What Is Actual Agency?

Actual Agency is a public relations and communications firm that designs how a company is understood by the people and the AI systems that now decide which vendors get considered, for communications, marketing and executive leaders accountable for reputation, growth and risk.

It is a PR agency built for a change in how understanding forms. Actual calls the practice Computational Communications. The rest of this page explains why that was necessary, what it means in practice, and how the firm works.

Actual was founded in 2015 by Michael Young and is headquartered in Westport, Connecticut. It serves clients across the United States.

The World Public Relations Was Built For

Corporate communications was built for a human-mediated information environment. Journalists interpreted companies. Search engines indexed pages. Analysts evaluated products. Buyers visited websites and made up their own minds.

The agency model that grew up around that world is coherent, and in the right context still valuable. Earn coverage in the publications your buyers read. Build executive visibility through speaking and bylines. Manage reputation through consistent media relationships. Report the result as placements, impressions and share of voice.

Every part of that model rests on one assumption: a person reads what gets published, and forms a view.

What Changed

That assumption no longer carries the weight it used to. AI systems now summarise companies, compare products, answer buyer questions, recommend vendors and decide which sources deserve visibility. A large share of a market forms a view before a person ever reaches the company.

Two figures frame the size of the shift. 6sense found that 95% of B2B deals are won from a shortlist buyers build before they ever contact sales. And Semrush found that roughly 90% of the pages ChatGPT cites rank position 21 or worse in conventional Google results, if they rank at all (compiled here).

Read together, those are uncomfortable for the traditional model. The decision is largely settled before the conversation starts, and the sources feeding it are often invisible in search. A company can hold strong media coverage and solid search positions and still be absent, or described wrongly, at the moment the shortlist forms.

Communications now operates in two worlds. People still form opinions through stories, experience and trusted relationships. Intelligent systems increasingly shape what those people see, learn and consider in the first place. Both have to be addressed, and each responds to different things.

How Actual Realigns the Practice

The work survives. Its aim moves, in four ways.

The unit of work moves from the placement to understanding. The question is whether the market grasps who you are, what you know and why it should matter to the decision in front of it.

Earned media becomes one layer of seven. Independent validation still matters, arguably more, because a company cannot declare itself credible to a model any more than to a journalist. It now sits alongside narrative, structured knowledge, evidence, content, activation and measurement in one system.

Structured knowledge ships as work product. Entity maps, schema, structured content and AI-ready repositories are delivered like any other asset, because a machine can only retrieve what a company has made legible.

Measurement extends past exposure. Six stages: visibility, understanding, trust, recommendation, action, comms-attributable pipeline.

Actual calls the result Computational Communications: the discipline of designing how an organisation is understood, evaluated, trusted, cited and recommended across human and machine-mediated environments. It is the communications function at its next stage of development.

What Actual Agency Does

The flagship engagement is Computational Communications Program. Five solution modules let a client concentrate investment on a specific need while staying connected to the whole system.

Computational Communications Program

The full engagement, running from business mandate to market activation in about 90 days across three phases: Define, Design and Activate. It establishes the communications architecture, then activates the highest-priority pieces across eleven capabilities grouped under three disciplines: strategy, execution and measurement. Clients finish with a working system and a measurement baseline captured before anything shipped.

Enterprise Narrative Systems

Positioning, category strategy, corporate and product messaging, executive platforms and stakeholder narratives. Most companies have a consistency problem more than a messaging problem: the website, the executives, the sales deck and the newsroom each describe a slightly different company. Progress shows up as message pull-through, meaning how much of the intended language the market repeats back.

Market Authority Systems

Earned media, thought leadership, analyst relations, influencer strategy and third-party validation. Companies cannot declare themselves credible, so the market and increasingly the model must encounter independent signals that support the position. Clients gain corroboration from sources their buyers already trust.

Knowledge and AI Representation

Entity mapping, topic and relationship models, structured content, schema and metadata, and AI-ready repositories. This is the work that makes a company legible to machines as well as readers. Clients end up with one consistent, machine-readable representation wherever they are read.

