Agency Reverse-Engineering
What I learned from the best PR agency I never worked for
⌚ 11 min read · 2,482 words
placements studied
Category: Digital PR
Author: Salva Jovells
Before I started Presslei, I spent months studying someone else’s work. His name is Fery Kaszoni, and he runs a UK agency called Search Intelligence that has earned over 50,000 media placements for clients. He’s the person who made me believe that reactive PR actually works at scale.
This post is about how I studied his methodology, reverse-engineered his public placement data, built a database of 5,272 earned media placements, and used everything I learned to start my own agency. I’m writing it because I think giving credit matters, and because the process itself might be useful to anyone trying to learn a craft by studying the best.
“I didn’t set out to reverse-engineer 5,272 placements. I set out to understand why one agency consistently earned coverage that nobody else could.”
— Salva Jovells, Presslei
In This Article
Finding Fery
I connected with Fery Kaszoni on LinkedIn in October 2022. At the time, I was managing SEO for Hockerty and Sumissura, two custom fashion brands based in Barcelona. My main link building strategy was buying links. Guest posts, niche edits, sponsored placements. The usual.
Fery’s content showed a completely different approach. He’d post about campaigns that landed placements in The Sun, Daily Mail, Yahoo, Express. Real publications with real audiences. No money changing hands. Just data-driven stories that journalists genuinely wanted to publish.
I started watching every YouTube video he posted. I read every LinkedIn post. I studied the case studies on the Search Intelligence website. I was trying to understand the patterns: what types of stories got picked up, which outlets published them, what data sources powered the campaigns.
At some point, I realized I wasn’t just casually following his content. I was obsessed.
The NotebookLM
I’ll be honest about how deep this went.
I built a Google NotebookLM and fed it every piece of Fery’s public content I could find. LinkedIn posts, YouTube transcripts, blog articles, conference talks. I wanted to be able to ask questions about his methodology and get answers drawn from everything he’d ever said publicly.
I called it “my Fery NotebookLM.” When I eventually told him about it, his response was: “Haha, please share it.”
That NotebookLM became my PR training ground. Before I ever pitched a journalist, I’d spent months asking questions about reactive PR to an AI trained on the output of someone who’d done it 50,000 times. It’s not the same as working alongside Fery, but it’s the closest thing I could build from public information.
Pro Tip
Track everything. The difference between PR professionals who grow and those who stagnate is measurement. Know your pitch-to-placement rate and which angles convert.
Scraping the Placements Database
Search Intelligence had a placements page on their website. Hundreds of pages listing every media placement they’d earned for clients. Article URLs, journalist names, outlet names, companies cited as data sources.
I started scraping it. Methodically. Page by page.
I was on page 42 when the placements page disappeared. Search Intelligence was going through changes, and the public placement listings were taken down.
But I already had 931 documented campaign cases. And from those 931 cases, I could trace the actual article URLs and verify the placements. That dataset grew to 5,272 verified media placements.
For each placement, I tagged:
- The outlet domain and its authority (DR)
- The journalist who wrote it
- The topic (finance, fashion, travel, health, etc.)
- The data source used (Google Trends, Instagram data, expert quotes, etc.)
- Any seasonal hook (Valentine’s Day, Oscars, summer, etc.)
- The campaign pattern (city ranking, celebrity spike, cost comparison, etc.)
That database became the foundation of everything Presslei does today.
Who Fery Kaszoni Actually Is
Credit where it’s due: Fery built something remarkable, and his origin story is part of why I respect him.
Before Search Intelligence, Fery was a classic car painter in Ipswich. He started doing SEO audits at night while painting cars during the day, around 2007 or 2008. His first blog post went viral with 20,000 readers in a day. His first SEO client, in 2014, was a flower card business that found him on Upwork and paid him GBP 30 a week.
