Why defence tech marketing is really a PR problem first
A defence robotics company posted a job recently for a Director of Communications, not a Director of Marketing. The role covers strategy for communications and media outreach across a genuinely fast-growing market. Nobody wrote 'marketing' anywhere in the brief.
That is not an isolated hiring choice. It reflects something I have watched play out directly whilst running Fortivus, and most agencies pitching into this sector still get it wrong.
Fortivus is approached directly by defence investment summits and capital allocator networks across Europe, including Nord Sloane's DSR programme, real evidence that consistent visibility eventually gets returned rather than chased.
I went to one of these events recently and met other genuine defence players and family investment funds there, the kind of relationship a search ranking alone would never have surfaced.
The function that does not exist as marketing
In a lot of defence tech companies, especially the smaller ones, there is no dedicated marketing function at all. What exists instead is closer to one person, or a very small team, running sales outreach, communications and whatever marketing happens to occur, all at once.
Nobody in that setup is tracking a conventional marketing funnel, because nobody has the time or the mandate to build one.
A UK agency working this exact sector, Defence Media, markets itself explicitly as covering marketing, communications, PR and content together, not as four separate services a client picks between.
That is not a positioning quirk.
It is an honest reflection of how the buying decision actually gets made inside a defence tech company, where PR and comms typically carry more real organisational weight than marketing does on its own.
A specialist comms firm working this same category, Bluetext, is positioned explicitly for defence technology startups and B2G campaigns specifically, precisely because the large corporate PR firms built for boardroom reputation and Pentagon relationships are the wrong fit for a company at this stage, further evidence that this sector has already sorted itself into PR-led categories most marketing agencies have not noticed yet.
Pitching 'get found when someone searches for you' into that reality asks the wrong question. It assumes an active search happening somewhere, and a marketing function resourced enough to build toward it. Neither assumption holds often enough in this sector.
The more useful question is different.
How does a company make sure its actual point of view is genuinely everywhere it needs to be, efficiently, without needing several extra hires to chase every channel individually?
AI citation is already being treated as a PR metric, just not by most agencies yet
Here is what makes this moment specific rather than a general observation about defence culture.
A research effort called Everything-PR now runs a dedicated 'Defense Citation Share Index' and a separate 'Defense & Aerospace AI Visibility Index', tracking how defence and aerospace companies actually show up inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google specifically.
That is a PR research franchise, not an SEO one, already treating AI citation as a reputation and visibility metric worth measuring on its own.
That is the real signal.
Being cited accurately by an AI system, the same way a journalist quoting a company accurately used to be the measure of good PR, is becoming exactly that, a comms metric, not a technical SEO one. Most agencies serving this sector have not caught up to that framing yet, even the ones who understand PR and journalist relationships well.
Founder-led storytelling and social-native communications are already the visible new playbook among the sector's most prominent challengers, the kind of direct, public positioning that used to be unusual in a category this guarded.
That shift is real.
What is missing alongside it is the technical structure that makes the same point of view actually spread efficiently into AI-generated answers too, not just a well-written press release or a founder's own social feed.
This is exactly the gap I wrote about from the SEO and AEO side, specifically why nobody in defence tech is ready for AI search or SEO; the two pieces are really describing the same underlying problem from opposite ends.
What efficient distribution actually requires
None of this replaces good PR. It extends it.
A strong press relationship, a well-placed interview, a credible founder voice, all of that still matters as much as it ever did. What changes is what happens to that material afterwards.
A company's actual position on a capability gap, a policy shift or a procurement question increasingly needs to exist in a form that is picked up correctly when an AI system is asked about it, not just when a journalist happens to be researching a specific story. That takes genuine technical structure, clear, well-sourced, specifically written content, not a press release reformatted as a blog post and left there.
It also increasingly means existing in more than one language. A press strategy built only in English reaches an American investor but misses a Danish procurement officer and a Finnish journalist entirely, even when the underlying story is exactly what they would want to read.
What this actually looks like in practice
A few concrete shifts follow from treating this as a distribution problem rather than a discovery problem.
Press material and website content should be built from the same underlying facts and sourcing, not written twice by two different people with two different standards for accuracy, exactly the discipline behind genuine corporate blogging and editorial work
Technical structure, clear headings, direct answers, proper sourcing should apply to comms content the same way it applies to a service page, since an AI system reading a press piece does not care that it came from the comms team rather than marketing, the same principle covered in what actually gets a page cited in AI Overviews
Multilingual presence matters at the distribution layer specifically, not just the website layer. A strong English-language press narrative that never gets built out in the languages a company's actual buyers use only reaches part of its real audience. The same language-first, hreflang-correct approach built for Fortivus applies just as directly to press material as it does to service pages
Measurement should track whether a company's actual position gets represented accurately when cited, not just whether a page ranks, since accuracy of representation is the thing PR has always actually cared about
None of these are separate projects bolted onto an existing PR effort. They are the same discipline behind genuine content marketing and AI search visibility work generally, just aimed specifically at extending PR's actual reach rather than competing with it for the same limited attention.
The reframe in practice
| The Discovery Pitch | The Distribution Pitch | |
|---|---|---|
| Opening question | How do we get you found | How do we make sure your position spreads everywhere it needs to |
| Assumes | An active marketing function already exists | PR and comms already do most of the real work |
| What it competes with | The limited attention a small team already does not have | Nothing, it extends work already underway |
| What gets measured | Rankings and search traffic | Accurate representation everywhere a company is cited |
| Who it has to convince | Someone to invest in search from scratch | Someone who already believes in getting the message out |
Where this leaves the SEO conversation
None of this means SEO and AEO stop mattering, they matter more, just not as the opening pitch.
Framed as a distribution and accuracy problem first, the technical work, structured content, multilingual architecture, genuine AI search visibility, becomes the thing that makes a company's existing PR effort actually reach further, rather than a separate discipline competing for the same limited attention a small comms team already does not have enough of.
That reframing also changes who the pitch actually needs to convince.
A pure SEO pitch has to convince someone that search discoverability is worth investing in from scratch, a genuine uphill conversation with a team that has never tracked a funnel and has no reason to start now.
A distribution pitch starts from something that team already believes, that getting the company's position out accurately and widely matters, and simply extends that belief into channels they have not yet built for. That is a much shorter distance to travel in a single conversation, and it is the honest reason this framing tends to land better in practice, not just in theory.
That is the honest version of this pitch.
Not 'let us get you found'. Closer to, let us make sure the position you are already building through PR actually spreads as far, and as accurately, as it deserves to.
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Usually not first. Comms and PR typically carry more real organisational weight in this sector, and a strong communications function extended properly into AI search visibility often matters more early on than a separate marketing hire.
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The starting question is different. A standard content pitch asks how to get found. This asks how a company's existing point of view, already being built through press and comms, spreads efficiently and accurately everywhere it needs to reach, including inside AI-generated answers.
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Yes, directly. A dedicated research effort, Everything-PR, runs indexes specifically tracking how defence and aerospace companies are cited across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google, treating it as a comms and reputation metric, not a technical SEO one.
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The underlying principle does, wherever PR and marketing are genuinely fused into one small function. However, it is particularly acute in defence tech given how guarded the sector traditionally is and how recently that has started to change.
If your defence tech company's actual position deserves to spread further than it currently does, get in touch to talk about what that looks like.
