Email outreach
Email outreach is writing to editors, writers and site owners to suggest your content, product or correction for something they publish.
Email outreach is writing to people who run websites, such as editors, journalists, bloggers and the people behind directories and review sites, to suggest something for them to publish. That might be a story, a source for an article, an addition to a list, or a correction to something they got wrong.
It's how most digital PR and link building gets done. The goal is to get your brand onto pages your customers read, in the words of someone they trust more than you.
What a good outreach email looks like
Short, personal and useful to the person getting it. Say who you are, why you're writing to them in particular, and what you're offering, in a few sentences. Point to the exact page and what you'd suggest. Make it easy to say yes.
The emails that fail are the mass-sent templates that start with flattery, ask for a link, and offer nothing. Editors get dozens a day.
For example, Fernhill Coffee notices that a food magazine's guide to coffee subscriptions lists five brands and says Fernhill doesn't ship outside London. It does. Fernhill's marketer writes to the guide's author with the correct shipping details, a link to the delivery page, and an offer to send a bag for testing. The author fixes the line and adds Fernhill to the next update.
Outreach for AI search
The pages AI platforms read when they answer are mostly other people's: list articles, reviews, directories, forum threads. Outreach is how you get onto those pages, and how you get wrong facts on them fixed. When a page that answers keep citing names three competitors and not you, that page is a better target for outreach than any random high-traffic site.
Stay on the right side of the rules. Paying for links breaks Google's spam policies, and paid placements should be clearly marked.
In AnswerOrbit
The Gaps tab in Sources lists the sites whose answers name a competitor and not you, each with a suggested way in, such as reaching out to the site. In Recommendations, tasks that ask you to contact someone come with an evidence pack: the claim, your fact, the page behind it and how often answers repeat it. Click Copy evidence pack to paste it into your email. See Sources and Recommendations.