibe PR. We're a boutique PR agency that focuses on gaming, entertainment, interactive media. I've been in the games PR industry for about 10 years now. Um, I actually got started in games PR with Bitcraft Ventures before Bitcraft even launched. So, I helped to

shape the firm's voice and communication strategy. I'm also the host co-host of the Navic Gaming podcast, which is going to come up late a little bit later. And I'm the founder of PR coverage.ai, which is the first reporting tool that really looks at how the LLMs pick up specific media pieces that are placed by PR individuals. So, why should you be listening to me about really any of this? About six months ago, we did an internal audit. We asked Chachu PT, Gemini, Grock, who are the best PR agencies out there when it comes to gaming, AI, tech, and we weren't ranked at all. Of course, if you did a search about me or about High Vibe, we came up, but we weren't in any of the top lists. So, we created a strategy to change that. And now if you were to do a query on chat GPT Gemini or Google AI for the best gaming PR agency and the best AI PR agency high PR is number one and we're rolling this out to our clients too and

it's relevant for pretty much everyone in this room whether you're a game studio or a tool provider. So first why does this matter for game studios? How we search is evolving. how we used to get recommendations for games. We'd ask our friends, our neighbors, maybe our favorite influencers, content creators, Twitch streamers, but this is starting to change. Instead of asking my friend, "What idol puzzle game should I be playing?" I'm asking chat GPT. And does this matter? Absolutely. Google search is down 10% yearover-year. Onethird of US adults are using chat GPT, but 58% of the critical under30 demographic are. And what I think most relevant is AI search users are four times more likely to convert. And that's simply because the LLMs give individual users the information that you need to make a purchasing decision. And as you guys know, mobile gaming

discovery is harder than ever. It's hard to break in. It's hard to stay visible. Last year, only 13% of the top 1,000 mobile games were new games. Everyone here knows how expensive user acquisition has gotten and that app store visibility is in decline. So, the question for mobile studios isn't how do you launch a game successfully, but how do you ensure your game continues to be discovered and by the right audience? So, let's meet the new discovery engine, which is LLMs. So, AI models give you one answer. They don't give you 10 links. They can site sources, sometimes only if prompted, but most of the time they're synthesizing information about you into a single response that's based on credibility, consistency, and context. What I'm personally obsessed with is where they're pulling their informations. Part of what LLM surface is pulled directly from your owned channels. And by that, I mean your blogs, your frequently asked questions, your website, your social media presence. And right now that gives studios and your comm's team much more

control over the narrative than you would expect on how your games are described and understood. But while your own channels can describe your game and share your facts, PR, and by PR I mean seeding stories to external media, PR can create the context that which shows how your game compares to others and what sets you apart. and it gets you in front of an audience that doesn't already know about you. Your game needs to be part of the narrative that the LLMs are trained on. And if your story isn't clearly told and widely referenced, AI systems are either going to get it wrong or they're going to leave you out entirely. So, I want to quickly talk about how LLMs see games. LLMs have two very distinct ways of discovering and holding information. LLMs don't only work on train data. They're out there searching, too. So, first LLMs go into their internal memory to look at what's there. And if you have a new game or a new

product launch, especially if you're using chat GPT, it's probably not going to surface because chat GPT is only trained a couple times a year. So, if it's not in the internal memory, the LLMs go out there and they search. And knowing how they search is going to guide your PR strategy, so you can prioritize what's likely to be picked up. A couple important clarifications. LLMs only site what they retrieve from live sources. So we actually don't know exactly what sources are training their internal memory even though the knowledge is shaping the answer. And then this is very critical. Different users see different answers to the same question. results vary based on location, language, prior searches, or even the temperature of the conversation, which is how exploratory or authoritative the model thinks the answer needs to be. So, key takeaway here, we're going to get into how to audit, but it's always best if you're doing an audit of your brand uh or your game studio to log out of Chat GPT.

You're going to get a more pure answer rather than an answer just for you. So, I want to take a look at a case study that shows how context matters and how that's picked up by LLM. So, I'm very lucky to work with an incredible client, Overwolf. Some of the team members are in the audience. Thank you for coming. And we got to place a really incredible news story last November. Overwolf paid out $300 million to creators in 2025. So, when we created our PR strategy, part of it was focused on LLM. There were some other reasons we went in this strategic direction. But how we rolled out PR is we gave two exclusives. We gave wanted tier one media which we gave to Forbes and we wanted tier one broadcast which we gave an exclusive interview with the Overwolf CEO to uh TBPN which is Tech's hottest new show. He was uh on right after the Roblox CEO. If you guys haven't checked it out, please do. It's it's I think kind of the future where tech is heading. Anyway, after those exclusives

