A British SEO/digital PR agency is selling an automated AI PR tool which generates entire PR campaigns, from the idea stage through to writing press releases and relentlessly pursuing journalists.
The £250-a-month tool, called Olivia Brown, is another source of the AI-written PR content that is seriously undermining the credibility of UK publishers (as revealed by Press Gazette in our Reality Wars coverage).
The tool appears to invert the traditional PR process, which normally starts with a story and then looks for publishers willing to cover it. Olivia Brown uses AI to invent press releases designed to chime with the existing output of target publications – even down to creating expert quotes.
Alastair McCapra, the CEO of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, says such tools “risk undermining the very foundations of the profession”.
Olivia Brown’s creator, UK digital PR Fery Kaszoni, founder of Search Intelligence, has suggested that the tool has become a £250,000-a-year business since launch in July, which, if true, suggests it is already in use by hundreds of agencies or PR and SEO people.
In those months, journalists at publications like The Sun have shown Press Gazette inboxes with dozens of low-quality press releases a day from PR outfits which link back to Search Intelligence.
Headlines on press releases include: “Roof expert: 4 home red flags costing £30k”, “Expert warns dog owners of the deadliest plants hiding on walks”, “The mortgage hack banks don’t want you to know”, “The UK’s most DANGEROUS areas for pedestrians REVEALED” and “Winter heating hack extends boiler life while slashing your energy costs”.
Stories sent out by this AI-powered PR writing and distribution tool have already landed coverage in outlets including the Daily Mail, Nottingham World, Lancs Live and GB News.
Kaszoni has also shown off screenshots with links on the Mirror, Express and Yahoo News, although the full URLs were not visible.
How automated PR tool works
The AI tool scans client websites for ideas, generating 100 suggested headlines automatically using AI (with PRs able to filter, for example, to exclude stories around the royal family).
It then automatically writes a press release (its maker suggests that their clients can manually add expert quotes, but screenshots seen by Press Gazette suggest that ‘Olivia Brown’ is happy to generate quotes by itself).
The tool then automatically scans for journalists who have previously covered such content and sends it out to lists of hundreds of journalists at once.
A feature called “Relentless Follow-up” automatically pesters journalists who have not replied to the emails.
Built-in software helps to “camouflage” the output so it is not picked up by AI detectors.
Maker Kaszoni, founder of Search Intelligence, says: “You just need to add a great subject line, and keep on re-sending.”
In posts on Linkedin, Kaszoni, who owns multiple businesses headquartered in the UK, has said: “Simply add a client website, the system will scrape the site to learn the niche, and you will have 100 really good expert commentary ideas that you can run for your clients.
“The system has been trained with thousands of ideas that landed links in the past.
“We already secured hundreds of links in mainstream press for our clients by using this ideation system, and now you can tap into it too via Olivia Brown AI.
“Olivia is the world’s first real digital PR AI agent, helping PR teams, SEO teams, and marketing teams semi-automate their digital PR campaigns, reducing execution time by up to 95%.”
Kaszoni declines to answer Press Gazette’s questions
Press Gazette contacted Kaszoni via one of his companies, Search Intelligence, receiving a response from a member of staff, but has had no response to questions around whether Olivia Brown has been misused or whether the tool is behind a recent surge in low quality press releases received by journalists.
Having put these questions to Kaszoni and Search Intelligence, Press Gazette has received no reply to any of the questions, or to a request via Kaszoni’s frequently updated LinkedIn page.
Despite repeatedly asking for a response over two weeks, Kaszoni has not answered.
CIPR CEO McCapra said: “Instant automation of PR responses may seem efficient, but it risks undermining the very foundations of the profession. Communication is about judgement, relevance, and trust, the qualities that make media relations meaningful. When responsibility is surrendered to automated tools, accountability slips away, and with it the public’s confidence in the entire profession.
“Coverage delivered without purpose or strategy is not influence, it is noise, and corrodes the industry’s credibility with press, the public, and clients alike. Technology should be used to sharpen human insight and creativity, but it cannot replace them. In PR, trust is the currency of the profession, and once spent carelessly, it is very rarely earned back.”
Alex Cassidy, managing director of content marketing agency NeoMam Studios, said Olivia Brown could mark a “turning point” for both journalism and PR.
