Every tech PR firm shows you the same three things: a logo wall, two case studies, and a coverage collage. None of them predict how your programme will perform, because none of them are denominators. The number that predicts it is reply rate in your specific category — what share of pitches get any response. Across Salient's outreach between December 2025 and August 2026, counting every response, including auto-replies, it ran 8.2% to 11.4% depending on company type. This page explains how to get that number out of any firm you're considering.
On this page
- Why case studies don't tell you anything
- The five questions that actually separate tech PR firms
- What happens when a tech reporter replies?
- What predicts quality
- How Salient engages
- How long until a tech PR programme works?
- How has AI search changed what tech PR is worth?
- Should you hire a specialist or a generalist?
- Podcasts: the channel most tech PR firms underweight
- The short version
Why case studies don't tell you anything
A case study is a story about the pitch that worked. It carries no information about the 199 that didn't, because nobody publishes those.
Response rate is different: it has a denominator. It tells you how often the firm's work gets a response at all, which is the actual constraint in earned media. Here is ours, broken out by the kind of company:
| Company shape | Contacted | Open rate | Response rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Established name, category past its news cycle | 269 | 54.5% | 11.4% |
| Pre-revenue, launching into a category the press doesn't cover yet | 351 | 54.3% | 10.6% |
| Late stage, recognised founder, crowded category | 700 | 48.3% | 8.5% |
| Market leader in a vertical with specialist trade press | 494 | 47.9% | 8.2% |
Same team. Same nine months. Same method. A spread of about three percentage points, which is far less than anyone selling PR implies.
"The same method got us 11.4% for an established incumbent and 8.2% for a market leader approaching $100M ARR. Nothing changed about how we wrote the pitch. What changed was whether reporters cover that beat right now. Ask an agency what their reply rate looks like in your category, not overall."
Justin Mauldin, Founder, Salient PR
That spread is the most useful thing in this article. It means a firm's headline performance tells you almost nothing about how they will do for you — and it means a firm quoting one blended number across all clients is obscuring the only figure that matters.
The five questions that actually separate tech PR firms
1. "Show me the last 20 pitches you sent in my category and what came back."
This is the whole evaluation compressed into one request. A firm that measures can produce it in an afternoon. A firm that does not will offer case studies instead.
"Ask for the last 20 pitches they sent in your category and what came back. Not case studies, not a logo wall. The actual sends. If they can't produce that, they aren't measuring, and you'll find out in month four."
Justin Mauldin, Founder, Salient PR
2. "What's your reply rate in my sector?" If the answer is a company-wide average, they are averaging across a spread like the table above.
3. "How do you verify a reporter still covers this beat?" There should be a stated rule with a time window.
"Before anything goes out I check whether the reporter has written about the category in the last 90 days. If they haven't, they come off the list. That one rule kills more pitches than any editing pass."
Lindsey Ranger, Account Lead, Salient PR
4. "Who writes the pitches, and can I meet them?" In most firms the person who wins the account is not the person who writes the emails.
5. "How often do you rebuild the media list?" Reporters move constantly. A stale list is the most common invisible cause of a failing programme.
"We keep 1,750 reporters in the database and the maintenance never stops. People move outlets, change beats, leave the industry. A list that hasn't been touched in six months is mostly wrong."
Kristin Kaplan, Operations, Salient PR
How far the funnel actually gets
Of every 100 pitches delivered, 51 register as opened.
That 51% understates it, and the reason is structural. A tracking pixel only records an open if the recipient's email client loads remote images, and a large share never do. Thunderbird, HEY and Mimestream block by default, and Proton Mail routes images through a proxy that loads them without revealing the reader, and journalists are a plausibly heavy user base for privacy-first clients.
There is a circularity worth knowing about: email client market share is itself measured by tracking pixels, so clients that block the pixel are invisible to the statistics people use to size the problem. Litmus notes this in its own methodology.
So we work on roughly 7 in 10 rather than 51%. That is our estimate and not a measurement — every blocked pixel is a read nobody counted, which makes the recorded rate a floor. We would rather say where the number comes from than dress it up as measured.
We also see it directly, which is why we are comfortable saying it: replies arrive from people the outreach tool records as never having opened the email. That is only possible if the pixel never fired.
Between December 2025 and August 2026 we also recorded a 1.0% bounce rate and zero unsubscribes.
"Our recorded open rate is 51%. The real number is closer to 7 in 10, because a big share of reporters read mail in clients that block tracking pixels. We know it happens because we get replies from people our system says never opened the email. Treat any open rate you're quoted as a floor, including ours."
Justin Mauldin, Founder, Salient PR
Follow-ups do less than you think
| Sequence step | Delivered | Open rate | Response rate | Replies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First email | 2,063 | 47.6% | 6.0% | 124 |
| Follow-up 1 | 1,576 | 37.4% | 3.7% | 59 |
| Follow-up 2 | 69 | 40.6% | 4.3% | 3 |
Two-thirds of every reply came from the first email. The follow-up is opened ten percentage points less often and replied to at little over half the rate. Most cold-email advice treats the sequence as where results come from; on a journalist list, the first email does the work.
