How PR firms are trading their authority for a quick buck

As a responsible consumer, If you want to buy a product or service, where do you do your research? You might ask your friends and family, or check TikTok and Twitter. However, if you're like the majority of people, you'll likely look to a search engine first.

As you should, right? Google is, for the time being, the premiere repository of all human knowledge. From a simple search query, you can discover top ten lists, blog posts, reviews, and more. These carefully ranked results are supposedly laid out by Google's powerful algorithm that determines E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

75% of consumers in a 2024 study report using online reviews "regularly" or "always" when researching local businesses, and 81% of respondents indicate that they use Google to find local reviews. Google research has become an integral part of most of our daily lives and decision-making. Search-based consumer research has worked for years and will likely continue to benefit consumers for the foreseeable future. Right?

Well, maybe not.

This system is deteriorating rapidly before our eyes. Let's discuss why it's collapsing, who is to blame, and how we can adapt to protect ourselves and our wallets.

Affiliate marketing: what went wrong

Before pointing fingers and assigning blame, let's take a step back and look at affiliate marketing. Essentially, affiliate marketing is a way for brands and marketplaces to incentivize content creators to share their products and platforms. The concept behind affiliate marketing was a good one. It went a little something like this:

1. Consumers need well-researched, objective information about the goods and services they're interested in buying, but they don't have the time to purchase and test every single item or service.
2. Bloggers, journalists, and content creators fill this need for consumer research by building a livelihood and a reputation for providing insights and reviews based on their established niche. Examples include software enthusiasts, mommy bloggers, travel hackers, etc.
3. Companies and marketplaces provide a light incentive for content creators to mention or review their products through affiliate links.
4. Reviewers and creators fund their continued work through these affiliate programs. The more successful they are and the bigger their audience, the more commission they get from the links.

Now, it's easy to see how the system could be manipulated. Who stops the content creators from explicitly and only reviewing products they get paid for? And what if the "best" products don't provide affiliate links? Does this preclude their products or services from getting mentioned in the supposed "top" lists? The affiliate marketing system incentivizes reviewers to promote the most lucrative affiliate products, not necessarily the most high-quality ones.

The only real safeguard to prevent this from happening is one thing: reputation. Journalists, bloggers, and content creators who want to continue doing what they're doing for the long term have to make sure they're not recommending garbage to their audiences. People don't like being manipulated out of their money, and they will gladly turn on even a beloved creator who greedily shills low-quality products.

The system has a decent self-correcting mechanism. Affiliate links can—and do—get abused, but those who abuse them often tarnish their reputation and rarely become successful in whatever niche they are pursuing. They get called out by audiences for being money-grubbing and disingenuous, quickly losing relevance and credibility.

The real problem comes when media outlets start getting involved and leveraging their own powerful, long-standing brand identity to co-sign and host lecherous affiliate linking techniques. Unfortunately, almost all of them have begun doing this.

The sketchy ad practices

I've written at length about how legacy media outlets are either dying or have to shift focus away from actual journalism in order to survive. Ads are ruining the user experience for many legacy media outlets, and they constantly have to cut corners. Many news outlets are trying to get creative and diversify their revenue streams, including affiliate marketing.

Again, this isn't an inherently bad thing. Including a link to an Amazon listing of a product you're already mentioning anyway isn't going to massively disrupt or harm anyone. The newspaper gets a little bit of revenue, the reader gets a convenient link to a product they might already be interested in, and everybody wins.

Unfortunately, more and more local and global media outlets are taking this too far. They are leveraging the one thing they have, brand recognition and established authoritativeness, and turning it into a way to sell products and services they have no intention of adequately vetting under the guise of "self-sponsored posts" and advertorials.

These outlets, alongside sketchy "digital PR" companies, are working together to trick consumers into assuming they're reading an article from a trusted, journalistic source, but they're actually reading an opaque, unscrupulous ad.

Here's how it works: a marketing or PR firm representing a company approaches a local or global news outlet to write a sponsored post. The marketers pay for the space (benefitting the outlet) and provide the content. The content includes opportunistically placed brand mentions and affiliate links (benefitting the marketing/PR team). The only people who don't benefit? The consumers who have no idea they just read a 2,000 word ad.

