In the past week the issue of fake AI experts has been a hot talking point within the PR industry. Press Gazette published a great article highlighting the issue and how major news publications have been duped into covering expert comments from people who (probably) don’t exist. Many news sites have now responded to the article by deleting and amending various articles. 

That was followed up by an SEO talk advocating for creating fake experts to improve your site’s E-E-A-T and earn backlinks (don’t do this - it’s unethical). 

Since AI tools like ChatGPT made it easier than ever before for literally anyone to become an “expert”, we’ve also seen “experts” responding to Journo Requests with quotes produced by ChatGPT. 

The end result of all this will be Journalists becoming even more cautious over the experts that they quote in their stories. Press Gazette is a very influential publication and I have no doubt that most newsrooms across the UK will have been warned and advised to start vetting the people they are quoting as experts in their stories. 

Unfortunately, for those PRs that aren’t using black hat SEO tactics, the job of earning press coverage for our genuine experts keeps getting harder. But for the genuine PRs reading this, don’t panic! We are also experts ourselves, and a stronger vetting process from Journalists is actually a good thing for us. 

We don’t have to fake it, we’re working with amazing people looking to provide helpful content, and we know better than anyone how to showcase their authority and why Journalists should trust them enough to be quoted in their stories. 

To help PRs in showcasing this, I’ve put together the following guide on how you can go about building the personal brand of your PR experts, and separate them from the growing pack of fake AI experts. 

Create GREAT author pages for your PR experts

Just having an author profile page for your PR experts isn’t a strong enough trust signal anymore. For them to be really effective at earning the trust of a real life person and not just a search engine bot, you need to be creating GREAT author pages.

Author pages should be treated as an online CV for your experts. Journalists will be vetting your experts more often now, and the very first thing they’ll do is Google their name. Ideally, you want a profile page on their website to be the first result people see when vetting your expert to confirm if they’re real and if they are in fact an expert on the topic they’re providing quotes on. 

Author profile pages are also great for your SEO by helping you to send strong E-E-A-T signals (experience, expertise, authority, and trust), not just to search engines, but to people reading your content and researching who you are.

Here’s a quick guide to what a GREAT author page might have on it:

Personal Biography

This is your elevator pitch to any Journalist vetting you out. Make it concise and to the point, and focus on no more than a handful of topics you want to display your expertise on. Avoid being seen as a jack of all trades, master of none. You can’t be an expert in PR, SEO, Social Media, and Graphic Design all at the same time. Pick a lane. Having a big list of ten areas of expertise is a red flag from the very start. If you want to list a lot of topics then my advice would be to have 2-3 topics, and then list subtopics of those topics.

Good Images

Get some good photos of your expert that you can use on their profile page, and do your best to make them high quality photos that don’t look AI produced or enhanced. Imagine that you’re vetting out an expert yourself, what are the red flags that you’d be looking for? Where possible try to include multiple images, and try to ensure this page isn’t the only digital footprint of those images. 

Video Content

Video content will become a huge green flag for Journalists vetting the authenticity of experts they want to feature in their stories. Naturally, not every expert you work with will be comfortable with producing video content to go online, but those that have a digital footprint with video content will have an advantage. A simple 30 second video of your expert introducing themselves and sharing their areas of expertise will go a long long way.

Aim to produce the type of video content you’d use for Instagram or TikTok that has your colleagues and a working office environment in the background. We want content that nobody will worry about being AI produced. This can also be a great opportunity to showcase some of your expert’s personality too.

Qualifications and Awards

Anything like awards they’ve won and qualifications they’ve gained can be a huge trust signal, as long as they can be verified. Anyone can say they have a fancy degree or are a member of an industry association. Signals of your expertise that can be verified on other websites like award wins is a big green flag.

Media Experience

If you’ve been covered as an expert in previous news stories, link to these from your profile page. Likewise, include blogs that you’ve written on the topics you want to be seen as an expert on. That’s the starting point. Again, anyone can use AI to produce a blog, and Journalists are now wary that being quoted in a news story maybe isn’t the trust signal of a real expert that it once was. 

So what type of media experience can we show that can’t be faked? Think of things like podcasts they’ve been on, videos of speaking gigs they’ve done, video of content they’ve collaborated with other brands/experts on. Real life examples that show your expert speaking will be a valued green flag (typing all this is kinda depressing the lengths we’ll have to take to prove we aren’t a fake AI imposter 🫠).

Social Profiles

Sadly some of the recent fake “experts” in question have social profiles. You can make them for anyone or anything. “Here’s a link to their Twitter profile” isn’t really that big of a trust signal anymore. The trust signal is the content on their socials. 

Aim for your expert to be publishing content on their social pages that display their expertise. Obviously this doesn’t have to be on their personal socials. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram will likely become even more important for building the personal brand of experts that showcase their expertise in video format. 

Digitaloft have put together a great guide on author pages with examples of best in class profile pages which you can read here. 

Build your expert’s personal brand in real life situations

One thing that fake AI experts can’t manufacture is real life experiences (unless they just start straight up stealing people’s identity). As the challenge of distinguishing the real experts from the fake ones becomes more difficult, the people building their personal brand, both online and offline, will be the ones that hold the strongest hand.

