Happy Tuesday!
Today's newsletter comes thanks to a reader request: Does the job title of our outreach figurehead affect how often we land a placement?
Short answer: yes. And not by a little!
Today, we are going to nerd out on six months of pitch data, and I think you're going to like what we found.
First, the big picture
We pulled 11,010 pitches and 298 earned placements from October 2025 through April 2026. That's a 2.7% pitch-to-placement conversion rate.
Woof. If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you know that number used to be a lot higher. Back in 2018, my personal conversion rate was somewhere around 20 to 25%. In 2021, the Jolly team's all-time high sat around 9%. Today? 2.7%.
The broad explanation is AI slop. Journalists are drowning in AI-generated pitches. Open rates are down across the board. Everyone's inbox is noisier than it was three years ago.
But here's the silver lining: When you stop looking at the average and start drilling into the nuances, there are pockets of dramatically higher performance hiding in the data. That's what we're here for today.
Who converts best (it's not who you'd guess)
When we have both a CEO and a CTO available as outreach figureheads on a client account, we convert at 9.6%. That's 3.5x the average.
Having two senior voices to choose from means we can tailor each pitch to the opportunity. Tech publication? Lead with the CTO. Business outlet? Lead with the CEO. That flexibility matters.
SEO professionals convert at 9.1%. This flies in the face of everything I've always thought - but, does make sense. People who understand linkbuilding and media outreach bring a kind of built-in alignment to the campaign. They get why this matters, and that shows up in the results.
COOs convert at 5.4%. Twice the average. Operations people make great outreach figureheads, because their pitches contain hard-earned, grounded-in-real-life insights.
Accounts with both a CEO and a Doctor on the team? 4.5%. Founder + Doctor combos come in at 4.1%. Like the CEO + CTO combo, having a credentialed expert alongside a business leader gives us strong pitch angles, especially for health and wellness publications.
The bottom of the list is surprising
Solo "CEO" title? 1.4%. That's half the average. Founders come in at 2.3%.
Here's an interesting comparison: Accounts where the figurehead holds a combined CEO/Founder title convert at 3.5%. That's more than double the solo CEO, and 1.5x the solo Founder conversion rate.
Our read: people who carry both "CEO" and "Founder" tend to be at earlier-stage companies where the brand story is more personal, more specific, more pitchable.
The source matters more than the title
This is the secret hiding in plain sight. Our MentionMatch pitches convert at 21.8%. That's 17x higher than Featured (1.3%), which is our highest-volume source.
And when you cross the two variables, some combos are absurd. COO + MentionMatch? 60% conversion. When we have both a CEO and CTO available, and use MentionMatch? 44.7%.
The takeaway isn't "only use MentionMatch." Volume matters, and Featured gives us massive scale. But knowing when to go low-quantity, high-quality with the right role + source match is a lever most people ignore.
What this means for your linkbuilding strategy
If you're running earned backlink campaigns, the figurehead attached to your outreach matters more than most people realize. Having access to multiple senior voices on an account gives your team flexibility to match the pitch to the publication. And having a figurehead with a specific, personal brand story (think founder/CEO of a company they built) consistently outperforms a generic executive title.
The data also says source selection is a bigger lever than most agencies treat it as. Matching the right figurehead to the right channel isn't just a nice optimization. It's the difference between 1.3% and 60%.
Past speaking + what's next
I've presented on this subject at brightonSEO, the Shenzhen SEO Conference, and DCBKK in Bangkok, as well as numerous podcasts, and published a course. These topics keep coming up because they're only getting more important as AI reshapes how people discover brands.
If you were at any of those events, I'd love to hear what resonated. Or, even if you weren't, what stood out from this newsletter?
JollyClaw: execute on this data for yourself
We're building a tool called JollyClaw that will make a lot of this pitch data accessible to you in real time. Where to send your pitches to get higher conversion rates, which sources are working, which figurehead profiles are converting. It's not ready yet, but if you want early access, hit reply and let me know.
Until next week, Greg
P.S. If you're curious how we increased both delivery speed AND article volume by 100%, that's newsletter #71.