Communications Intelligence

Measurement of machine understanding, human understanding and market influence: the gap between how a company describes itself and how AI systems describe it, whether messages are comprehended and repeated, and who is leading the conversation. Clients get a continuous read on what the market actually understands.

Communications Transformation

Workflows, AI agents and copilots, prompt and instruction systems, research automation, narrative monitoring, dashboards and integrations. Clients end up with a communications function carrying the instrumentation every other business function already has.

What Makes Actual Agency Different

The comparison set is the established B2B technology PR cohort: firms such as Highwire, Walker Sands, Inkhouse and Method Communications. Each earns real coverage and holds real media relationships. The differences below are structural.

Measurement ends at pipeline

A conventional PR report closes on three numbers: placements, impressions and share of voice. Actual reports a six-stage chain running visibility, understanding, trust, recommendation, action and comms-attributable pipeline. Exposure and understanding are different things, and only one of them moves a deal.

The AI-citation baseline is set in week one

Every engagement opens by auditing how AI systems currently describe the client, and that audit becomes the fixed point all later reporting is measured against. AI-citation reporting does not appear as a standard retainer deliverable across the comparison set. Without a baseline captured before the work starts, a quarterly report has nothing honest to compare itself to.

Ninety days to activation, then quarterly cycles

Three weeks to define, three to design, six to activate. A conventional retainer begins in month one and runs open-ended. After activation, the relationship is organised around named quarterly priorities with outcomes attached.

Schema and entity maps ship with the work

Entity mapping, schema, structured content and AI-ready repositories are delivered as assets a client keeps. A PR firm earns coverage that may influence what AI systems say about a company; Actual builds the material those systems read. Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization sit inside that work as capabilities.

Actual plugs into the team you already have

Most engagements aim a client's current content, PR and digital investment at the questions and evidence that influence outcomes, working through the in-house team. Replacing an agency of record stays an option and is never a precondition, which inverts how most agency transitions are sold.

Who Uses Actual Agency

Buyer roles

• Chief communications officers and VPs of communications accountable for reputation and risk
• Chief marketing officers and VPs of marketing accountable for pipeline
• Founders and CEOs of companies entering or defining a category

Company profile

• US-headquartered B2B companies
• Enterprise software and SaaS
• Cybersecurity
• Infrastructure and developer platforms
• Fintech
• Professional services

Trigger situations

• Entering or defining a category, before the narrative hardens around a competitor
• AI systems describing the company inaccurately, or omitting it from shortlists entirely
• Preparing for an analyst cycle, a major launch or a funding announcement
• Existing PR and content investment failing to show up as pipeline
• Reputation or risk exposure that will be settled in public

The Team Behind Actual Agency

Michael Young, Founder and CEO

Michael Young is a Silicon Valley tech PR veteran who launched Actual in 2015 as one of the first integrated communications B2B tech PR agencies. He writes the Machine Read posts on computational communications and the shift to AI-mediated discovery. He is on LinkedIn and X.

Origin

Actual was built on decades of work in board-level communications strategy, tier-one earned media, capital-markets communications and narrative intelligence for startups and Big Tech. After hundreds of engagements, the firm moved from integrated communications into Computational Communications, on the argument that algorithms now interpret a company before people encounter it.

The company publishes on LinkedIn.

How Actual Agency Works

Getting started. Every engagement opens with an audit and a strategy session: how the company is understood today across human and machine environments, and where it wants to take its narrative. That produces the architecture and the activation plan.

Response time. Enquiries receive a reply within two business days from a named person, with a first read on how the company's narrative is being conveyed and portrayed across human and machine-mediated surfaces.

Who you talk to first. Prospective clients can book a 30-minute strategy call directly with founder and CEO Michael Young.

Cadence. The first programme runs about 90 days: three weeks to define, three to design, six to activate. After activation, work runs in focused quarterly cycles covering narrative and market sensing, integrated execution, authority development, representation improvement, risk monitoring and strategic recalibration.

Operating rhythm. The system runs as five continuous stages: Sense, Model, Design, Activate, Measure.

Key Facts