When Omri Hurwitz claimed that his firm outperforms its nearest PR competitor by 567% on a published global ranking, the natural response is skepticism. Hurwitz anticipated it and leaned in anyway.
The metric, drawn from a report that has been cited in Business Insider, blends volume of media coverage with a quality score assigned to each outlet. A Forbes article rates at approximately 9.2; a mid-tier tech publication might score around 5.2. Those scores are summed and divided by the total number of coverage placements, producing what Hurwitz describes as a weighted performance index.
No industry body certifies the ranking. Hurwitz acknowledges it freely. “It’s not accredited but widely accepted,” he told IsraelTech host Yoel Israel during their recent sit-down.
But the number, 567% ahead of second place, is not the story. The infrastructure behind it is.
The Vertical Integration Play
Hurwitz began buying media assets years before the strategy became fashionable. Peers laughed. Advisors pushed him toward influencer investment instead. He bought outlets anyway.
His reasoning was borrowed, consciously or not, from manufacturing: if you own the supply chain, you stop negotiating with it. “Let me just own this,” he recalled thinking.
The analogy he reaches for is Elon Musk’s approach to Tesla and SpaceX, producing components in-house rather than depending on external suppliers. “You don’t have to negotiate back and forth. You don’t have to wait. You don’t have to compete with other customers from that supplier.”
For a PR firm, owning media outlets means guaranteed placement capability, leverage over outlets you don’t own, and the ability to offer clients something no retainer-only shop can match: a pipeline you control.
AI Changed Everything, Then Confirmed the Strategy
Hurwitz admits he was rattled before artificial intelligence reshaped the media landscape. His firm was profitable, operating margins in the low-to-mid seventies percent, extraordinary for a services business, but he sensed PR was losing relevance.
“I was scared. I was like maybe like we need to do something more like another thing,” he told Israel.
Then the large language models arrived. Suddenly, every mention of a company across the internet, every article, every blog post, every citation, became raw training and retrieval material for AI systems. The asset portfolio Hurwitz had spent years assembling was no longer just a placement tool. It was a data footprint.
“I’m like yeah, it really fixed everything,” he said.
For founders and CMOs who dismissed traditional PR as a vanity exercise, that shift deserves a second look. The AI crawlers don’t distinguish between earned and owned media. They index what exists.
Why Competitors Can’t Catch Up
The structural moat Hurwitz has built is one that capital alone cannot close quickly. Acquiring media outlets is only the beginning. Those outlets must then be grown, monetized, and leveraged, a compounding process that takes years of profitable reinvestment.
Hurwitz estimates he is five to six years ahead of any firm attempting to replicate the model. And he shows no signs of slowing.
“I work harder than them,” he said flatly. “I’m five, six years ago. You’re hungry. I’m hungrier than them. I’m an aggressive freak. They have no chance.”
It is the kind of language that makes brand consultants wince. But Hurwitz has built a firm that out-executes the industry by more than half a millennium in percentage terms. On his track record, the brashness is at least earned.
