I often see the phrases “traditional” and “nontraditional” PR thrown around, and these labels are often vague and unhelpful. What people usually mean is something closer to: “Are you only going to send press releases?” or “Is this a creative team that’ll come up and activate on something bold?”
Hopefully, we’re all in agreement that successful PR in 2026 is creative problem-solving. And that can include tactics that were common 20 years ago alongside those only available in the last year.
If you’ve focused on landing a placement in CNBC, Fast Company, or your go-to trade pub, that’s a great instinct. But on its own, it’s an incomplete strategy and likely a signal that you’re in the early stages of PR maturity. Influence and authority in 2026 aren’t built exclusively in newsrooms. They’re built in the podcast your ICP listens to on their commute, the newsletter your buyers actually open, the LinkedIn thread your prospects are debating, and the questions your audience is asking Claude or ChatGPT.
Check out our What Is Non-traditional PR? blog post to understand the basics. This post shows you what nontraditional, aka creative, PR looks like in practice, why it matters specifically for AI and SaaS brands, and how PANBlast builds these opportunities proactively.
Why the trade press alone isn’t enough for AI brands
Journalism is saturated and devastated simultaneously. Every day brings another AI announcement alongside news of a newsroom cutting staff or shutting down. Reporters are inundated. Editors must often prioritize pageviews over thoroughness.
The more important problem: The buyers of AI products, operators, IT leads, CX directors, and revenue teams may not be pulling up trade press directly. They’re catching a niche podcast episode, scanning a practitioner newsletter, attending a community event, and asking questions on LinkedIn, Reddit or ChatGPT. That’s where many buying decisions get formed, validated, and reinforced.
In my client conversations, a common objection to smaller, or, more appropriately, targeted channels is that it’s a high-effort, low-reward tactic. I disagree. A PR program approaches relevant opportunities as compounding gains. We aren’t abandoning the Tier 1 pursuit. A TechCrunch feature carries a signal that a Substack mention doesn’t, and I’m not arguing otherwise; we even built StoryScore to help measure PR success. The goal is to build a positive, well-rounded presence that meets audiences where they spend their professional and personal time, whether in digital or in-person environments.
What “nontraditional” media actually means in 2026
In addition to newsrooms and editorial media, here are the channels most relevant for AI and SaaS brands:
- Podcasts: from massive industry shows to practitioner interviews with 5,000 targeted listeners
- Newsletters: analyst-run, creator-run, and community-run publications with highly engaged subscribers across Substack, Beehiiv, and Medium
- Social media: LinkedIn, Bluesky, X
- Video-first channels: YouTube, Instagram Reels, TikTok
- Open and closed communities: Reddit, Discord, Slack, LinkedIn, and Facebook groups
- LinkedIn news editorial: separate from social posts, LinkedIn has its own news team
- Events and speaking opportunities: in-person and virtual, from major conferences like SXSW to smaller, niche meetups
The common thread: These channels reach audiences who are already invested in the topic, at a moment when they’re actively seeking information, not passively scrolling past a headline.
Does PR help with AI search visibility?
Yes, PR directly enhances AI visibility, and this is one of the most consequential strategic shifts across the industry right now.
When a buyer asks an AI tool, “What are the best PR agencies for AI companies?” or “How do tech brands build credibility with enterprise buyers?” the answer is a synthesis of content, coverage, transcripts, social media conversations, and third-party mentions that exist about your brand across the web. LLMs are trained on publicly available sources: podcasts, newsletters, Reddit threads, and more. Your AI visibility is a score of your digital footprint across all of these surfaces, not just the Tier 1 hits. The more you appear, the more authority signals the algorithm receives.
We use tools like Peec AI to actively monitor which prompts PANBlast and our clients appear in across LLM responses, and to identify the gaps where competitors are showing up instead.
How PANBlast identifies and secures nontraditional PR opportunities
Non-traditional media hits don’t happen by accident.
First, the PR experts at PANBlast map the media ecosystem around each client’s ICP, not just the obvious trades, but the podcasters, newsletter writers, and community moderators that buyers actually follow.
Second, we build proactive outreach that equips the right spokesperson with the right POV, targeting channels where an executive can go deep on a specific insight, data point, or customer story, not recite a product pitch.
Third, we monitor coverage, share of voice, and LLM visibility to identify which buyer questions a client is absent from, and reverse-engineer the placements needed to close those gaps.
Here’s what recent execution looks like:
Podcast: Zingly’s CEO was a guest on Adrian Swinscoe’s “Doing CX Right.” Swinscoe is a Forbes contributor with 16,000+ LinkedIn followers and a concentrated CX practitioner audience. The Zingly CEO used the appearance to present specific company messaging — the “CX Paradox” positioning and Dynata survey data — directly to the buyers who evaluate and purchase CX technology.
Newsletter: PANBlast’s research was included in a Substack newsletter. We identified author Dan Lewis by posting in Reddit’s r/PublicRelations, asking how PR pros are navigating the newsletter and AI ecosystem. Lewis responded, mentioned his Substack, and we pitched our research via email. He declined to make the data a lead story but offered a quote placement alongside a Q&A with Noah Greenberg of Stacker. We took it. The lesson: Community-sourced outreach surfaces relevant outlets and establishes a relationship.
LinkedIn News: A PANBlast client was featured in a trending news recap. The LinkedIn editorial team featured a story on DoorDash’s AI-driven restaurant recommendation app. We helped our client publish a timely, relevant post on the news to catch the editor’s attention. The perspective surfaced natively in the feeds of millions of professionals, with zero ad spend.
The compounding case for a broader media footprint
A Tier 1 placement is a win in a successful PR program, not the end goal. This placement may be shared on social or addressed in a boardroom, but if that’s all we sought, it’ll soon lose its relevance. So what else can help us make progress in share of voice or a share of the market?
A podcast interview lives on a host’s website or Spotify feed and gets transcribed into crawlable text. A newsletter mention drives inbound search for months. An event talk gets clipped, shared, and cited. Each placement feeds the AI visibility ecosystem that determines whether your brand surfaces when a prospect asks an LLM for a recommendation, which is increasingly where opinions are formed
For AI and SaaS brands specifically, showing up consistently, in the places your buyers trust, with specific expertise rather than vague claims, is what shortens sales cycles and builds the kind of authority that paid media can’t manufacture.
If you want to audit your current media footprint or talk through what a proactive strategy could look like for your brand, let’s connect.