mod·01 / media_relations
Media relations and tier one placements
Named reporters worked through pitch, follow up, and briefing. AI and technology desks first, then the business press and the vertical trades where your buyers actually shop.
An AI PR agency that names the outlets, the dates, and the refund before you pay
Every company in your category now says the word AI, so coverage goes to whoever can prove something. That is the job of an AI PR agency: turn your evaluation results, your customers, and your founder into stories reporters can verify and publish. Targets, outlets, and dates go in writing before kickoff, behind a 100% guarantee. You get the agreed results or your money back.
Eval runyour story · v1.0
Checks outThe stakes
What the noise costs a company doing real work
The AI beat is the most crowded desk in technology journalism. A reporter at TechCrunch, The Verge, or Bloomberg opens a few hundred pitches a week, and most of them announce a model, a round, or a feature that reads like the last four. Saying you use AI stopped being news around the time every landing page said it.
So the real cost is not a bad story. It is absence from the shortlist. An enterprise buyer runs procurement on a category she cannot yet evaluate herself, and reaches for the names she already saw in Wired, Fast Company, or an analyst note.
A partner checks whether the market has heard of you before your round gets a second meeting. A senior research engineer weighs two offers and reads the coverage of both. None of that costs you anything in a moment you can point at. You were simply never in the running.
Meanwhile a rival with the thinner product gets quoted every time a frontier lab ships something, and their name slowly becomes the category name.
The work
The AI PR services we run
Scopes get built backwards from where your revenue comes from: the publications buyers name on sales calls, the analyst who appears during procurement, and the competitor quoted in every story about your market.
mod·02 / announcements
Funding and launch announcements
Seed through growth rounds, model and product releases, enterprise customer wins, acquisitions, and senior research hires. Run with embargoes and exclusives, not a press release blasted to a rented list.
mod·03 / exec_positioning
Thought leadership and executive positioning
Bylines, reactive commentary on the week's AI news, podcast bookings, and founder LinkedIn programs. In this category the founder carries the story more often than the product does.
mod·04 / research_story
Benchmark and research storytelling
Evaluation results, model cards, production usage data, and original research shaped into something an editor will defend in a news meeting.
mod·05 / crisis
Crisis and reputation work
Model failures, data provenance questions, layoffs attributed to your product, and the screenshot that spreads at midnight.
mod·06 / digital_pr_geo
Digital PR, GEO, and measurement
Coverage aimed at the pages that produce demo requests, reported against the targets written into your scope.
Full menu at public relations services.
The range
The AI companies we build programs for
Foundation model and open weight labs
Applied AI teams selling into one vertical
Agent and orchestration platforms
Developer tooling
Inference and data infrastructure
Evaluation and observability
Computer vision, voice, and robotics
Established software companies shipping AI features that need explaining to a skeptical installed base
Regulated markets get their own treatment, because the compliance story is the sales story: clinical and health AI, financial services models, hiring, legal, and anything touching consumer data. Neighboring programs sit at SaaS PR and B2B tech PR.
The proof burden
Why AI PR carries a heavier proof burden than tech PR
Reporters on this beat got burned. Staged demos, benchmarks that never replicated, products marketed as autonomous that turned out to be people in a spreadsheet. Your pitch now gets read as a claim to verify rather than news to run, and one unchecked superlative costs you that reporter for a year.
Regulators arrived too. The SEC has charged companies for overstating what their AI does, the FTC has run enforcement sweeps against deceptive AI claims, and the EU AI Act phases its obligations in through 2026 and 2027. The practice even has a name now: AI washing. An announcement calling your model the best available, with nothing published about what it was measured against, is a liability rather than a headline.
That scrutiny favors you if the work is real. We build campaigns from material a journalist can check, because publishing a limitation buys more credibility than any adjective, and it earns the citations your search program needs anyway.
The evidence filewhat a campaign here is built from
- Results against a named benchmark, plus the methodology behind them
- Latency and cost numbers from production
- Accuracy a customer will confirm on the record
- Dataset provenance you can describe in plain language
- An honest account of what your model does badly
Your stage
What you need at your stage
Most founders looking for a PR agency for AI startups are solving one of three different problems, and a program built for the wrong one wastes a quarter.
ckpt·01
Pre seed and seed
You need a name your next investors recognize and a founder story that survives a first meeting. Launch coverage in the trades, podcasts, bylines, and a founder profile do more here than a wire release ever will.
ckpt·02
Series A and B
Enterprise buyers enter the picture and start asking who else uses this. Customer stories, benchmark coverage, analyst awareness, and one tier one feature your sales team can attach to an email.
ckpt·03
Growth toward an exit or IPO
Category ownership, policy and regulatory positioning, executive visibility, and a narrative that holds together under diligence and under a hostile question.
The process
The first quarter, week by week
Lab notebookprogram · quarter one
Week one
Everything gets written down
Discovery with founders, research leads, and sales. Messaging framework, a share of voice read against whoever keeps getting quoted, target media list. Placement targets, outlet tiers, timelines, and deliverables are signed before money moves.
Weeks two and three
Pitching starts
Named reporters on their beat, plus reactive commentary pitched into the week's AI news, which is the fastest route into a first byline while longer stories build.
Days 30 to 45
First coverage
Technology and AI trades usually land first, since that is where analysts and technical buyers spend their attention.
Day 90
The tier one push, then a straight scorecard
Business desks, placed executive bylines, the first data story out, and a read of what landed against the numbers on your scope rather than a summary of how busy we were.
Monthly after that: proactive pitching, an agreed volume of bylines and reactive opportunities, and reporting on placements against target, outlet relevance, share of voice, referring domains, branded search lift, and where AI engines name you. Forbes clients typically see a first opportunity within 4 to 8 weeks.