"One follow-up, and it has to add something. If the second email is just 'bumping this up,' you've told them the first one wasn't worth reading either."
Lindsey Ranger, Account Lead, Salient PR
What happens when a tech reporter replies?
Across 175 replies Woodpecker graded:
| Grade | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Interested — yes | 110 | 63% |
| Maybe | 31 | 18% |
| Not interested | 34 | 19% |
Reporters said yes about three times for every no. The scarce resource is attention, not goodwill.
"When a reporter does reply, 63% of the time it's a yes. The hard part was never convincing them. It's getting read at all."
Justin Mauldin, Founder, Salient PR
What predicts quality
The reliable predictor of quality is not size. It is whether the person who understood your business in the pitch meeting is the person writing the emails in month three.
How Salient engages
We ask for a six-month commitment to start, because the first two months are relationship building and judging the work before then tells you nothing. After that there is a 30-day exit, no questions asked, either side. If it is not working we would both rather know.
How long until a tech PR programme works?
Six to ten weeks to the first meaningful placement, assuming you have a story and can supply a spokesperson quickly. The first four to six weeks are list construction, message development and calibration — and calibration is real work, because the first batch of pitches is partly an experiment to find out which angle lands.
The most common cause of a slow start is not the agency:
"The slowest part of most programmes isn't the agency. It's how long it takes to get a quote approved internally. Companies that can turn a quote in a day get into stories that companies who take a week never see."
Lindsey Ranger, Account Lead, Salient PR
How has AI search changed what tech PR is worth?
Two shifts, and they point in different directions.
Referral traffic from coverage is worth less. Google's AI Overviews now appear above the results on a large share of technology queries. Ahrefs' measurement puts the click-through penalty on the top-ranking organic result at around 58% when an overview is present. In our own tracking of 180 keywords, click-through was about 10% lower on queries carrying an AI Overview, measured at different average positions four to ten.
Being cited is worth more. Those same systems have to attribute. A peer-reviewed study of generative-engine optimisation (KDD 2024) found that adding direct quotations, statistics and cited sources measurably improved how often a page was surfaced in generative answers — by up to 40% on the authors' benchmark, with the size of the effect varying by subject area.
The practical consequence is that earned media is now partly a training-data strategy. When a buyer asks an AI which vendors matter in your category, the answer is assembled from what credible publications have said about you. A firm that gets you quoted in the trades is building that; a firm that gets you a syndicated press release is not.
"AI writes a fine first draft and a terrible pitch. The part that matters is knowing that this specific reporter wrote about this specific thing six weeks ago. No model knows that about your beat unless someone fed it."
Justin Mauldin, Founder, Salient PR
Should you hire a specialist or a generalist?
Specialist, in almost every case, for one reason visible in the table at the top of this page: category appetite is the dominant variable. A firm with live relationships on your beat starts at a reply rate a generalist reaches in month six, if ever.
The exception is a company with genuine crossover into mainstream business press — a funding round large enough to be a business story, a founder with a public profile, a consumer-facing product. There, breadth is worth something.
Podcasts: the channel most tech PR firms underweight
We track podcast outreach separately from press. Across 143 podcast responses, 16 became confirmed bookings and 44 more were actively scheduling — 60 of 143, or 42%, moving toward a booking, against only 24 flat declines.
"Of 143 podcast responses we tracked, 60 moved toward a booking and only 24 were flat declines. Podcasts are the most under-used channel in B2B because everyone assumes they're harder to land than press. They're easier."
Kayla Haines, Media Relations, Salient PR
For technical products with an articulate founder, this is frequently the highest-return channel in the programme, and it is rarely on a standard tech PR firm's scope of work.
The short version
- Case studies have no denominator. Reply rate does. Ask for it.
- Counting every response, auto-replies included, ours ran 8.2% to 11.4% by company type.
- Ask for your category's number, and to see 20 real sends.
- When reporters reply, 63% is a yes. Attention is the constraint.
- Specialists beat generalists because beat relationships are the dominant variable.
- Add podcasts. 42% of our podcast responses moved toward a booking.
Salient PR runs technology PR programmes for companies in semiconductors, developer tools, security and B2B software. All outreach figures come from our own database covering December 2025 to August 2026 and are updated quarterly.
Sources
- Salient PR outreach database, Dec 2025 – Aug 2026
- Salient PR / Google Search Console + Ahrefs, 180 keyword AI Overview analysis, Aug 2026
- Ahrefs, AI Overviews reduce clicks, 2026
- Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD
If you want this run by people who do it every day — Salient PR is a technology PR agency working with technology companies. See how we work or start a conversation.
We also publish what a yes actually turns into — nine pitches traced from the reporter's reply to the published piece, with the dates.
Related reading
About Salient PR
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How to evaluate a tech PR firm using reply-rate data instead of case studies. Based on our outreach between December 2025 and August 2026.