As already mentioned in relation to author profile pages, marketing opportunities such as podcasts and speaking events can be a huge green flag to anyone reviewing the legitimacy of your expertise. Black hat SEOs can make fake personas that can create content in the disguise of an expert, but you won’t see those fake experts appearing on a podcast, or on stage giving a talk.

Opportunities like this are about more than just building a personal brand and proving you’re a real person (what a time to be alive!). When you appear on a podcast, most of the time you’ll also get a backlink in the show notes. Likewise, events often create profile pages for their speakers which will usually be another source of a relevant backlink to your website. You can also use content from podcasts or talks your expert has taken part in, as content on social channels for further promotion to send more trust signals. 

Read more: The Best Experts for Earning PR Coverage

Add something new with your expert insights

As well as your expert’s digital footprint, the quotes you’re creating are also a great opportunity to showcase that they are the best expert available. Fake AI experts build their knowledge off content that is already out there on the internet. They don’t provide unique insights that Journalists can’t Google themselves. 

Work with your experts to discover the most interesting parts of a topic that only the real experts know and understand. Yes, PRs will often ghostwrite comments on behalf of experts, but still lean on them to find the most interesting insights they have to offer. 

One thing you can do to help ensure the quotes provided by your expert stand out from the crowd and do the best job of positioning them as the expert they (hopefully) are, is use tools like ChatGPT to your advantage. Enter the questions you’re looking to answer, or that a Journalist has sent you, and see what responses AI tools give you. 

Now you know what the “obvious” answer is, and the answers that fake experts are likely to be providing. Make use of the fact that you have a genuine expert that can add something new to the existing insights already easily available to literally everyone on the internet. 

Sometimes you may ghostwrite comments for your expert that inadvertently read very close to an answer that ChatGPT may produce. After all, it’s not uncommon for content we write to be flagged as AI content, ironically by an AI tool. By running your questions through these tools, you can see the type of insights those answers are providing, and realise that you may potentially need to tweak your quotes to read less like an AI response, or provide a piece of insight not already covered. 

Read more: How to find experts for your Digital PR campaigns

Own the SERPs for your experts

More and more often, Journalists will be vetting any experts they want to quote in their stories. The first part of that process will be Googling the name of your expert. Therefore, it’s super important that we’re making use of our SEO knowledge to ensure the search engine results pages for our experts showcase strong trust signals. 

In an ideal world, you’ll want as many of the following as possible to appear on that SERP:

• Author profile page on the company’s website

• Social profiles with a strong number of followers displayed above the page title

• Results of PR and Marketing activity they’ve been part of - things like podcasts, awards, industry stories, etc

• A variety of different images of your expert on the Images tab

• Some positive news stories about your expert on the News tab

• Videos of them giving helpful tips and advice on the Videos tab

• In the long term, a Knowledge Panel (these take a lot of great PR work to get but are the ultimate trust signal for an expert)

Build your own personal brand as a PR

Fear not if you’re not a fan of “marketing yourself” and doing things like LinkedIn posts and appearing on podcasts. You don’t have to go that far. But as any PR will know, your reputation is everything. That applies to the experts you’re pitching quotes on behalf of, but also you as the person pitching them to Journalists. 

Work on forming strong positive relationships with key Journalists in the sectors you’re going to be pitching stories to. The more that a Journalist trusts you, the more likely they are to trust the expert that you’re pitching quotes from. This has always been important, but as Journalists become more and more wary of the authenticity of fake experts, they’ll rely even heavier on the PRs that they know they can trust. 

I would also expect to see an increase in more Journalists going directly to PRs that they know have good reliable experts available to comment on their stories, at the expense of going down the Journo Request route. Again, this will further emphasise the importance of you as a PR also being considered a trustworthy source by Journalists.

If Journo Requests platforms become less trustworthy in the minds of Journalists, they’ll lean more on PRs that they have worked with in the past, or that have introduced experts they have on hand that match what they’re looking for. 

When you start working with a new expert that wants to provide quotes for PR stories, send a quick intro pitch to relevant Journalists detailing who your expert is and what topics they can provide quotes on. If a Journo searches their inbox for “relationship expert” for example, you want your relationship expert to have a presence in those search results. 

To summarise:

• Don’t create fake experts - find a real one to represent your brand, or use a different link building tactic (there’s plenty of them!)

• Journalists are going to become more suspicious of the experts they work with - they’ll want to verify they actually exist and will be doing online research to vet them out

• Our job as PRs is to make sure experts we’re using for PR stories have a strong digital footprint that shows they’re a real person and a genuine trustworthy expert on the topic they’re providing quotes on

• Make sure your experts have best in class author profile pages on their website

• Video content of your expert is going to become even more important

• Market your experts across other channels such as Social, Video, Podcasts, Events

• Add something new to the conversation with your quotes that ChatGPT can’t produce

• Review what search engines show when someone searches for your experts

• Make sure you as a PR are also trustworthy, and introduce your experts to key Journalists for if they become less reliant on Journo Requests platforms for sourcing quotes

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