I’ve been in this business since 1996 — longer than Google — and over the years I’ve watched the lines between earned media, paid media, and search blur more than once. So when I sat down with Adrian Fagerlund, co-founder of Linkby, I was curious about the idea at the heart of the company: “performance PR.”
Was this really a new category, or just a new name for something marketers have been doing for years?
After talking with Adrian, I think there’s something genuinely interesting here, particularly now, as brands are trying to figure out how traditional PR, performance marketing, and AI visibility fit together.
Finding a Gap Between PR and Advertising
Linkby’s story starts in Australia. Adrian’s co-founder, Chris, spent more than a decade running Pedestrian.TV, a youth-focused publisher Adrian describes as something like Vice meets BuzzFeed, with a healthy dose of Australian culture.
They noticed an interesting disconnect. Hundreds of brands were sending publishers press releases and hoping to earn free coverage, while much of the advertising revenue came from a relatively small group of blue-chip companies.
Could there be something in between?
Their answer was a CPC marketplace connecting advertisers with premium publishers. Today, Linkby works with roughly 450 titles across Australia, the UK, North America, and Europe, including names such as Forbes, CNN, Vogue, and Marie Claire.
Give Publishers the Building Blocks
One aspect of the model particularly interested me: the advertiser isn’t simply handing publishers a finished article and asking them to run it.
Instead, the brand supplies the building blocks: its values, product information, key differentiators and the messages it wants communicated. The publisher’s editorial team then creates content for its own audience and in its own voice.
Adrian gave a good example involving Modibodi, the period-underwear brand. Starting with the same basic brief, one publisher created a hands-on product review. Another focused on a celebrity ambassador. A travel publisher found an entirely different angle, discussing adventure travel in Southeast Asia and the difficulty of finding feminine hygiene products in some locations.
One brief, but very different stories.
That distinction matters. You get consistency around the underlying brand message without simply duplicating the same article across multiple sites.
A Different Incentive for Publishers
The CPC model also changes what happens after an article is published.
Publishers only get paid when a reader clicks through from the content to the advertiser. That gives them an incentive not simply to post the article and move on, but to help it find an audience.
As Adrian explained, publishers may promote a piece through newsletters or social channels, change the headline or lead image, or introduce it to another relevant vertical. The advertiser doesn’t pay for that additional exposure; the CPC is triggered when someone actually clicks through to the brand.
That’s an interesting difference from the traditional flat-fee branded-content arrangement.
Where AI Visibility Enters the Picture
This is also where our conversation moved into GEO and AI visibility.
Adrian’s argument is that as consumers increasingly use LLMs to research products and ask specific purchase questions, brands need to think about the sources those systems may draw upon. A company’s own website matters. Forums and other third-party discussions matter. But he believes coverage across trusted premium publishers can provide another important signal, particularly when multiple independent pieces of content consistently reinforce the same product attributes.
Linkby is now building a service specifically around that idea. It combines its own measurement technology with Profound, creates what Linkby calls an AIV score, and develops 90-day plans around particular prompts and queries a brand wants to “win, defend, or steal.” Virgin Airlines is one of the first clients Adrian named for the service.
My usual advice on GEO still applies: don’t create content purely for AI visibility.
If the content makes sense for the audience, supports the brand, generates awareness and potentially drives qualified traffic, then greater visibility within AI platforms can be an additional benefit. Think of GEO as the tiebreaker (or the icing on the cake) rather than the sole reason for doing the work.
The larger takeaway from my conversation with Adrian is that the old boundaries between PR, performance marketing, SEO, and now GEO continue to get harder to draw. For marketers, that creates some interesting opportunities, especially when a single piece of content can build awareness, drive measurable traffic, and potentially strengthen a brand’s visibility in AI-driven discovery.
Discussion Points Include:
- How LLM visibility may be influenced by third-party content: Why Adrian believes consistent messaging across trusted publishers can help brands stand out beyond their owned properties and forum mentions.
- Categories you might not expect: Linkby works not only in fashion, beauty and travel, but also in areas such as video games, supplements, sexual wellness, THC/CBD, insurance and B2B services.
- Publishers in the zero-click era: Why Adrian argues that premium publishers may become more important, rather than less important, as AI changes the way people discover brands.
- Scale versus one deep publisher relationship: When it may make sense to spread a budget across 10, 20 or 30 publishers instead of concentrating it with a single media brand.
- Where the budget comes from: Linkby can sit at the intersection of brand, performance marketing and PR; one reason Adrian says PR agencies in particular value the model’s measurability.