How do you measure the search impact of a PR campaign?

Measuring the search impact of a PR campaign means looking past coverage volume to whether the campaign changed what people find. Four measures do the work. Search-result movement: track the priority queries before, during, and after the campaign to see whether the placements actually reshaped the result page, which is a query-by-query exercise IMPACT™ is built for. AI citation rate: check whether the AI engines pulled the campaign’s content into their answers, because a placement that never enters the engines’ source pool has no AI effect, and AIQ shows whether it did. Branded search lift: a campaign that worked usually shows up as more people searching the name afterward, a clean downstream signal. And source-quality contribution: whether the campaign strengthened the authoritative sources the engines read and the identity signals that feed both search and AI over the longer term. Together these answer the question that justifies the budget: not how much coverage ran, but whether the coverage moved the assets stakeholders actually encounter.