By Stepan Burov, a Co-founder of 8bitPR, a Budapest-based boutique PR Agency for tech companies, startups and VC funds. Stepan is a PR & Growth Marketing professional specialising in IT and tech who has developed communication strategies for companies and startups in FinTech, EdTech, Retail, DeepTech, and LegalTech.

In startup culture, we love precision. Burn rate. CAC. Runway. We obsess over these numbers because they keep us honest and alive.

For years, PR got lumped into the “cost” column — a nice-to-have that got cut first when things got tight. And honestly? That made sense at a time when the value was fuzzy, and ROI was hard to pin down. A Forbes mention felt good, but it didn’t show up cleanly in a spreadsheet.

That thinking is now a competitive liability — and as PR professionals, we’ve watched it play out in real time with the clients we serve.

The landscape has shifted in ways that make strategic communications not just useful, but structurally important to how companies grow, raise, and win. Here’s what we’re seeing on the ground.

We’re no longer writing just for humans

Here’s something most of the founders we work with haven’t fully internalised yet: their audience in 2026 includes machines.

When a potential investor or enterprise buyer types “who are the leading players in *your clients’ or yours space* into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, those models aren’t pulling from paid ads or beautifully optimised landing pages. They’re pulling from earned media — articles, interviews, analyst mentions, editorial coverage.

This is the reality of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) — SEO’s more consequential cousin. And the companies that figured this out early are already ahead.

Klarna is a good example. Years of consistently earned media across European fintech press, TechCrunch, and the Financial Times mean that when any AI model is asked about BNPL leaders, Klarna is cited almost reflexively. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because of sustained, strategic communications investment over time. For the startups we represent, this is the playbook we’re now building toward from day one.

Media coverage as pre-done due diligence

When our clients head toward a Series B or C, we brief them on something important: the best investors are already Googling them before the second meeting.

In a tighter capital environment, VCs are leaning harder on signals outside the pitch deck. They want third-party validation — proof that smart, independent people found the company credible enough to write about.

A consistent body of earned media does exactly that. We saw this play out clearly with Wayve, the UK-based autonomous driving startup that raised $1.05 billion in 2024. Before that round closed, Wayve had been featured extensively in the Financial Times, Wired, and BBC News. By the time SoftBank and Microsoft were at the table, the editorial record had already done part of the validation work. The pitch deck didn’t have to carry the full weight.

That’s the dynamic we work to build for our clients — not just coverage for its own sake, but a media record that functions as informal due diligence.

Trust is now a moat

We’re in a strange moment. Synthetic content, AI-generated noise, and deepfakes have made people instinctively sceptical of almost everything they read online (I bet you doubt this one as well). Paradoxically, this makes verified editorial coverage more valuable than ever. 

A byline in a Tier-1 outlet carries a kind of trust transfer that money can’t directly buy — because it represents a third party staking their own credibility on a company’s story.

Companies that have invested in this kind of trust equity recover faster from bad news. They retain talent better during uncertainty. They command attention in rooms where newer competitors have to fight for it.

The brands that treated PR as a line item to cut are now the ones scrambling to rebuild reputations they let erode. The ones that treated it as infrastructure are operating from a fundamentally stronger position.

Shortening the enterprise sales cycle

For the B2B tech companies we represent, the hardest thing to overcome isn’t product quality — it’s incumbency bias. Why should a regulated financial institution or a cautious enterprise buyer take a chance on someone they’ve never heard of?

Earned media eliminates a step in that conversation.

When your sales team gets to a C-suite meeting, the ideal scenario isn’t that they’re introducing your company cold. The ideal scenario is that the person across the table has already seen your name in a context they trust — an industry report, a trade publication, a regional business press outlet relevant to their market.

That prior exposure doesn’t close the deal. But it eliminates a step. It collapses “who are these people?” into “I’ve heard of them.” In complex enterprise sales, that gap can mean months.

Regional media strategy matters here. A Hungarian bank, a German logistics company, a Southeast Asian fintech — they each have their own information ecosystems. Speaking their language, in their press, with case studies that reflect their context, is how you shorten that trust-building curve.

For our clients entering new regional markets, we apply the same logic. A fintech expanding into Central Europe needs coverage in local business press — not just for visibility, but to compress the “who are these people?” phase of every sales conversation.

The compounding logic

If we treat PR as a cost, we optimise for cheapness — the lowest-cost vendor, success measured by mention volume, deprioritised the moment budgets tighten.

If we treat it as an investment, we think about compounding returns. The interview held today becomes an AI citation next year. The analyst relationship built now becomes a Series C reference. The regional coverage earned this quarter shortens enterprise sales cycles in that market for years.

This is what we mean when we talk about building infrastructure, not just generating noise. The PR agencies doing the most important work right now aren’t counting clips — they’re constructing a durable, global presence for their clients that becomes harder to replicate as it grows, and that shows up in company valuations in ways that eventually silence even the sceptics.

Don’t count mentions. Build infrastructure.