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Publicity used to be a relationship you rented. Productising it changed who can buy their way into the conversation, and the AI-search shift raised the stakes.
Here is the math that kills most startup PR before it starts. A retainer with a US agency runs $3,500 to $10,000 a month for early-stage companies, per AMW's 2026 pricing data, and the contract guarantees effort, not articles. Meanwhile the people you are pitching are disappearing: PR practitioners now outnumber US journalists roughly six to one, by O'Dwyer's analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and the BLS projects reporter jobs to keep shrinking through 2034. More pitchers, fewer catchers, no guaranteed outcome. For a founder watching runway, that is not a marketing channel, it is a donation.
Baden Bower's answer was to stop selling the process and sell the artifact. The agency, founded in 2018, prices editorial placement in named publications like a product: agreed outlet, agreed timeline, money back if it does not publish. It has shipped more than 25,000 articles for 3,548 clients across 37 countries, and the Global Recognition Awards called it the world's most disruptive PR agency in 2025. Traditionalists call the model heresy. Founders mostly call it a line item.
"BruntWork now ranks for more than 2,280 search terms and sits in Google's top three for a hundred of them," says Adam Pisk, director of BruntWork, an outsourcing firm that has run the productised route. "That is not luck. That is a system working."
BruntWork's result is what the product looks like when it works. The company holds the number one Google result for the searches its buyers actually type: bookkeeper Philippines, bookkeeping Philippines, hire virtual assistant Philippines, and three more like them.
"Search bookkeeper Philippines or hire virtual assistant Philippines and we are the first result,"Pisk says. *"At some point you stop competing in a category and start defining it."
*And the same coverage is now doing a second job the invoice never mentioned: feeding AI answers. BruntWork is cited 61 times across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI features. That matters more each quarter, because the buyer's first question is moving. A G2 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers published in March 2026 found 51% now start research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% a year earlier. And Muck Rack's December 2025 citation analysis found 82% of what AI engines cite is earned media. Press coverage has quietly become the raw material of machine recommendations, which turns publicity from a vanity spend into infrastructure.
The obvious objection is the honest one that this is all paid. A placement you bought is not a journalist's independent endorsement, and anyone who tells a founder otherwise is selling something worse than PR.
But the retainer model does not escape the same test, it just hides from it. Effort-priced PR asks founders to pay monthly for a probability nobody will quantify. Product-priced PR states its output and accepts a refund clause. Between two imperfect options, startups are choosing the one that behaves like everything else they buy.
"The goal was never to be found on Google. It was to be the answer, wherever the question gets asked." Pisk said that about BruntWork. It reads like a forecast for everyone else.
This story was distributed as a release by Jon Stojan under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program.
Here is the math that kills most startup PR before it starts. A retainer with a US agency runs $3,500 to $10,000 a month for early-stage companies, per AMW's 2026 pricing data, and the contract guarantees effort, not articles. Meanwhile the people you are pitching are disappearing: PR practitioners now outnumber US journalists roughly six to one, by O'Dwyer's analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and the BLS projects reporter jobs to keep shrinking through 2034. More pitchers, fewer catchers, no guaranteed outcome. For a founder watching runway, that is not a marketing channel, it is a donation.
Baden Bower's answer was to stop selling the process and sell the artifact. The agency, founded in 2018, prices editorial placement in named publications like a product: agreed outlet, agreed timeline, money back if it does not publish. It has shipped more than 25,000 articles for 3,548 clients across 37 countries, and the Global Recognition Awards called it the world's most disruptive PR agency in 2025. Traditionalists call the model heresy. Founders mostly call it a line item.
"BruntWork now ranks for more than 2,280 search terms and sits in Google's top three for a hundred of them," says Adam Pisk, director of BruntWork, an outsourcing firm that has run the productised route. "That is not luck. That is a system working."
The output compounds where ads do not
BruntWork's result is what the product looks like when it works. The company holds the number one Google result for the searches its buyers actually type: bookkeeper Philippines, bookkeeping Philippines, hire virtual assistant Philippines, and three more like them.
"Search bookkeeper Philippines or hire virtual assistant Philippines and we are the first result,"Pisk says. *"At some point you stop competing in a category and start defining it."
*And the same coverage is now doing a second job the invoice never mentioned: feeding AI answers. BruntWork is cited 61 times across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI features. That matters more each quarter, because the buyer's first question is moving. A G2 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers published in March 2026 found 51% now start research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% a year earlier. And Muck Rack's December 2025 citation analysis found 82% of what AI engines cite is earned media. Press coverage has quietly become the raw material of machine recommendations, which turns publicity from a vanity spend into infrastructure.
Say the quiet part
The obvious objection is the honest one that this is all paid. A placement you bought is not a journalist's independent endorsement, and anyone who tells a founder otherwise is selling something worse than PR.
But the retainer model does not escape the same test, it just hides from it. Effort-priced PR asks founders to pay monthly for a probability nobody will quantify. Product-priced PR states its output and accepts a refund clause. Between two imperfect options, startups are choosing the one that behaves like everything else they buy.
"The goal was never to be found on Google. It was to be the answer, wherever the question gets asked." Pisk said that about BruntWork. It reads like a forecast for everyone else.
This story was distributed as a release by Jon Stojan under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program.