Agency Reverse-Engineering
What I learned from the best PR agency I never worked for
⌚ 10 min read
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 reactive PR actually works at scale.
This is the story of how I reverse-engineered his methodology from public case studies, built a database of 5,272 verified media placements, and used what I learned to start my own agency. I’m not claiming those 5,272 placements as Presslei’s results — they’re Search Intelligence’s, studied and catalogued by me. I’m writing this because giving credit matters, and because the process is 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
Here’s why the patterns below still matter in 2026, not just for link building: editorial coverage is becoming the raw material AI search runs on.
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 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 landing in The Sun, Daily Mail, Yahoo, Express. Real publications, real audiences, no money changing hands. Just data-driven stories journalists genuinely wanted to publish.
I started watching every YouTube video he posted, reading every LinkedIn update, studying every case study on the Search Intelligence site. I was reverse-engineering the pattern: what stories got picked up, which outlets ran them, what data powered each one.
At some point I stopped calling it “following his content.” I was obsessed, and I’m fine admitting it.
The NotebookLM
I built a Google NotebookLM and fed it everything Fery had ever published publicly — LinkedIn posts, YouTube transcripts, blog articles, conference talks. The goal: ask questions about his methodology and get answers pulled from everything he’d said in public.
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 quizzing an AI trained on someone who’d done reactive PR 50,000 times. Not the same as working alongside him, but the closest thing you can build from public information alone.
Pro Tip
Track everything. The gap between PR people who improve and those who stall is measurement — know your pitch-to-placement rate and which angles convert.
Scraping the Placements Database
Search Intelligence used to run a placements page listing every media hit they’d earned for clients — article URLs, journalist names, outlets, the companies cited as data sources. Hundreds of pages of it.
I scraped it methodically, page by page. I was on page 42 when the page disappeared — Search Intelligence was restructuring and pulled the public listings down.
By then I already had 931 documented campaign cases. From those, I traced the actual article URLs and verified each placement individually. That verification process took the dataset from 931 campaigns to 5,272 confirmed media placements.
For each one, 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 tagged dataset 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 2007-2008. His first blog post went viral, 20,000 readers in a day. His first SEO client, in 2014, was a flower card business he found on Upwork, paying GBP 30 a week.
He quit his day job in 2016, at age 38. 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. A GBP 30/week Upwork client to a 90-person agency in under a decade.
That trajectory is the point: this is what happens when you find a working model and execute it relentlessly.
How Search Intelligence Works
Search Intelligence is based in Witney, Oxfordshire — about 50-55 team members, 250+ active monthly clients. They push out 200 press releases a month, send 80,000-100,000 emails a day, and have sunk over GBP 1 million into proprietary PR tech.
Starting price: GBP 5,500 per campaign. They guarantee a minimum of 8 links — miss it, and they run additional campaigns free until they hit the number. No long-term contracts, because a 65-70% success rate on campaigns backs that confidence up.
Their model rests on three pillars:
Reactive PR. When something trends, they build a data angle fast and pitch 400+ journalists at once. The pitch IS the story — no pre-written content, no press release, just a sharp angle, a stat, and a quote. Trend to pitch: 30 minutes to half a day. Speed is everything.
Expert commentary. Position clients as thought leaders by getting them quoted in articles. No data required, just a credible spokesperson with something useful to say on a trending topic.
Data campaigns. 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. Bloomberg, Telegraph, The Sun.
- BedKingdom: 270 PR links earned. 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 the important one. It shows the system beats individual talent. If a three-week hire can land Telegraph coverage, the methodology is doing the work, not the person.
The team splits into digital PR staff (journalist relationships), data analysts (sourcing and sorting data), and a creative team (matching 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 upfront 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 room for a small reactive PR agency doing things the way Search Intelligence did?
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 with 50,000 placements behind him thought the market could support another player.
What I Learned From Studying 5,272 Placements
I’ve written about these patterns in more detail elsewhere. 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 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 connects credibly to one of these, your odds go up 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 5-8 domains automatically — network effects 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 they 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’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 8-14 placements. I wanted 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 hit the placements we targeted. I published the full breakdown of what went wrong. Not 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 outreach is where smaller agencies can actually compete with bigger ones.
My own track record. I ran reactive PR campaigns internally at Hockerty and Sumissura before starting Presslei — 2,296 earned media placements there, across Esquire, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Brides, and dozens more. That gave me hands-on experience with what works. Studying Fery’s methodology gave me the broader pattern library. Doing it myself plus studying the best is what Presslei is built on.
Giving Credit
I want to be direct about this: 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 the PR industry would be better if more people admitted their influences instead of pretending they invented everything from scratch.
Fery didn’t teach me directly. He didn’t consult for me or hand me a playbook. But everything he shared publicly — the videos, the posts, the case studies, the placement data — was enough for someone paying close attention to reverse-engineer the methodology and build on it.
If you’re studying reactive PR and wondering whether 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 from a UK agency’s public case studies and used the patterns to found a reactive PR agency built on data-driven stories journalists actually want to publish. Based in Zurich.
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DO
- Study public case studies, talks, and posts from agencies ahead of you
- Tag what you find — outlet, topic, data source, pattern — so formulas become visible
- Verify claims against real published articles, not just marketing copy
- Credit the people and companies whose work shaped your approach
- Build your own track record alongside the research, not instead of it
DON’T
- Copy pitches, headlines, or client angles word for word
- Present someone else’s dataset or results as your own portfolio
- Assume one agency’s playbook works identically in every market or vertical
- Skip the verification step and take case studies at face value
- Stay quiet about your influences to look more original than you are
Frequently Asked Questions
How were the 5,272 placements collected and verified?
I started from 931 campaign case studies published on Search Intelligence’s own site, scraped before that page came down. From there I traced the actual article URLs in Ahrefs and Majestic to confirm each one, then tagged it by outlet, journalist, topic, data source, and campaign pattern. That verification took the count from 931 documented campaigns to 5,272 individually confirmed placements.
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 its 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
Salvador 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.
