What's your online PR presence?

Your PR presence is not what you have published. It is what a stranger finds in the ninety seconds after they hear your name. That is the whole test. An investor doing diligence, a journalist deciding whether to reply, a prospect checking you are real — none of them read your content marketing. They search your name, glance at the first screen, and form a judgement that is very hard to move afterwards.

This assessment scores that first screen. Eight questions, about two minutes, and a 0–100 measure of how much independent, credible evidence exists about you and how easy it is to find. It deliberately does not reward volume. Posting daily on LinkedIn for two years can leave you with a weaker PR presence than one well-placed interview, because the two are not the same kind of evidence.

Owned, earned, and why the difference decides everything

Everything written about you falls into two piles. Owned is anything you control: your site, your blog, your social posts, your newsletter. Earned is anything an independent party chose to publish: an interview, a quote in an article, an award, a profile.

Owned media proves you can describe yourself. Earned media proves someone else thought you were worth describing. Only the second one carries weight with a stranger, because only the second one cost somebody something to produce. This is not a moral point about authenticity — it is a mechanical one about verification. A reader who cannot verify a claim discounts it, and a claim that appears only on your own domain is unverifiable by construction.

The four things a strong PR presence actually has

• Independent coverage that is findable. Not "we were in a newsletter once" — pieces that surface on the first page for your name, on domains that are not yours.
• Recency. Coverage decays. A profile from four years ago reads as a company that used to be interesting. Something from the last twelve months reads as one that still is.
• Consistency. The same name, the same title, the same one-line description of what the company does, everywhere. Inconsistency does not look like variety; it looks like you are hard to pin down.
• A place that collects it. A press or newsroom page that links every piece. Without one, your coverage is scattered across the internet and nobody assembles it but you.

Why "we don't do PR, we just build" stops working

It works fine until the moment someone has to decide about you without meeting you — which is most decisions, and all of the early ones. A term sheet, a partnership, a senior hire, an enterprise deal: each begins with somebody searching your name and forming a view. If nothing credible comes back, the default assumption is not neutral. It is that you are small, new, or unproven, because that is what an empty search result usually means.

The same gap now propagates into AI answers. Assistants build their replies from sources they can retrieve and corroborate, and a company that exists only on its own domain has nothing to corroborate. That is a separate problem with a separate fix, and we have a separate assessment for it — but it starts here, because earned coverage is the raw material both of them run on.

What a realistic first move looks like

Almost nobody needs a retainer to fix a weak score. The first moves are small: search your own name in a private window and write down what actually appears; lock one canonical bio and use it everywhere without edits; build a press page even if it only has two links on it; and get one substantial piece of independent coverage rather than five thin mentions. Depth compounds, volume does not.

Three mistakes that keep good companies invisible

The same three errors account for most weak scores, and none of them are about the quality of the business.

• Chasing tier before substance. Founders spend months pitching outlets far above their current evidence base and get nothing, while a well-run trade publication would have covered them immediately — and that piece is what makes the bigger one possible later. Coverage is a ladder, and the first rung is the one people skip.
• Treating a placement as an event. A piece gets published, gets posted once, and is never referenced again. Coverage is an asset you keep using: in your signature, your deck, your site, your next pitch. Most of its value arrives after the week it went live.
• Letting the record go stale. Old titles, a former company name, a bio describing a pivot you made two years ago. Nobody decides you are untrustworthy because of this; they just come away unsure which version of you is current, and uncertainty loses deals as reliably as a bad reputation.

How to read your score

This measures presence, not prestige. A well-run company with two good interviews, a consistent bio and a press page will outscore a much larger one with scattered mentions and three different job titles across its profiles. That is the correct result: the first is easy to verify and the second is not, and verification is the entire job your PR presence does while you are asleep.