PR has always mattered. It matters more now than it ever has.

If your company, product, campaign, or organization is not visible, you do not exist. That has always been true. What has changed is where visibility is determined.

Reporters, investors, and customers increasingly use AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others — to research who is leading a space, which companies are credible, and who is worth paying attention to. Those tools do not guess. They draw on what has been written, published, and indexed: press coverage, bylined articles, podcast appearances, industry awards, and the accumulated public record a company builds over time. A company with a strong media record shows up in those answers. A company with a thin one does not appear at all.

Earned media is now discoverability infrastructure. The press program is not just about getting a story placed. It is about building the public record that AI tools surface when someone searches for the leaders in your space. And the time to build that record is before you need it — not after a competitor already owns the conversation.

The GAF Energy story illustrates exactly how that works in practice.

GAF Energy came to market with a genuine product advantage and a steep communications challenge. The parent company, GAF, had 133 years in roofing and installed shingles on 1.4 million roofs annually. But GAF Energy was a new brand, a new domain, and a new website entering one of the most contested categories in residential energy: solar roofing. The direct competitor was Tesla.

The goal was first-page rankings on terms like "solar roof" and "solar shingle." To get there, press and earned media would have to do more than build awareness. It would have to build the domain authority that search engines reward — and the distributed public record that AI tools now surface.

The Press Strategy

The press program did not start at launch. It started years earlier, with earlier versions of the product — building name recognition, establishing GAF Energy as a credible voice in solar roofing, and generating coverage before the market knew the category existed.

The approach was to announce almost everything. New roofing contractor partnerships. Manufacturing milestones. Product development updates. New versions of the integrated solar shingle. Internal progress that signaled momentum. In a category that was still being defined, consistent activity told the market that GAF Energy was building something real and building it fast.

That cadence produced coverage across a wide range of publications and sectors — not just the clean energy trade press, but home improvement, technology, business, and general consumer outlets. Each placement in a new vertical introduced GAF Energy to a new audience and added another credible domain linking back to the company page.

By the time Timberline Solar launched, GAF Energy was not an unknown brand asking for attention. It had a media record. Reporters had written about it. Outlets had linked to it. That foundation is what made the launch land the way it did.

The Coverage

The strategy produced placements in CNET, Popular Science, Good Housekeeping, Business Insider, and Time. GAF Energy earned recognition from CES, Fast Company, and Green Builder as a sustainable product of the year. Newsrooms and outlets across the country covered the launch and linked directly to their web site.

Each placement did two things. It put GAF Energy's story in front of a new audience. And it created an inbound link from a credible, high-authority source — which is a core signal in how search engines rank pages.

Over time, more than 1,000 unique domains linked directly to GAF.energy. That link profile, built almost entirely through earned media rather than paid placement, gave the site the authority to compete for top search rankings against one of the most recognized brands in the world.

The Result

Over five years, GAF Energy climbed to first-page rankings on ultra-competitive solar search terms. Organic traffic grew substantially and correlated directly to increases in sales. The communications program helped drive a 90% decrease in cost per acquisition and a 10x increase in leads.

Keally DeWitt, Vice President of Marketing and Public Policy at GAF Energy:

"Through a combination of performant design, development, data science, SEO and strategy work, we were able to decrease our CPA by 90% while 10Xing leads in an incredibly competitive market."

The press work was the fuel. It authenticated the brand, validated the product, and built the link structure that made the SEO results possible.

The technical SEO and site performance work behind those rankings was led by JB Web, whose team handled everything from site architecture and page speed to content strategy and keyword targeting. The press program and the technical program ran in parallel and reinforced each other — earned media built the link profile; technical execution ensured the site was ready to rank on it. Neither would have produced the same results alone.

What This Illustrates

Earned media is not just a communications outcome. It is search and discoverability infrastructure.

Every placement in a credible outlet is a signal — to search engines, and increasingly to the AI tools that surface company information when reporters, investors, and customers search for who is leading a space. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools draw heavily on what has been written and published across the web. A broad, consistent press record is now the foundation of both search rankings and AI visibility.

This makes the GAF Energy approach more relevant now than when it was executed. The strategy of announcing consistently — partners, milestones, product updates, manufacturing progress — built a media footprint across hundreds of publications and sectors. That footprint is exactly what AI tools are trained on and surface in response to queries. When someone asks an AI tool who the credible players in solar roofing are, the answer is shaped by what has been written. Companies with thin media records do not appear. Companies with broad, sustained press coverage do.

The announcement cadence that generated 1,000 unique linking domains did not just win on traditional SEO. It built the kind of distributed, multi-sector public record that LLM search now rewards. The more publications that have written about a company — across industries, across years, across topics — the more likely that company is to surface when AI tools construct an answer about its space.

The companies that invest in press and media relations are not just building awareness. They are building the public record that drives discoverability across every channel, now and over time. That record compounds. A placement from 2022 is still generating traffic and credibility in 2026.

Boykin Consulting works with clean energy, sustainability, and climate tech companies to build press programs that drive real visibility — in search, in AI tools, and in the outlets your audience actually reads. Get in touch.