Building Your Brand on Borrowed Land

There’s something every marketer wants right now, and it’s this: top search results, and to be the sources informing AI.

Wouldn’t you like to search for the terms your prospects are looking for and see your company in all those red boxes? Wouldn’t your sales team like to call a prospect, have that prospect look up your company and see something similar?

This is brand marketing.

For a long time, technical B2B companies could rely on a fairly straightforward path: build a strong website, publish helpful content, show up at the right industry events, and trust that the right buyer would find you when they were ready.

But now, there’s something sitting heavy in the bottom of every marketer’s stomach: website traffic is going down.

Searches are increasing, but the clicks are disappearing. Recent data shows searches are up roughly 15%, yet website traffic across many sites has dropped about 10% (Digital Bloom). And nearly 60% of Google searches now end without a single click (Sparktoro), meaning the user gets their answer directly inside Google and never visits your website.

So, people are still searching, researching, and trying to understand their options…but they’re doing more of that research in places that keep them inside the platform.

Your website still matters. It remains one of the most important credibility checks your company has. But, it can’t be the only place your brand lives.

Your buyers are forming opinions about your company long before they talk to sales and, increasingly, before they ever click through to your site. They see what Google says, read technical publications, skim AI overviews, and ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for summaries.

If you’re not already, it’s time to build your brand in these borrowed spaces.

Don’t be afraid of borrowed land

The “borrowed land” phrase usually comes with a warning. Marketers love to fearmonger around borrowed land. Don’t invest too much in a place you don’t own! What happens if the algorithm changes or the platform loses relevance?

But we’re not talking about chasing followers or building a brand that depends entirely on LinkedIn engagement, Google traffic, or any single channel. We’re talking about putting valuable, credible information where your prospects are already looking for it. It’s a publishing strategy with technical content at its core, and it can pivot easily if the winds change.

Right now, though, the places to be include search, AI-generated answers, the sources behind those answers, technical publications, and other industry media that already have your audience’s trust.

PR matters right now

Our recent research shows technical buyers don’t blindly trust an AI overview and move on. They may read the summary, and then they look deeper, click through links, and validate details.

So we need to be those sources: the helpful article, the expert quote, or the credible third-party mention. A focused, strategic PR effort built around a clear message, the right media targets, real evidence, and consistent follow-through brings about this coverage.

Today’s powerful metric is a screenshot

The way we see these efforts are working happens pretty quickly and can be qualitatively captured on the borrowed real estate we’re targeting. One of the most compelling things I can show a prospective client right now is not a spreadsheet full of metrics, it is a screenshot.

On the left, you see what the search result looked like before the PR effort. The brand was not meaningfully present for the terms their audience was searching for. On the right, you see the same search after focused news releases, media pitching, and earned coverage. Now the brand is showing up in top results, in relevant articles, and in a way that influences what Google and AI tools surface.

The same search, 10 days later, gives a pendulum shift in brand presence after targeted PR efforts.

We still track the metrics, of course: coverage referral traffic and campaign engagement are certainly significant.

The most powerful evidence is often the thing an executive can understand in five seconds: this is what your buyer saw before, and this is what your buyer sees now. When they were looking for a solution they didn’t see your brand, or expertise that leads to your brand, and now they do.

Who can win with PR?

The companies winning with PR right now are not always the biggest or loudest companies. They are the companies that know what they want to be known for and are willing to put that message into the market again and again through credible sources.

The efforts look like aligning internally, tightening messaging, finding the right publications, communicating helpfully with editors, connecting your news to a real market need, making sure your spokespeople are ready, staying opportunistic, and repeating the process continually.

When a buyer spends months researching before they talk to sales, awareness is not a soft metric. It is what gets you onto the initial list, gets your sales team a callback, and makes their first conversation feel familiar and trusted. A strong PR program can build this awareness to support the business