Which Job Title Wins on Quality? (DR + Traffic Edition)
Happy Tuesday!
Last month, we looked at which job titles convert best.
Spoiler: COOs and SEO professionals punched way above their weight, and the source you pitch from matters more than the title you pitch with. What you didn't know:
A lot of you wrote in with the same follow-up question: "Okay, but converting is not the whole story. What about the QUALITY of what you actually land?"
(If you want the answer faster than you can read this newsletter, AgentJolly will surface this for you in real time.)
So this week, I went back to the same six months of placement data, kept the lens on persona role, and focused on the Organic Traffic of both the pitches sent, and the placements we actually landed.
Prefer to watch instead of read? Here's the video version:
Reach: 1.45 Billion Organic Traffic
Updated conversion data: 11,238 journalist outreach pitches sent. 393 earned placements landed.
Total monthly readers reached across those placements: 1.45 billion.
Total monthly organic traffic on publisher sites.
That number deserves a second to land.
1.45 billion monthly readers, in 6 months of placements, off pitches our team sent via journalist outreach platforms like HARO.
That's the scale of earned media when you run it as a system.
But all those numbers above are averages. The interesting story is how the 1.45B splits out by job title.
Founders + CEOs are the reach engine (with a few surprises)
Quick breakdown of the 1.45B monthly readers we reached in the last six months:
- Founder: 598M monthly readers. About 41% of our entire reach total.
- CEO: 384M (26%).
Then a tier of "small placement count, surprisingly big traffic":
- COO: 286M off just 25 placements. Average 11.4M monthly readers per placement.
- SEO: 284M off just 22 placements. Average 12.9M per placement.
- CTO: 143M off 24 placements. Average 5.9M per placement.
- Doctor: 79M off only 10 placements. Average 7.9M.
- The rest (Director, Executive Director, CMO) combined: 23M.
Two surprises in this chart that I did not see coming:
- The first surprise: Founder beats CEO in every dimension. More placements (157 vs. 111) AND more reach (598M vs. 384M). Founders are the clear #1, and it's not particularly close.
- The second surprise: COOs and SEOs are quietly elite. They each landed only 22-25 placements, but those placements averaged ~12M monthly readers apiece. That's bigger than what CEOs (3.5M avg) or Founders (3.8M avg) typically pull. When a COO or SEO lands, they land surprisingly big.
What does that mean if you're picking a figurehead? Founder is the safest reach play: highest volume, highest total reach, dependable. CEO is the runner-up. But if you have a COO or a credentialed SEO on the team and you've never pitched them, you're leaving an order of magnitude on the table.
The conversion data almost made a fool of me
Honest moment here. In #73, I shared one of the most surprising-to-me findings in our entire dataset: a solo CEO converts at 1.4%, the worst single-role conversion rate in the report.
When I first ran those numbers I almost talked myself into deprioritizing CEOs. Why keep using a role that converts so poorly?
The above chart is the reason I shouldn't have, and the reason my CEO bias was right all along. Relative to the average, CEOs don't convert well.
But, the placements they DO win extend a brand's reach by a mind-blowing scale:
- 384M monthly organic traffic off 111 placements is an order of magnitude more eyeballs than any low-conversion-rate concern would forecast.
- While atypical, the CEO wins are also asymmetric, doing heavy lifting.
Convert badly, swing big, hit the occasional grand slam. That's the CEO.
Once you see the reach data, the conversion data stops looking like a problem.
Consistency + occasional moonshot
Founders & CEOs get the most opportunities to contribute:
- Founders showed up on 157 of our 393 placements. CEOs on 111.
- Net of overlap, about 55% of every link we landed had a CEO or Founder.
- Net of overlap on the reach side: 827M of the 1.45B monthly organic traffic total.
Many placements come in around DR 70 / 50K traffic.
A few come in at Yahoo / Forbes scale, singlehandedly tipping the average.
This chart compares where we PITCHED (pink bars) vs. where we actually LANDED (red bars):
Source: Jolly SEO internal placement data, Oct 2025 - Apr 2026.
Two patterns to notice, plus one warning:
Technical credentials swing for the fences. CTOs, Doctors, and SEOs aim at the biggest publications we have access to: 13-16M average monthly traffic.
- SEOs land almost exactly what they aim for (12.9M of 13.2M).
- CTOs and Doctors land at roughly half the aim. Still enormous in absolute terms, but a meaningful step below the very top tier.
CEO and Founders run the moonshot play:
- Most CEO and Founder placements are mid-tier.
- The rare Yahoo / Forbes / Business Insider wins drag the landed average up.
Aim modest, occasionally hit a giant.
Directors, which pitched at 2.9M average, landed at just 600K.
Director-level contributors seem to clear editorial filters at mid-tier sites just fine, but the biggest publications hold out for senior contributors.
What this means for your campaign
If you take 3 things from this:
- Earned media at scale is a real thing. 1.45 billion monthly readers from six months of placements at a single agency. Don't let anyone tell you "PR is dead." It just looks different than it did in 2015.
- Founders are the workhorse. CEO is right behind. Together they drive 57% of total reach. If you only have time and budget for one figurehead, choose one of these.
- Doctor, SEO, CTO, and COO contributors are quietly elite on quality. SEOs and COOs land sites that average ~12M monthly readers per placement. So, if your category allows it, these credentials let you punch up.
AgentJolly is going to make this answerable in 30 seconds
In #73 I mentioned AgentJolly (at the time, I called it JollyClaw). It's the tool I built so anyone can run this kind of role × source × quality analysis on daily HARO opportunities & help with pitching the right opportunities.
Plus, AgentJolly can analyze your pitch & placement data, without waiting for an analyst.
If you want to be in the limited-access Lifetime Deal group, check out AgentJolly here ASAP.
- AgentJolly v2.0 will be a monthly subscription.
Until next week,
Greg
P.S. Question for you: Does this match what you are seeing in your own campaigns? Reply and tell me!