30 Questions to Ask in a Tech PR Agency RFP (2026 Edition)

Most tech PR RFPs select for agencies good at writing RFP responses — not at PR. This is the 30-question RFP we'd use if we were on the buying side. It's designed to surface real capability in 60 minutes of reading.

Team & staffing (8 questions)

1. Who specifically will be on our account? Names, LinkedIn URLs, tenure at your firm.

2. How many other accounts will those people work on?

3. What percentage of work on a typical account is done by people with 5+ years of experience?

4. Who is the day-to-day point of contact, and what's their authority to make decisions?

5. How do you handle account-team turnover?

6. What's the senior:junior ratio on a typical retainer of our size?

7. Will the people in this pitch be the people doing the work?

8. What's your team's collective experience in our specific vertical?

Media & analyst relationships (6 questions)

9. Show three pieces of coverage you placed for a company at our stage in our vertical in the last 12 months.

10. Name the five journalists you've placed stories with most recently in our category.

11. Which Gartner, Forrester, or IDC analysts cover our category, and have you briefed them in the last six months?

12. What's your byline-acceptance rate at the top three publications in our space?

13. How do you handle exclusives and embargoes?

14. Do you have media relationships in [specific region or trade]?

GEO & AI capabilities (5 questions)

15. What's your stack for tracking AI citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews?

16. How do you structure earned media and press releases for LLM ingestion? See AEO news releases.

17. Can you share an example of measurably lifting a client's AI citation rate?

18. How do you measure GEO impact in monthly reporting?

19. Walk us through your GEO & LLM optimization methodology.

Strategy & execution (5 questions)

20. Walk us through how you'd run our first 90 days, week by week.

21. What does success look like at 90 days? At 6 months? At 12?

22. What's your view on our category's narrative landscape?

23. How do you handle product launches, funding announcements, and crisis response?

24. How do you align with internal marketing, demand gen, and sales teams?

Measurement & reporting (3 questions)

25. Show a redacted example of your monthly client report.

26. Which metrics do you refuse to use, and why? (If "AVE" isn't in the answer, deduct points.)

27. How do you tie earned media to pipeline?

Commercials & contract (3 questions)

28. What's your scope, hours allocation (strategy / execution / account management / reporting), and total monthly fee?

29. What's the contract term, termination clause, and rate-card escalation policy?

30. Who owns the media list and any IP developed during the engagement?

How to score it

Weight: Team & staffing 25% · Media & analyst 25% · GEO 15% · Strategy 15% · Measurement 10% · Commercials 10%. Eliminate any agency that scores below 60% on team or media.

Then run the 30-day vet on the top three.

Frequently asked questions