He quit his day job in 2016, at age 38. His family savings hit zero in 2019. He talks about this openly. By 2022, Search Intelligence was doing GBP 2.3 million in revenue. By 2024, GBP 5.5 million. He went from a GBP 30/week Upwork client to a 90-person agency in under a decade.
That trajectory matters because it shows what happens when you find a model that works and execute it relentlessly.
How Search Intelligence Works
Search Intelligence is based in Witney, Oxfordshire. About 50 to 55 team members. Over 250 active monthly clients. They push out 200 press releases a month, send 80,000 to 100,000 emails a day, and have invested over GBP 1 million in proprietary PR technology.
Their starting price is GBP 5,500 per campaign. They guarantee a minimum of 8 links, and if they miss it, they run additional campaigns for free until they hit the number. No long-term contracts. That confidence comes from a 65 to 70% success rate on campaigns.
Their model has three pillars:
Reactive PR. When something trends, they build a data angle around it fast and pitch 400+ journalists simultaneously. The pitch IS the story. No pre-written content, no press release. Just a sharp angle, a stat, and a quote. The entire process from trend to pitch can take 30 minutes to half a day. Speed is everything.
Expert commentary. They position clients as thought leaders by getting them quoted in articles. This doesn’t require any data at all. Just a credible spokesperson with something useful to say on a trending topic.
Data campaigns. They combine government statistics, scraped data, and proprietary datasets into journalist-ready stories. Rankings, comparisons, cost analyses.
Some of their documented campaigns show what this looks like at scale:
- CarGuide (fuel shortage story): 50+ links in 3 hours. Placements in Bloomberg, Telegraph, The Sun.
- BedKingdom: 270 PR links earned. The company started outranking IKEA, Argos, and Wayfair for key terms.
- Bulk.com: 40 links in one month. Healthline, Daily Mail, HuffPost.
- Pink Tax study (school uniforms): Run by a team member with three weeks of experience and zero PR background. Landed in Telegraph and Mirror.
That last one is important. It shows the power of the system over individual talent. If a three-week hire can land Telegraph coverage, the methodology is doing the heavy lifting, not the person.
The team is split between digital PR staff (who build journalist relationships), data analysts (who source and sort data), and a creative team (who match stories to outlets). Fery runs overall strategy as CEO, with Maddie as Director of PR. He’s spoken at SERP Conf Vienna, Zagreb SEO Summit, and on podcasts including Ahrefs, Promote Or Die, and Let’s Talk Link Building. His LinkedIn has 90,000+ followers.
Key Takeaway
PR is a long game. Individual campaigns matter less than building a reputation as a reliable, valuable source that journalists trust.
The Conversation That Changed Everything
In June 2025, I messaged Fery directly on LinkedIn. I was honest about what I’d been doing:
“Hey Fery, long time learning from you, thanks for all the knowledge you share. I was scraping all the links from search-intelligence.co.uk/placements… I was creating a beautiful database and AI machine to start my own reactive PR agency soon. I have even created a NotebookLM that has all your LinkedIn and YouTube content, so I could ask ‘you’ things on the way.”
I asked him the question that had been keeping me up at night: was there still space for a small reactive PR agency doing things the way Search Intelligence had been doing them?
His answer: “There is still a good market for it absolutely, and high demand.”
That was the confirmation I needed. Not because Fery’s word is gospel, but because someone who’d been doing this for years and had 50,000 placements to show for it thought the market could support another player.
What I Learned From Studying 5,272 Placements
The dataset revealed patterns that I’ve written about in detail elsewhere, but here are the findings that shaped Presslei’s approach:
Ten repeatable campaign patterns account for roughly 90% of all successful placements. City/state rankings, celebrity trend spikes, fictional wardrobe valuations, expert tips with seasonal hooks, cost comparisons. These aren’t random. They’re formulas that journalists respond to because they match what editors want to publish.
Five topics dominate everything. Finance, Fashion, Travel, Health, and Property account for about 78% of all placements. If your brand can credibly connect to one of these, your odds increase dramatically.
