A national healthcare nonprofit was leaving most of its $10,000 Google Ad Grant unspent every month on a Dynamic Search Ads setup. We transitioned the account to Performance Max in October 2025. Monthly grant spend rose 165.738% to hit the full cap by April, clicks grew 439.206%, and website events increased 107.692%.
SEO + Content Case Study
Digital PR Drives 208% Organic Impression Growth and major boost in AI Search Visibility for Affiliate Marketing Firm
A data-led digital PR strategy grew PartnerCentric’s organic visibility year over year and made its content a go-to source in AI search, ranking in the top 10 for AI-relevant marketing queries and surfacing in AI Overviews.
208.3%
growth in organic impressions, year over year
74.3%
growth in organic clicks, year over year
5/5
digital PR campaigns ranking in the top 10 for AI keywords
The Client
PartnerCentric is an affiliate marketing firm expanding into broader visibility services across influencer, affiliate, and AI visibility. As that category shifts, they partnered with us to build authority in both traditional organic search and AI-driven search.
The Objective
Grow PartnerCentric’s visibility and topical authority in the marketing space, with a specific focus on AI search. They wanted to be the answer when buyers ask AI tools about marketing topics, and to tie that presence back to a repeatable strategy instead of guesswork.
Digital PR Strategy
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The problem
AI search visibility looks like a black box. Everyone wants to land in AI Overviews and get cited by LLMs, but there’s no submit button and no obvious lever. Most people assume traditional SEO carries the load on its own. In our experience, it doesn’t. AI tools pull from sources that demonstrate real authority, and that authority has to be earned.
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The solution
We ran a series of digital PR campaigns built on original data, including Social Media Use Trends by Generation, TikTok Shop, BNPL, and Influencer Trust, and Planned & Impulse Buying Statistics. Each one earned high-authority, on-topic media coverage, including the New York Times, Forbes, and inclusion in BNPL provider press releases. Those same pieces became the content ranking in the top 10 for AI-relevant marketing keywords, the queries that trigger AI Overviews. The data-led angle did double duty: it earned the links, and it produced the citable, authoritative content AI tools favor.
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Why it matters
High-authority earned media is one of the few reliable inputs into AI visibility. Here, digital PR wasn’t a link play with a happy side effect. It was the mechanism. One note on the numbers worth calling out: clicks grew strongly, but impressions grew faster, so CTR compressed slightly. That’s expected, and it’s healthy. It means the brand is now surfacing across a much wider set of high-funnel, AI-adjacent queries it wasn’t visible for before. That’s what building authority looks like in the early innings.
This chart tracks the number of keywords where PartnerCentric’s content appears in Google’s AI Overviews, indexed over time. For most of 2025, that visibility sat near zero. Starting in late 2025 and accelerating hard through the first half of 2026, it climbed to an all-time high. The shape tells the whole story: this isn’t slow, linear progress. It’s a compounding curve, which is exactly what authority-driven visibility looks like once the earned media behind it reaches critical mass.
This chart shows traffic referred to PartnerCentric from AI assistants, broken out by tool and indexed over time. Two things matter here. First, total referral traffic trended up across the period. Second, and more telling, look at the top of the bars in 2026: ChatGPT drove nearly all early traffic, but Gemini and Claude emerge as meaningful contributors in the final months. That diversification is the signal. PartnerCentric isn’t dependent on a single AI tool’s quirks. The content is being surfaced and cited across the LLM landscape, which is what durable AI visibility actually requires.
This chart counts key conversion events attributed to AI-tool referrals, indexed over time. For most of the engagement, these held at a steady baseline. Then May 2026 spikes dramatically above every prior month. This is the payoff of the first two charts: visibility earned (Graph 1) and traffic captured (Graph 2) ultimately translate into action. The takeaway isn’t the single big month on its own; it’s that the groundwork laid over the preceding year is what made that month possible.
Results
Over the past year, PartnerCentric’s organic impressions grew 208.3% and clicks grew 74.3% year over year. Its AI Overview keyword visibility climbed from a near-nonexistent baseline to an all-time high, and all five digital PR campaigns now rank in the top 10 for AI-relevant marketing keywords. AI-tool-attributed key events hit a record high, with Claude emerging as one of the fastest-growing sources of LLM-referred traffic. The campaigns earned 284 high-authority placements, building the topical authority that compounds across both traditional and AI search.
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