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Like many journalists, my email inbox is perennially stuffed with messages from PR agencies quoting fun facts they hope will find their way into a news story. Shorts are Louisiana’s most-searched-for menswear item this summer, Princess Peach is New Mexico’s favorite female video game character, NBA 2K is the USA’s most popular sports video game, and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is the song Americans most want to learn to play, I recently read in my Gmail tab.

Each of those facts ostensibly comes from research conducted by a different company—the weepy-sounding fast fashion powerhouse boohooMAN, online casino directory Just Gamblers, Ohio gambling info site OH Gamblers, and music hub Ukulele World, respectively. But a close look reveals that all those data points and many, many others come via an ambitious PR operation called Journo Research.

“We are the rebels, the misfits, the trouble-makers,” reads Journo Research’s website. “And yes, we challenge the status Quo. The energy in our team is comparable to the one seen in The Wolf of Wall Street movie.” 

Journo Research is essentially the press-facing arm of Search Intelligence Ltd., a PR firm based in Oxfordshire, England, that specializes in delivering “high-tier backlinks in the world’s most reputable publications.” In other words, while other PR agencies might specialize in publicizing new product launches or cleaning up after a scandal, Search Intelligence focuses on getting the media to link to its clients’ websites. 

That’s because incoming links (backlinks) from reputable sites like news outlets boost a site’s ranking by search engines. The more reporters link to a business’s findings on, say, Americans’ musical aspirations, the more likely it is to come up high in search results when people are looking for ukulele tips. To some extent, the most important audience for these reports isn’t human journalists or their readers—it’s robots who spot those links as they scour the web for Google and Bing.

For journalists looking to meet deadlines and draw clicks, these types of releases do offer easy, typically lighthearted stories that don’t require too much work. And while news outlets have always offered readers some lighter fare, at a time when local news coverage and trust in the media are both in decline, it feels unlikely corporate-funded novelty studies are a solution.

“What I would hope is that reporters and editors kind of think of whether these are really empty calories or whether they’re adding substantive information,” said Derek Willis, a lecturer in data and computational journalism at the University of Maryland.

Reporters really do write about these studies and link to the Search Intelligence clients putting them out. That state-by-state analysis of female video game character popularity got picked up by local newspapers and TV news sites across the country, and the “Over the Rainbow” report made its way to multiple music news sites. Other reports, like a purported ranking of the British royal family by intelligence attributed to “elite summer schools” operator Oxford Royale, have drawn international attention. Search Intelligence client studies have shown up in other traffic-heavy outlets like the New York Post, Daily Mail, CNBC, and Marie Claire. 

Search Intelligence CEO Fery Kaszoni argues that’s because today’s journalists, tasked with writing multiple stories per day, often don’t have the time to run down data sources and do their own analyses. Meanwhile, his company’s industry-funded researchers can take the time to track down datasets, crunch numbers, and write code to find interesting results. His team uses databases like Muck Rack and Roxhill to pitch reporters by beat and location, and when news breaks, like the potential Elon Musk-Mark Zuckerberg cage match for which the company quickly reported a client’s predictions, employees quickly chime in on a Slack channel with potential angles.

Kaszoni’s social media channels feature backlink-themed parodies of “Santa Baby” (“Please Fery, give me all your link juice tonight”) and “Nothing Compares 2 U” (“I can drink my link juice in a fancy restaurant”), along with a double-entendre-laden post about trying to “penetrate” the field of adult content promotion (thankfully free of juice references). 

Speaking to me on Zoom while sipping on a bright magenta, vitamin-laden juice drink, Kaszoni said that his company, which starting in 2020 ramped up from just himself and one employee, now has a team of 55. He’s aiming to expand to 100 employees by year’s end and currently has about 200 clients, he said. The company even recently acquired a UK trademark for the phrase “link juice.”

Of course, it’s hard not to compare Search Intelligence’s rapid growth and employee perks with years of layoffs and stagnant pay in the news industry, and observe that while the company describes Journo Research as a “journalists’ research department,” the studies it produces are likely not the kind of data-driven stories editors would assign if they only had more staff. They’re not the types of stories young journalists dream of covering, and they’re probably not what most readers particularly seek out.

Kaszoni says his company is doing genuine research, pointing to examples where his team has pulled and merged multiple public datasets, like tracking down tax data from across Europe for a country-by-country comparison of take-home pay. Other campaigns, especially those focused on identifying fan favorites, often use search volume stats for certain queries from Google Keyword Planner, or other techniques that can raise questions about whether the numbers truly represent what the press release headlines claim.

It’s not clear, for instance, that more frequently Googled things are necessarily people’s favorites, or that the music searches analyzed by the ukulele study really demonstrate the songs people most want to learn. And ranking humans–British royals or otherwise–by intelligence using factors like college rankings and high school grades clearly has its limitations. 

