As CEO and founder of Nomada Digital, Danny Sullivan oversees a B2B SEO and cross-platform visibility agency that bridges continents.
His entry into the field was hardly textbook. A maths degree meant to keep career doors open accidentally won him his first digital marketing interview at a travel firm because the hiring manager assumed calculus implied troubleshooting talent.
This problem-solving streak built the foundation for Nomada, which Sullivan founded in York in 2020. What started as a lean SEO consultancy grew into an integrated powerhouse handling search, AI optimisation, conversion rate optimisation, paid media and PR, kept intentionally agile by design.
Transatlantic campaigns for UK businesses now are a core specialty. Sullivan treats the space through a search lens first, pointing out that visibility and brand reputation stopped being separate conversations years ago.
We chatted with Danny about how AI is changing public relations, the line between meaningful coverage and empty chatter and his judging criteria for PR54 this year.
What led you to found Nomada Digital?
Years in digital agencies gave me a clear view of what I’d do differently.
Too much work pushed down to junior teams while clients paid senior rates, and channels run in silos that cost more than they returned – not because anyone was doing a bad job, but because the structure made it almost inevitable.
So I built the agency I’d have wanted to work with as a client – lean, senior-led, no permanent office and no overheads passed down for the sake of it. The bet was that a small specialist team could compete with agencies several times its size if it was structured properly, and six years on, we’re doing it with clients on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nomada positions itself as a cross-platform visibility agency rather than a traditional PR or SEO agency. What does that mean in practice, and why do you think that approach matters today?
We are an SEO agency, this is the foundation everything else is built on. The ‘traditional’ bit is where it stops fitting, because SEO alone no longer describes where buyers look. So it’s SEO and cross-platform visibility rather than one or the other.
What that means in practice is that we don’t work in siloed channels, we sequence them. A single B2B buying decision now runs across 10 or more touchpoints and at least four different platforms – including Google, ChatGPT, Bing, LinkedIn and press. If you’re only visible in one of them, you’re invisible to most of the journey, and no amount of budget in that one channel fixes it.
We rely on our five-tier Cross-Platform Visibility Framework, where each layer compounds the one before it. SEO and AEO build the foundation, content clusters and CRO multiply it and Bing and LinkedIn introduce efficient paid support.. Brand PR then acts as the authority layer that reduces the cost of everything beneath it, leaving Google Ads to scale last only when the foundation is ready to hold them.
It matters now because brand authority and search visibility are the same thing. They used to be separate conversations with separate budgets. They’re still different disciplines with different skills, but they drive the same outcome, so splitting them makes less and less sense.
How has the rise of AI search, answer engines and changing buyer behaviour altered the role that PR plays in helping brands get discovered online?
I’ll answer that as a search person rather than a PR one, because from where I sit the two stopped being separate jobs a while ago.
Buyers used to search, click, and decide. Increasingly, they are handed an answer before they visit anyone’s website. Search engines index pages and rank them, whereas LLMs do not rank anything; they cite sources they trust enough to repeat. Muck Rack’s ‘What is AI Reading?’ report in May 2026 found that around 84% of the links AI models cite come from earned media, against under 14% from owned. This means the trust PR builds in the real world is what these systems end up reflecting.
Coverage lifts branded search, builds the authority that non-brand organic depends on, and feeds the citations that decide whether you appear in an AI answer at all. None of that comes from search work alone. PR used to be judged on whether people saw the coverage, whereas now it also decides whether a machine has any reason to mention you.
You see this most clearly with UK brands moving into the US, which is a big part of what we do. A company can have years of strong UK coverage and still be close to invisible to a US buyer asking ChatGPT for a shortlist. That’s because the answers tend to draw on the publications and sources that market already trusts, and search authority doesn’t carry across cleanly either.
Visibility has to be rebuilt market by market. PR in the titles US buyers actually read is usually where that starts, because it’s the quickest way to give Google and the LLMs a reason to take a new entrant seriously.
As someone who works closely with brands on visibility and reputation, what do you think separates truly effective PR from activity that generates coverage but little real impact?
The PR industry has often struggled to quantify its impact in the terms the C-suite wants to hear, but that’s never meant the work wasn’t effective, just that the dots were often harder to draw between a piece of coverage and a commercial outcome.
What’s changed is that some of those dots are now visible. If coverage is influencing what AI tools say about a brand, that’s trackable in mentions and citations, alongside more traditional metrics like branded search and referral traffic. Regarding AI search, PR teams can now evidence something they’ve always known was happening, just through a new lens.
I’d add a caveat though that AI visibility is one measure, not the measure. Coverage still does the things it always has – building trust and credibility, shaping how a brand is understood and shortening the conversation when someone finally speaks to sales. Judging PR solely on whether an LLM picked it up would be a mistake, it’s just a new way of seeing and measuring the value, not a replacement for the old ones.
This year, you’ll be judging entries from PR agencies and communications professionals. What excites you most about taking on that role?
We brought brand PR in-house earlier this year, and it’s changed how I think about how brands get found online. That’s a big part of what appeals about judging – you get a look at how a whole industry is thinking at once, which is a rare thing from the outside.
I’m also coming at it from the search side, so I’m interested in the work that shows how the pieces connect: coverage that’s clearly doing a job in the wider visibility picture rather than sitting on its own. I’m just as interested in being shown things I hadn’t considered.
When you’re reviewing entries, what are the key qualities or achievements you’ll be looking for?
Evidence of what the business needed, what the agency did and what changed as a result – connected to the business objectives. Creativity matters too, but creativity in service of a commercial goal is what I’ll notice.
I’ll also be drawn to entries that show where the work sat in the wider picture. Campaigns don’t happen in isolation, and the ones that can point to what the coverage fed will stand out.
What advice would you give entrants who want to stand out in a competitive field and make a strong impression?
Be sure to answer the question that was asked, and don’t assume a judge knows your business or the campaign inside out. A lot of entries describe activity rather than results, and leave the judge to join the dots – the ones that do that work for you will be easier to champion.
Furthermore, be specific and be honest about the constraints you were working within. A sharp result on a modest budget is more impressive than a big campaign with vague outcomes. And if something didn’t go to plan, say so and mention what’s been changed because that reads as a more credible than a one where everything went perfectly.
The communications landscape is changing rapidly, particularly with AI becoming part of how people search for information. How would you like to see PR agencies adapting to that shift?
Mostly by claiming ground that’s already theirs. The thing AI systems reward is credible third-party validation, which is exactly what PR has always produced, meaning PR agencies are well placed to own that conversation.
Practically, it starts with reporting. If a report stops at reach and sentiment, it’s describing the work rather than its effect. Branded search, citations across the LLMs, referral traffic and links earned through coverage: the tracking exists, and it is the sort of evidence a board responds to.
Looking ahead, what skills, approaches or trends do you think will define the most successful PR agencies in the coming years?
The ones that see search and PR as one strategy and not two that occasionally overlap. Buyers don’t distinguish between finding a brand through a news story, a search result or an AI answer, and the agencies that stop drawing those lines internally will be the ones producing work that compounds.
In practice that means people who can sit with the search and paid teams and talk about a shared outcome instead of defending their channel. It doesn’t take technical depth, just enough common ground to have the conversation.
Lastly, a willingness to keep testing the tools. AI won’t make the strategic calls, but it will change how fast you can work, and this field is moving quickly enough that you can fall behind without doing anything wrong.
