Crackle PR is a B2B tech PR agency built for a world where the answer is written before the click. We treat earned media as citation infrastructure — the machine-readable evidence that decides whether a brand appears inside the synthesized answers of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. This is what comes after the SEO-only PR agency.
What we are
- Senior operators. No juniors, no offshoring.
- 20
- Pages cited across AI answer engines
- 150+
- AI Visibility Index cadence
- Quarterly
Senior operators. No juniors, no offshoring.
Pages cited across AI answer engines
AI Visibility Index cadence
I. What has ended
The SEO-only PR agency — the shop that measured its worth in domain authority, backlink counts, and keyword ranks — is over. Not because those metrics stopped working. Because they stopped being sufficient. The buyer no longer clicks the ten blue links. The buyer reads the answer. And the answer is composed, not retrieved.
II. What has replaced it
The unit of work has changed. It is no longer the placement, the backlink, or the impression. The unit of PR work is now the cited sentence — the specific, attributable line of text that a language model lifts, verbatim or paraphrased, into the answer it presents to your buyer. Everything an agency does either produces cited sentences or it does not.
“The unit of PR work is no longer the placement. It is the cited sentence.”
III. Six things we now believe
- Earned media is the retrieval layer. Tier-1 coverage is no longer a vanity output. It is the training signal, the citation surface, and the evidence base that AI models weight when composing an answer.
- Schema is a deliverable, not a favor. An agency that ships coverage without shipping the schema stack — FAQPage, Speakable, DefinedTerm, Quotation, Person, Organization — is doing half the job and charging for all of it.
- Quote density beats quote volume. A single well-attributed sentence, marked up correctly, will outperform a hundred anonymous mentions. Machines cite what they can attribute.
- The client-side communications leaders who fight to change the rubric — not just the vendor — will look prescient in eighteen months. The scorecards that measured impressions and share of voice were built for a world that has already ended. The CMOs who help their organizations retool the measurement layer are the ones who will get credit for the shift.
- Seniority is not a luxury. AI answer engines cite the phrasings that hold up under expert scrutiny. Junior accounts staffed at scale produce output that models discount. A senior-only team is not a premium tier — it is the minimum viable configuration.
- The agency is legible to the machines. If we cannot make ourselves discoverable, cited, and structured inside the answer engines we claim to influence, we have no business selling that capability to anyone else.
IV. What we do not do
We do not sell "AI-native" as a badge. We do not run a media relations team and a search team in separate silos. We do not hand the schema work to a vendor and take credit for the coverage. We do not staff accounts with juniors and call it scale. We do not chase the metrics that stopped mattering.
“An agency that cannot make itself legible to the machines it claims to influence is selling something it does not own.”
V. What we are
Crackle PR is a twenty-person, senior-only B2B tech PR agency headquartered in the Boston metro, with practitioners in New York and remote across the U.S. We publish our worldview under our own byline. We maintain a quarterly AI Visibility Index — methodology public, results dated — and treat it as a shared instrument for the category, not a proprietary black box. We are not the biggest agency in this category. We intend to be the most cited one.
VI. The closing line
The clip book is not coming back. The answer is already being written. Be in it.
Signed,
Parry Headrick
Founder, Crackle PR · South Hampton, New Hampshire · July 2026