went live, we seated the story with other gaming press. So, it got picked up by about five to seven other publications and then we published it on the Overwolf blog. So, this source right here is from our internal tool, which is pr.ai. And what it does is we run queries based on the topic to see what's getting cited. And as you can see here, a lot of our external media got cited as did the Overwolf blog. But what's important is the PR provided the positioning and context that the own channels meaning the blog wouldn't provide. So in Forbes, Overwolf was referenced alongside creator payouts from Roblox and UFN. And it was positioned as the decentralized UGC platform. And that means that Overwolf covers games and creators outside the Roblox and UF UEFN ecosystem ranging from Hogwarts Legacy, The Sims, and Minecraft. and that never would have been referenced simply from the Overwolf blog.

Okay, so for game studios, this is where PR becomes strategic or your cheat code. Your own media can describe your game or your news, but PR gives you the ability to create the context that matters. For instance, how is your game compared to others? Is it recommended as the best option within a specific genre? Is it consistently framed in the right competitive context? These are the typical props where LLMs are more likely to site articles than your own channels because journalists tend to give that context as they're writing stories because that's what their audience needs. So before I move on to the next slide, I don't want anyone to check on their phone, but what do you think Chat GPT would say if you asked for the best mobile puzzle game? What do you think it recommends? Is it Candy Crush, Royal Match? One of the other top three, five, 10? Nope. It's Monument Valley, a game that came out in 2014. Monument Valley 2 came out in 2017. In the US App Store, sorry,

I'm American. We're going with that. Uh, Monument Valley number one currently ranks number 12. Monument Valley number two ranks 28. App stores look at popularity, but LLMs measure authority, context, and citation quality. Getting recommended by AI is completely different strategy than topping the app stores. So I want to take a dive into what chat GPT chat GPT is citing in this specific source. So if we ask questions about Monument Valley, the first thing that comes up, actually the first couple are listicles. The first is from Pocket Tactics, which is a great kind of niche gaming site. And the second is just from a mobile marketing agency. And this is perhaps the biggest cheat code of the day. Target listicles. They're the number one for the best of queries. They're opinionated. They're really easy for LLMs to digest. They're usually well formatted. And you want to be in these. And it [laughter] doesn't have to be the best one. You don't have to get on IGN

listicles. You can get on a kind of random marketing blog and it will likely still rank. So different queries equal different citations. So if you ask Chat GPT, what are the best puzzle games to play on mobile? It's often going to be a listical that's cited first. But if you ask what is Monument Valley or why should I play Monument Valley, it's going to site news with more authority. Uh for this one, for instance, it's from the the Verge, Pocket Gamer, and often from Reddit threads. News features provide authority in context. When the AI explains what a game is or why it matters, it pulls from these more detailed sources. One thing to note is Reddit does often matter, but we're going to get to that in a second. So, what does this mean for you as a game studio or a tool provider? How do you get started? First, you need to audit your AI visibility. I'm going to very quickly just run through the tools that we use. We use a tool called ARFS, which is more for SEO. We use a tool called Profound, which

shows our share of voice versus that of our competitors. And of course, we use PR coverage.ai, which can prove how the articles that we've placed have shaped the conversation for our specific clients. You can use these, but you don't have to. You can just do a chat PT search. We recommend ChachiPT for two reasons. First of all, it dominates the market with over 90% of retail market share. And simply put, they have more citations. If you want to get fancy, you can also use Gemini or Gro. We recommend starting with what are the best mobile games in your particular genre. What are the top indie games or platform wise right now? and what are games like your game or that of your competitors? See if you're mentioned. Notice who is and write it all down. And then for there, check what's being cited. Look at the sources that the LLMs are referencing. Is it IGN? Is it Reddit? Is it Pocket Gamer? Is it Games Beat? These are your priority PR targets. But but note, if a journalist just wrote a game about your

competitor, don't be that meto PR person. they likely aren't going to cover you a week later unless they are, you know, have that very specific beat where they only cover cozy games. As I mentioned, listical matter, best of articles are frequently surfaced by LLMs, and I think that's really the lowhanging fruit here. Pro tip, Reddit is very high signal for AI. It heavily influences LLM answers, particularly in gaming. But if you try to fake it with fake posts, it's going to come back and backfire. You need to show up authentically. You need to let the gamer shape your narrative. And there's a really great cautionary tale which I didn't link here that was published in uh in PC Gamer about a month ago. There was a marketing agency that did a case study talking about how they basically gified Reddit. And of course that was found by Reddit users and all their comments were taken down and they were essentially like banned. So be careful there. And then you want to ask AI about