“The article could just be, well, this was New York’s most Googled movie, or this was the best A-level scores for members of the royal family,” says Justin Joque, a visualization librarian at the University of Michigan. “That’s completely legitimate, but if they start trying to say, OK, this is a measure of intelligence or favorite movie, that seems really suspicious to me.”

Search Intelligence’s releases do always include notes on methodology, said Kaszoni, comparing the company’s output to lists known to have an element of subjectivity, like magazine rankings of the year’s best cars.

“It doesn’t mean that they are 100% the best cars, because maybe if you add some two or three other extra methodologies, then maybe some other cars are the best, right?” he said.

In general, state-by-state comparisons can have small sample sizes that mean individual state selections aren’t necessarily that meaningful, said information visualization researcher Michael Correll. And analyses of popular search terms can vary based on methodology, like whether multiple languages or even spelling errors are included in the tally, said Correll, who’s the author of a scientific paper titled “Towards a Theory of Bullshit Visualization.”

To Kaszoni, search engine stats are similar to political poll numbers: Methodologies may differ, and everyone knows polls won’t perfectly reflect how the population will vote, but media outlets will happily cover them and report who’s apparently in the lead, he said. And so far, his company’s success seems to back him up.

Ideally, reporters would probe these studies the way they sometimes do poll numbers, but they likely see the stakes as a bit lower, and as Kaszoni points out, these stories are likely scooped up by journalists short on time for detailed analysis. Whether Search Intelligence’s success will continue remains to be seen: Journalists seem increasingly inclined to openly comment on the sheer volume of unsolicited pitches, lists, and factoids they receive. That level of saturation, arguably, may make these individual novelty stories lose their luster.

Ever-shifting search engine algorithms and internet habits could also dilute the importance of current SEO techniques. Users posing questions to an AI interface like ChatGPT, or conducting targeted searches through forums like Reddit, video apps like YouTube and TikTok, and shopping megaportals like Amazon, often tend to bypass traditional search engine queries entirely.

Still, Kaszoni has discounted the idea that AI will eliminate the need for search engine optimization, posting a mock listing on LinkedIn for a course retraining SEO experts as plumbers understanding the “perfect internal linking schema of the boiler pipes and radiators.” In a more serious post on the platform, he predicted that AI tools will still rely heavily on link data to know what internet content to present to users and “content that is of highest quality, will stand out and get more attention.”

“The future is exciting 🔥,” he wrote. 

 

 

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Recent Subscribers’ Work:

• Zinara Rathnayake reported on how an economic crisis is shaping Sri Lanka’s tea industry. 
• Mimi Howard wrote an essay about Christian Petzold’s Afire for ArtReview. 
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• Grace Byron wrote an essay about conversion therapy for The Cut. 

 

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Comings and Goings

–Christopher Cann is now covering breaking news for USA Today.
–Hannah Jackson is now a fashion writer at Vogue.
–Matthew Schneier was named New York Magazine’s next restaurant critic.
–Manny Ramos is now an investigative reporter for Block Club Chicago.
–Sebastian Modak is now a travel editor at The Wall Street Journal.
–Jordan Greene is now a society and culture reporter at People.
–Dorothy McGivney is the new vice president of product at Wirecutter.
–Patrick Reis is now Vox’s senior politics editor. He was previously Rolling Stone’s senior politics editor.
–Lila Seidman is no longer a mental health reporter at the Los Angeles Times. 

 

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Everything Else:

—Kotaku EIC Patricia Hernandez revealed that she was fired by G/O Media in an interview with Shannon Liao. She expressed some qualms with G/O Media’s management.
—According to Axios, last week, the New York Times‘ union staffers met with The Washington Post union to share “best practices” for a walkout, indicating that The Washington Post’s union may stage a walkout in the near future.
—Last week, a top prosecutor concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to justify a warrant to raid The Marion County Record, a local newspaper in  Marion County, Kansas, and ordered law enforcement to return confiscated property to the newspaper. The initial raid was criticized by the Reporters Committee For Freedom Of The Press.
—The AP News Guild criticized the Associated Press’s management for denying their request to read the company’s deal with OpenAI and also not consulting with them prior to setting AI standards for newsrooms.
—Last Friday, a federal judge ruled in favor of the U.S. Copyright Office’s position that AI art can’t be copyrighted.
—Uhoh! The conservative girlies are fighting! Instead of belligerently belching made-for-TV chaos at Fox News’ GOP primary debate, Donald J. Trump will be appearing on Tucker Carlson’s web series for a pre-taped interview that will be posted (on X or Truth Social or Threads?) during that time slot on August 23. This surely won’t go well with Rupert Murdoch or the other Fox News executives beefing with both Trump and Carlson. Maybe Murdoch can vent about all of this drama to his new girlfriend, a molecular biologist (hooray for STEM majors!).