AI answers
Getting named when your buyer asks ChatGPT for a shortlist
Your buyers use the same class of product you sell to decide who to buy from. Someone types a question into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, gets one answer naming three vendors, and the evaluation starts and ends there. No second page to climb onto.
Generative engine optimization reads like jargon because most agencies sell the acronym and skip the method. It is not complicated. A model repeats only what it can check: sources it already crawls, entity signals about your product and your market that stay consistent wherever it finds them, and structured data on your own site that agrees with both. The strongest single input is a feature written by a publication the model already reads, and that is the one input no link vendor can fabricate. Which is why the same team runs your earned media and your search work here, instead of two vendors trading blame on a call you are paying for.
Why AceIt
Why hire AceIt as your AI PR agency
Every firm ranking for this search asks the same thing of you: commit $10,000 or more a month, wait two quarters, trust us. You are being asked to buy on faith by people selling to a market that has stopped buying anything on faith.
The clause
So the risk sits on our side of the contract instead. Placement targets, outlet tiers, timelines, and deliverables are agreed before kickoff, and if we do not deliver what we committed to, on the timeline we committed to, you get your money back.
Signed before kickoff
What we stand behind is the work and the agreed deliverables, not one named reporter's decision, because nobody honest sells you a journalist's mind. Scoping it that tightly is what lets the refund mean something.
Then the rest: senior people on the account with no coordinator layer in between, replies inside 1 to 2 hours, and one Austin team covering PR, SEO, and web.
Receipts
The receipts, with numbers on them
1M+Brand impressions Vezbi, a community super app, took out of targeted organic PR while expanding into the U.S.
50+Forbes placements secured across 12+ industries
4,200+Visits from a single anonymized feature, with a 38% rise in branded search and 12 secondary pickups
DA 94Authority of the backlink that same feature returned
Clients have been featured in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Wired, Mashable, Bloomberg, Fast Company, CNET, PCMag, and Forbes. Every one of those numbers ships with the same commitment behind it: agreed target missed, money returned. More at Vezbi and the Forbes program.
The number
What an AI PR agency costs
Specialist firms in this category rarely publish a rate, so here are the bands to judge any proposal against.
Boutique retainers
$8,000 to $20,000
a month
Larger practices
$20,000 to $30,000
a month
Global networks
Past six figures
monthly
A defined project
$25,000 to $50,000
a launch or a funding announcement
Ours are on a page rather than quoted after three meetings. Every price is printed on the pricing page, and Forbes campaigns are scoped and priced in writing before kickoff.
Pair earned media with search and you are looking at mid five figures to six figures a year against a 12 month roadmap. Project, retainer, and performance oriented models are all open to you, and the number is settled in writing on the strategy call.
The honest filter
Who we take on, and who we turn down
We take onin distribution
It fits AI companies with something checkable:
- A benchmark result
- A customer willing to be named
- Production data
- A founder with a real opinion about where the technology is going
- Teams raising, hiring, or entering a market where buyers have never bought this category before
We turn downout of distribution
- Anyone who wants a specific publication promised by Friday
- Anyone shopping on the lowest monthly rate
- A company whose only news is that it exists and the market is growing
- A product marketed as capable of things it cannot do, because that story eventually gets written by someone else
If your announcement has no finding, no number, and no person willing to hold a position in public, we will say so on the first call rather than bill you for six months to reach the same answer.
Questions
Asked before every AI engagement
Anything else, email [email protected] and it comes back in 1 to 2 hours.
An AI PR agency earns credible third party coverage for companies building or applying artificial intelligence, in the publications their buyers, investors, and future hires already read. The work covers media relations with AI and technology reporters, funding and launch announcements, benchmark and research storytelling, executive thought leadership, crisis handling, and measurement tied to pipeline rather than clip counts.
Expect $8,000 to $20,000 a month at a boutique firm, $20,000 to $30,000 at a larger practice, and $25,000 to $50,000 for a defined project such as a launch or funding announcement. Global networks run past six figures monthly. Our prices are published rather than hidden behind a discovery call at pricing, and Forbes campaigns are scoped and priced in writing before kickoff.
Same craft, a much heavier proof burden. A technology reporter asks how the product works. An AI reporter asks what benchmark you ran, who replicated it, where the training data came from, and why the demo is prerecorded. Add regulatory scrutiny of AI claims, a research community that fact checks marketing in public, and a category so crowded that novelty alone earns nothing.
Roughly 6 to 8 weeks before you need the coverage to exist: ahead of a funding announcement, a product launch, a conference, or the quarter your sales team starts calling enterprise buyers. Hiring after the news breaks means paying an agency to chase a cycle that already moved on. The earliest useful trigger is a paying customer willing to talk.
First placements in technology and AI trades typically arrive inside 30 to 45 days, with tier one business coverage building over the following two to three months as reporters get to know your founders. Search and AI citation effects compound more slowly, usually 6 to 12 months. Your timeline gets written into the scope before kickoff and the refund is attached to it.
It can, and you can tell. Reporters on this beat receive generated pitches daily and delete them faster than anything else in the inbox. We use AI tools for research, monitoring, and analysis, and humans write everything a journalist reads, because the value of a pitch is the specific fact and the relationship behind it.
Next step
Read the plan first, decide second
Give us three things: your domain, the date of your next announcement, and the name of the competitor who keeps getting quoted instead of you. Back comes the angles we think are publishable, the desks and reporters we would work first, how long we expect first coverage to take, and the figures we would attach our fee to. A 100% guarantee sits under all of it: you get the agreed results or your money back.
Every engagement carries a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back