your brand. That's the next step. What's your studio known for? Who are your executives? What are they known for? Is your game any good? You might be really surprised by what you see. Maybe there's missing leadership. Maybe there's old positioning or reviews summarized from years ago or where AI is confidently repeating something that's just not true at all. And this is the oftentimes the first version of your studio that fans, consumers, potential investors, and even journalists are going to see. And here's the uncomfortable truth of it. If the answer is wrong, that's not an AI problem. It's a comm's problem and you need to fix it. It means that the information just isn't visible. It's not consistent. It's not being reinforced often enough across the right places. And before you can start fixing this or building out your strategy, you need to answer the question, what is it that you want to be known for? And then once you have that answer, you can start building out your LLM

visibility strategy. So of course, I'm a PR person. So I think the number one step is how do you prioritize coverage? And this has changed in the world of AI. You know, five years ago, if we would ask clients, you know, where where would you like this specific news to get picked up? It used to always be TechCrunch if it was a funding announcement, Wall Street Journal for something bigger. When people think about PR, they default to scale. the biggest outlets, the largest audiences, the highest traffic numbers. But LLMs work differently. They care about trust and context. And a deeply relevant trade publication or a niche site that consistently covers your category might be picked up more than let's say the Wall Street Journal. And it really helps because now you're able to kind of build that strategy. And then oftentimes there's some surprises. Like for instance, Gamesbe has a mid-level domain authority. So you might think it would rank less. They they separated from Venture Beat. So they

went from high to mid-tier domain authority, but they are consistently picked up by the LLMs more than other publications. Okay. Then you want to seed executive thought leadership. Thought leadership is great particularly when it comes to podcasts. And I don't just mean the top 1% podcast. Before AI, depending on the client, we might only um we might only pitch the top 5% or 10% podcast. But if you're trying to introduce new key messaging, you can go to almost any podcast, especially those that publish a blog or do um notes afterwards of the call, like a transcript, because those are going to get fed to LLMs. If you're concerned about your LLM strategy, pick speaking opportunities that republish the content. And this is critical. Make sure that all spokespeople, no matter who they are in the company, have access to the same messaging. All right. And I have another case study, another client who we adore, who's also in the audience. Thank you for letting me use this, Simon. So,

we've been working with We Are Mighty, which is formerly Mighty Bear Games for about a year now. And when we first started working with them, we really wanted to position Simon as a thought leader in the Telegram gaming space, which was new a year ago, and also in the AI tooling world. And this took us over a year to build. We started with smaller podcasts. We started with smaller media med media opportunities. We are introducing Mighty Bear Gaming into a new category. Simon in particular is incredible at maintaining consistency in his messaging. And over time, we are build building up to having him on stage at Fortune AI Brainstorm Summit and Forbes. And the best thing and why we're using this as a reference here is the LLM have captured all of this. If you do a query about Simon, everything that's cited is a podcast, an article, an interview that was placed in the last year. So, this does work. You need to maintain consistent narrative and messaging. As I mentioned, you got to nail that core message. You have to mediate train all spokespeople.

I don't care if someone from Bisdev or someone from the marketing team. Everyone can have their own take on the business, but they have to be able to describe the business and your key differentiators in the same way. You need to avoid conflicting messages. What you say on your social media to describe your game needs to match what's on your website needs to match your key messages. And the most important for me at least is write like a human, not a robot. And as I mentioned, I co-host the Navic Gaming podcast and it's really interesting to be on the other side. I'm getting pitches now instead of being the one who's pitching. And I want to say 95% of the pitches that I get are clearly written by AI and not well. It's like the most jargon that doesn't fit what I'm looking for at all and I don't respond. We have an internal mandate where we use AI for everything that's not part of our core business. So the accounting, the reporting, the tracking, the auditing, but it is so critical now more than ever to write in your own voice. And that

alone is going to set you apart when you're pitching media. I have journalist friends who say 90% of what they get is AI slop. So, in my opinion, it's easier than it's ever been before to place a story if you are writing to a journalist why it matters. And then finally, monitor and iterate. I mentioned these tools before. Rerun your audits monthly. Track how mentions evolve over time. Use PR not just as a campaign, but as ongoing training for data for LLMs. And also, I think it's a great time to be a PR person. Not only because it's almost easier to place stories, as I just mentioned, but it's easier than ever to prove your value to your company or your clients because you can directly track what stories you have placed that are reinforcing your company's messaging. And finally, AI is taking over new game discovery. With the right PR and comm strategy, AI will be your greatest powerup. And if you don't do it, your competitors will.

All right. Thank you so much. [applause]