Vitis PR has landed at number three in Feedspot’s 8 Best UK PR Blogs to Follow in 2026. Feedspot judges on relevance, expertise, posting frequency and freshness, so we’ll happily take the compliment.
Thank you to Feedspot, which is an RSS Reader that lets you subscribe to blogs, news sites, and any website you want to keep up with. Only the UK’s leading industry publication PR Week and another agency sit above us, and we’re the only West Midlands blog in the top eight. London agencies hold half the places, which makes a Midlands technology agency squeezing in feel all the better than making it into the top eight to begin with.
Awards have always helped a brand’s reputation, but what interests the entire Vitis PR team more is what a list like this does for visibility in AI answers.
How to use roundups for AI visibility
Nobody asks an AI assistant for “CRM software small business” any more. They ask something more comparative, like which five lightweight CRMs suit a ten-person creative agency, and which has the best Slack integration. To answer that, tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Claude don’t conjure an opinion from thin air. They search, then use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to pull in external sources before writing a word of recommendation. Those sources are very often the humble “Top 10” roundup.
It makes sense when you look at how a listicle is built, though. Items, feature descriptions, pros and cons, prices: it’s a tidy little parcel of data that somewhere an editor has gone through, reviewed, agreed upon and that an AI model can lift without having to improvise. Better still, roundups create consensus. If your brand turns up in four separate, reputable lists for your market, the model reads that overlap as proof you belong in the conversation. One mention is an anecdote. Four is a pattern.
Here’s the part some marketers won’t enjoy. Publishing your own list and putting yourself at number one achieves precisely nothing. Models spot self-promotion quickly and shrug it off. The credit has to come from third parties they already trust, which makes this a job for digital PR rather than a content calendar. I’d go further and say that earning a place on other people’s lists is now one of the most effective things a PR team can do for generative engine optimisation (GEO), and plenty of agencies are still treating it as a nice extra.
How to secure roundup rankings
Start by finding out what the machines are reading. Put your buyers’ real questions to ChatGPT et al and look at the citations. The same blogs, review hubs and trade outlets will keep appearing, and that’s your target list. Then pitch the existing article, not a new one. A fresh post can take months to rank, whereas an author adding you to a list that already ranks might take an afternoon. Write to them, point out the gap (“great enterprise picks, but nothing for teams under ten”), and make yes the easy answer by sending a ready-written blurb, a logo and a trial account.
Pick your niche carefully while you’re at it. The “Best Overall” crown is crowded and rarely cited for nuanced prompts. “Best for lean startups” or “best budget alternative to the big name” is where specific questions land, and it mirrors how people actually prompt these tools.
If you do publish your own comparison content, make it easy to break down into its parts. Item lists, FAQs, proper comparison tables and a self-contained answer of 40 to 60 words under each heading will serve you far better than clever prose that a retrieval system can’t cleanly quote.
Don’t neglect the “scruffier” corners of the internet either. Models lean heavily on Reddit, Quora and niche communities, because real people arguing about “what’s everyone using for X?” carry weight that polished copy doesn’t. Turn up, be useful, and let satisfied customers do the talking. Review sites such as G2, Capterra and Trustpilot feed AI answers too, and a profile with no recent reviews looks abandoned. A steady trickle of fresh feedback keeps it alive.
Traditional SEO was a race to the top of a single results page. Generative search rewards the brands that appear wherever the model goes looking for evidence, and a respectable listing in a well-read roundup is a very good place to start building that footprint.