Because that's the thing: when you read a news article, you expect there to be ads, maybe in the form of a popup or a sidebar, not for the article to be the ad. Sure, many of the articles have a real-sounding title, are written by a real-sounding person, and may even have an affiliate disclosure somewhere in tiny print.

But when you, as a consumer, go looking for product reviews and information, do you expect to have to research the author and their credentials and read every single line of tiny text? Or do you go into the experience assuming the media outlet will have integrity? Especially when you purposely seek out that media outlet based on brand recognition and respect for the institution.

How SEO plays a role

All of this begs the question: What happened to traditional advertisements? Why don't companies buy ad space on Google or the news outlets themselves? Well, the simple answer is that people don't trust advertisements. The average person's eyes glaze over an ad, thanks to the fact that we all see hundreds of ads per day.

Additionally, we're conditioned to see a "sponsored" tag on the link and not trust it because advertisers have no incentive to be honest. Advertisements can lie to you, and nobody stops them; thus, nobody trusts them. So, instead, marketers and brands are choosing the indirect route by leveraging media outlets to obfuscate the pay-to-play nature of what they're doing. So, more lies.

Which is fine; that's their choice. Outlets and digital marketers can choose to go this route and damage their credibility in the process. But we also need to consider how SEO plays a role in this. Google ranks legacy media outlets highly based on brand recognition and factors like established Domain Authority.

However, Google doesn't seem to differentiate self-sponsored "ad" posts from actual, credible journalism. They're effectively highly-ranking cheap advertorial posts like they'd rank a breaking news story, just because they're being published on the same media outlet. So now, when you use Google to do research, you're getting fed with actual ads in the form of sponsored and paid-for advertisements—but then the bona fide first-page results that you've come to know and trust? Also ads.

The long-term damage to journalistic reputation

Alright, maybe one of these digital marketing companies published a sponsored post in your favorite digital newspaper and got you to buy a product that you assumed would be reputable based on it being, you know, listed in Forbes or Business Insider. It wasn’t, you wasted a bit of money, and there’s not much you can do about it. Big deal, who cares, right?

Well, we all should. Remember back at the beginning when we talked about why affiliate links work, and that's because content creators don't want to destroy their reputation by selling their audiences garbage? More and more consumers are catching onto these "parasite SEO" practices. Soon, the fact that a product is listed in CNN or the Wall Street Journal could no longer mean anything.

Media outlets are playing the short game. They are staying afloat in the interim while doing massive harm to their reputation. You can only burn consumers once or twice before they stop trusting you or your outlet to give credible information. These legacy and local newspapers are banking on the idea that their readers are ignorant of their sketchy practices. But they're failing to consider that the younger generations no longer trust them and they have nobody to blame but themselves.

It's not just the media outlets that must be held accountable for these sketchy parasitic practices. The digital marketers and public relations firms that engage in them also need to be held responsible. They're also garnering a reputation as sketchy corner-cutters who are more concerned about a quick dollar and less about building relationships with the public on behalf of their brands and clients.

The search engines should be aware that consumers are starting to catch on and they should adjust their algorithms accordingly. As artificial intelligence grows and Google faces a disastrous blow to its ad revenue through generative AI search results, they're not doing themselves any favors by religiously linking to legacy media outlets that auction off their reputation to the highest (affiliate) bidder.

If you can't trust Google results, why not just search on Open AI? Or TikTok? Or go straight to Amazon and read the reviews? Some companies think they are too big to fail and think their consumers are too dumb to notice. But I don't believe either of those things are true, and the data shows that consumers are getting tired of it.

What consumers can do to combat parasite SEO practices

Staying informed is the best thing we can do as active and engaged consumers. It's not enough to search "top VPN in 2024" or "top PR software." We have to dig deeper and do more thorough research.

This can involve reading actual consumer reviews on websites like TrustPilot and G2 and checking thoroughly for "sponsored" or "affiliate" disclosures. We must also research the author and see who they're writing for and why. Following the money is always a good way to determine whether you can trust them or not.

And lastly, as consumers, we should give back to the systems that empower us. We need to write reviews and help others in the same way that their reviews help us. Give brutally honest—but fair—feedback about products and services. Reach out to companies and let them know what improvements you'd like to see. And if you're disgusted by the parasitic nature of your favorite publication using this sketchy form of SEO, let them know directly, or indirectly by no longer supporting them.