Here's something most marketers don't know: 97% of stories distributed through Stacker earned at least one AI citation compared to 82% for owned content alone.
That gap is exactly why brands come to us.
As Stacker's Head of Accounts, I’ve spent more than 5 years watching this play out in real time. I've seen our sustainable storytelling model evolve from Stacker Studio — where we wrote stories for brands — to Stacker Connect, where we serve as the editorial vetter and amplifier for solid brand journalism. I know intimately what it looks like when a brand comes to us, regardless of what industry or company stage they’re starting from.
Curious?
Here's what those first 90 days of working with us actually look like.
Day 0: Getting Started
Meeting the Team & Getting Set Up
Before we kick off a partnership, we set the stage with a meet-and-greet to introduce the Stacker teams they’ll be working with. They will meet our:
- Editorial Team: Led by Frank Sennett, Executive Director of Stacker Connect, who guides brands on how to write stories that build trust and authority, without being promotional.
- Value Team: Tamara Sykes, Director of Strategy & Insights, who translates media insights into strategies that help brands succeed with media coverage and AI visibility.
- Accounts Team: Melanie Vernoia, VP of Accounts Brand Partnerships, me, Eliana Marzullo, Head of Accounts, and your account manager, who you can count on as your partner and point of contact for this partnership.
Next, with our kickoff call, clients can expect:
- Access to our Stacker Portal, the central hub for collaboration between clients and Stacker teams. The Portal provides customized story ideas through Sparks, the ability to submit stories, plan stories that align with seasonal trends, track progress, and view results.
- A walkthrough of the Portal, an overview of the submission process, and the resources at your disposal, like our value team or AI-powered content insights tool called Sparks, and exactly what to expect once you submit your first story.
- Examples of how we measure success and a look at the kinds of story analytics that are available.
Days 1-30: First Story & First Wins
Streamlined Processes & Publishing From Idea to Distribution
Once you learn of all that Stacker can do and have some story ideas, we set the ball in motion to get your team some wins on the board.
Learn what goes into a Stacker story, step-by-step, starting here
Submission Process: You submit a story for review in the Portal, which kicks off our two-step approval process. First, we gauge if your story is a:
- Judge Topic Fit — Is the story a good fit for the Stacker wire? If the story doesn’t feel like a fit, you’ll work with your AM and our content strategy team. From there, we’ll help you set up your stories for success across our publisher network.
- Editorial Vetting: If the story passes our fit test, Stacker will do a light editorial review of the draft to ensure quality, objectivity, and remove any promotional content. This is the most crucial part of what we do: maintaining our editorial standards for quality has helped us build relationships with thousands of publishers over the years.
- Optimize for Maximum Pick-Ups: While deciding which stories will be picked up is solely the publishers' responsibility, we give clients tailored suggestions for optimizing their stories based on publishing patterns that indicate which types of stories are working across the Stacker publisher network.
- We also publish our overall findings monthly on our blog — though as a partner, you get more real-time updates and bespoke ideas within the Portal.
Most partners get their first story published and distributed within the first 30 days of working together. Especially with how lightning-fast LLMs surface new content in AI search, once the story starts getting coverage across our network of high-authority publishers, clients start seeing ROI signals quickly.
Days 30-60: Measuring Early Impact
Seeing Where Your Story Lands
Next is the fun part — waiting to see how far your story traveled. After your first story gets published, you’ll begin to see the early indicators of reach, visibility, and discoverability.
Link Report for Media Coverage: Stacker provides clients with a link report within the first two weeks of distribution to measure where your stories are being picked up across the media ecosystem.
GEO Results for AI Visibility: You’ll also be able to see how your media coverage has translated to brand mentions and AI citations in AI search results through Stacker’s partnership with Scrunch.
With Stacker’s distribution engine and Scrunch’s AI search analytics of performance across multiple LLMs, clients have a single place to measure how their earned distribution drives reach — and brand authority. Clients can track 30 prompts tied to their brand and goals to see how their brand authority evolves over time in AI responses and as they distribute more stories to the publisher network.
This is only the baseline for what clients will receive while working with us — we’re constantly evolving our deliverables to respond to client feedback and keep pace with the speed of GEO.
Days 60-90: Building Momentum
Turning Insights into Strategy
All of these tools and pieces of information at your fingertips within the Portal, your content command center, allow marketing and content teams not just to submit content and track statuses, but to get really in the weeds with results and reports.
We know you want to create extremely specific content strategies and clearly communicate your content’s ROI — all while bringing trust and quality storytelling to new audiences. In months 2 and 3, Stacker gathers enough information for our clients to make deeper insights into how their content is performing and make data-driven strategies. Here’s how we do it.
Benchmarking: We compare performance to similar stories in your vertical and to overall top performers to provide a broader context for which stories are working and how yours stacks up. A little competition never hurts. Plus, there’s much to learn from what others are doing well.
Ongoing Results: We provide story-over-story performance tracking to see how your stories are evolving, distribution after distribution. We also help you identify which story topics have driven the most pickups.
Strategic Guidance: On top of all this data, you get steady support from the Stacker Value and Insights teams. Since these teams work across diverse publishers and brand teams, they know exactly what publishers want now and which strategies other brands are using successfully. This aspect of Stacker support is key, because our data shows a perception gap between what one might expect publishers to be interested in and what they actually want.
From the Account team, you’ll receive highlights on current trends you can jump on and timely opportunities coming up, to plan accordingly. Our Insights team is also at the ready with tailored recommendations for future content.
One Quarter with Stacker is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
Partnering with Stacker to build your brand’s authority and visibility is more than a kick-off call and random emails. Within 90 days of distributing your first story with Stacker, you will have had multiple touchpoints with us and seen results.
Our latest research found that distributing content through earned media channels delivers a median 239% lift in AI search visibility. That's not a year-end metric. That can start happening within your first 90 days.
We’re with you every step of the way in the continuous feedback loop, where we collaborate together to learn, refine, and improve outcomes.
Successful brand marketing has always been about a continuous drumbeat of visibility — but with AI, that old strategy becomes more necessary. With LLMs, brand visibility compounds with consistent media coverage over time.
➡️ These 90 days are just the beginning of what we can build together. Want to see what earned distribution can do for your brand? Let’s chat.
Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock / Canva