Automated PR is working because publishers are not acting as gatekeepers
Cassidy said: “The problem is that what Olivia Brown does as a tool, this industrialised form of PR where AI comes up with the ideas, AI writes the press release, and then essentially creates the list of journalists by scraping the web and sends it to them, is bearing fruit for Fery Kaszoni. He is gaining coverage in the biggest press you can in the UK.
“These publications might have traditionally gatekept or scrutinised or had a certain difficulty to achieve coverage in – that just doesn’t exist anymore because of the environment created by them needing to get articles up quickly, needing to compete with each other.
“I think publishers such as Reach would like to create the perception that the gates are being overrun by an AI horde of press releases. That may well be true, but it doesn’t require sophisticated methods to stop, it just requires the minimum level of scrutiny that would be expected.”
Cassidy said that previously, clients would have featured case studies and press releases on their own sites, then agencies would have sent them out – or the website would have shown how research worked.
Cassidy said: “It’s a tool marketed for in-house SEO teams to do the link building which is traditionally something which is specialised by agencies from a digital PR perspective. I think it’s probably being used more by in-house teams. I mean, Fery says that it’s helping PR teams, SEO teams and marketing teams, selling and automating their digital PR campaigns. So I think that’s his main target audience.
“The agencies that are actual agencies with employees, that are utilising tools like Olivia Brown, or trying to create a sort of industry scale PR approach, are poisoning the very well that they drink from.
“They require this ecosystem to work. In order for their company to exist, for their clients to benefit, they need there to be a press that can trust PRs, that can be robust in the stories they’re producing. It’s very short sighted, because all of this is just going to result in further distrust.”
Cassidy said it is harder for such stories to “land” in US media.
“I think that it requires both sides to increase their media literacy. I think a lot of the people using this are ignorant to the effects they actually could have.
Cassidy said: “The topics are always low-stakes topics. The problem is that this is always a slippery slope. It will eventually get to the point where there is a completely faked serious issue, like serious topics that can significantly impact a person’s health, financial stability, safety, or overall wellbeing.
“Olivia Brown is a turning point, because beyond the ethical issues, the effectiveness of the tool is questionable at best. The list it built for press releases is just a public scrape. Sometimes it pulled people who aren’t even journalists, they just had the same names as them, and their emails were public. So a researcher in New Zealand, they thought that he was a journalist for the Press Association so he’s probably receiving dozens of press releases a day,
Kaszoni has said that he thinks Olivia Brown could become a hugely valuable company, comparing it to legal AI tool Harvey, valued at $5bn.
Cassidy said: “Fery just thinks that this is pioneering, that he’s the tip of the spear of what will eventually be a completely accepted approach to this type of work, and so he’s trying to essentially sell shovels in that gold rush. From my perspective, this looks less like a pioneering strategy and more like a form of ‘fool’s gold’ for an industry that is increasingly prioritising quantity over quality.”
Press Gazette has a dossier of more than 100 examples of fictional PR content published by mainstream IPSO-regulated UK publishers and has asked the press standards body whether it plans to take any action on this issue.
Kaszoni responds
Update: Shortly after publication, Fery Kaszoni responded with this comment on Linkedin:
“Thank you very much for the opinions shared 🙂
“As one of the leading digital PR firms in the world who have earned tens of thousands of features every year in top tier press for the past five years (even before AI was a thing), we also have the same concerns as you do:
“Ensure that journalists receive the best stories that help them and their audiences.
“We always encourage every user to consider themselves as journalists colleagues, who help them with their job.
“We always emphasise throughout the platform that people should use real expert quotes, they should always have genuine experts, and always manually revise, edit and fact check every story before they press the send button.
“The tool is not much different from most other PR tools that have implemented AI press release writing features (hint: all of them have).
“It is also not much different from people using ChatGPT for ideation sessions.
“We simply streamlined the processes and made them work in a single workflow, to free up the time and allow the PR executive to go out and collect genuine quotes from their clients, have time to conduct in-depth data analysis (Olivia DOES NOT conduct data analysis, you have to feed it with your own data).
“Olivia is just a tool aimed at freeing up the time of PRs to do more creative and on-the-field work, such as collecting expert quotes from genuine experts, and collecting datasets that then Olivia can collate.
“The tool is not perfect, of course, but we are committed to improving it and to ensure that ultimately journalists get the best value out of it.
“The bottom line, this is not a replacement, but an enhancer of skills, and we are just as committed as everyone in the PR industry to ensure that authenticity prevails.”
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