The outlet landscape is concentrated. Reach PLC titles (Express, Mirror, Daily Star, Wales Online) account for roughly 734 placements in the dataset. One placement in a Reach outlet can syndicate across 5 to 8 domains automatically. That’s network effects that paid link building can never replicate.
Google data is the number one source. You don’t need expensive proprietary datasets. Search volume data and Google Trends are free and power more successful placements than any other data source.
February is the densest month. Valentine’s Day, Oscars, Grammys, and Super Bowl all converge. 162 seasonal placements tied to February hooks alone.
What I Did Differently
Studying someone else’s playbook doesn’t mean copying it. Here’s where Presslei diverges from Search Intelligence:
Price point. Search Intelligence starts at GBP 5,500. Our PR Power Pack is $3,000 for 8 to 14 placements. I wanted to make reactive PR accessible to smaller brands and startups that can’t commit to a GBP 5.5K minimum.
Transparency about failures. Our first client campaign (Chatronix) didn’t produce the placements we targeted. I published the full breakdown of what went wrong. I don’t think enough agencies do this. Fery’s public content is mostly about wins, which makes sense for marketing, but I wanted Presslei to be the agency that talks about both.
Technology-first approach. I’ve built a database of 27,000+ journalists with scoring, email enrichment, and automated pitch personalization. The data infrastructure around the outreach is where I think smaller agencies can compete with larger ones.
My own experience. I ran reactive PR campaigns internally at Hockerty and Sumissura before starting Presslei. The 2,296 earned media placements we achieved there (across Esquire, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Brides, and dozens more) gave me hands-on experience with what works. Studying Fery’s methodology gave me the broader pattern library. The combination of doing it myself and studying the best is what Presslei is built on.
Giving Credit
I want to be clear about something: Presslei exists because of what I learned from Fery Kaszoni’s public work.
I’m not the first person to study a successful practitioner and build something inspired by their approach. And I won’t be the last. But I think the PR industry would be better if more people were upfront about their influences instead of pretending they invented everything from scratch.
Fery didn’t teach me directly. He didn’t consult for me. He didn’t hand me a playbook. But everything he shared publicly, the YouTube videos, the LinkedIn posts, the case studies, the placement data, was enough for someone paying close attention to reverse-engineer the methodology and build on it.
To anyone else studying reactive PR and wondering if you can build a practice around it: you can. The market is there. The patterns are documented. The data sources are mostly free. What you need is the discipline to execute consistently and the honesty to admit when a campaign doesn’t work.
And if you’re reading this, Fery: gracias. The NotebookLM still gets used regularly.
Presslei is a reactive digital PR agency based in Zurich. We turn data-driven stories into earned media coverage. See how we work or get in touch.
About Salva Jovells: Founder of Presslei. 12+ years in ecommerce SEO across international markets. After managing SEO for Hockerty and Sumissura, I reverse-engineered 5,272 earned media placements and founded a reactive PR agency that builds authority through data-driven stories journalists actually want to publish. Based in Zurich.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How were the 5,272 placements collected and verified?
The dataset was built by pulling link reports from Ahrefs and Majestic, then manually tagging each placement for content type, vertical, publication tier, and link type. Duplicates and redirects were removed to keep the analysis focused.
What was the biggest surprise in the analysis?
Campaigns built around publicly available data regularly outperformed expensive primary research. What mattered far more was the novelty of the angle and the relevance to a journalist’s current beat, not the data source.
Do these patterns work for any industry?
The broad patterns — which formats earn the most links, which tiers are most receptive, how timing affects pickup — hold across verticals. Some sectors like finance have stricter gatekeeping, but the relative performance stays consistent.
About the Author
Salva Jovells
Founder of Presslei. 12+ years in ecommerce SEO across international markets. After a decade of link buying for Hockerty and Sumissura, I reverse-engineered 5,272 earned media placements and founded a reactive PR agency that builds authority through data-driven stories journalists actually want to publish. Based in Zurich.
