Building a Digital PR & AEO Program From Zero

Objective

When I joined Product.ai (formerly Demand.io) there was no press program, no data-journalism motion, and no way to measure whether AI engines were citing us at all. The job was to build all three, and to turn our own commerce data into the reason journalists and AI engines would start. That runs on Story Machine, which I vibe coded from spec to production: it reads our proprietary data against market trends, then crafts and pitches media angles built on journalist psychology.

Key Results

Vibe coded Story Machine from spec to production: a proprietary data journalism engine built in Claude Code that reads our commerce data against market trends and journalist psychology, then runs the pipeline from dataset → story angle → media-ready pitch
Built digital PR program from zero to 151 media placements across 92 outlets in 22 states in under 3 months
Earned a Scripps News TV interview syndicated to 46 broadcast stations nationwide
My team and I created the AI Shopping Divergence Study, putting the same 220 shopping questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity (8,794 answers) and finding a factual conflict on 86% of them. Business Insider and ABC Philadelphia (6abc Action News) interviewed me about the findings
Secured 49 backlinks at avg DA 70.5, including 9 placements at DA 80+ (Mercury News, NewsBreak, Grokipedia)
Stood up the CEO’s executive byline program: a recurring Fast Company column, 6–8 pieces in 2026
Led blog rebrand to journalist-facing PR resource (Shopping, Decoded)
Doubled Bing AI citations from ~20K to 42K+/day; grew AI-cited pages 59%

Building a Digital PR & AEO Program From Zero

Objective

Key Results

Key Links

The work