How Gaia AI got into Forbes: a teardown.

Gaia AI got into Forbes because we gave a Forbes contributor a category, not a press release. The protocol was framed as the Stripe for AI agents, the story was carried by one named co-founder willing to defend a real opinion, and the pitch met a reporter already covering agentic AI on her own beat. The Forbes feature published on 23 December 2024 and became the anchor the rest of the campaign stacked on top of.

I run fractional PR for Web3 and AI founders, and Gaia is the campaign founders ask me to walk through most often, usually phrased as "how do we get into Forbes." So here is the honest teardown: what actually moved, in what order, and which parts are repeatable versus which parts were luck and timing. I am reconstructing the mechanics of a real placement, so where an exact internal figure is not mine to publish I say so rather than inventing one. The public artifacts, the outlet, the reporter, the date, the framing, are all verifiable and linked.

If you want the wider campaign, including the full coverage stack and pricing, that lives in the Gaia AI case study. This piece zooms in on the one placement everyone wants: Forbes.

The frame that unlocked the beat

Before any pitch went out, the campaign had one job: get Gaia out of the wrong box. Every generic AI announcement in late 2024 was being filed as either "another AI model" or "another crypto-AI mashup." Neither box gets a Forbes contributor to spend a byline on you.

The frame we shipped was Gaia is the Stripe for AI agents. That single analogy did the pitching before the email did. It told a tech-literate reporter, in eight words, that Gaia is infrastructure and rails for the agentic web, not a model competing with OpenAI. Forbes contributors covering AI do not want to explain your category for you. Give them a frame that is already legible to their readers and you have removed the biggest reason a pitch gets ignored.

The reporter match

The placement was written by Cloris Chen, a Forbes contributor covering agentic and onchain AI. This is the part most founders skip. They chase "Forbes" as a logo and blast a generic press list. Forbes is not one inbox. It is a masthead of staff writers and contributors, each with a narrow, public beat.

The match here was deliberate. Chen was already writing explainer-led pieces about the future of the agentic web. Gaia's Stripe-for-AI-agents frame slotted directly into a story she was already inclined to tell. The pitch did not ask her to change her beat. It gave her a fresh, concrete example for the exact arc she was covering. That is the difference between a cold pitch and a warm fit.

The generic version of this reporter-mapping method, for founders without a warm list, is written up in how to get a crypto or AI project into Forbes in 2026, and the self-serve path is Forbes Councils. This teardown is the worked example behind both.

The timeline

Here is the sequence, compressed. Dates that are public are dated; internal windows are given as ranges.

The lesson in the ordering: the Forbes piece did not close the campaign, it opened it. Once a Forbes contributor used the Stripe-for-AI-agents framing in print, I was no longer selling the category to the next editor. I was pointing at Forbes and extending it. A tier-1 anchor makes every subsequent pitch shorter.

How the pitch was built

I am not going to paste a fake email and call it "the pitch that landed Forbes," because that is exactly the kind of invented artifact this site does not publish. What I can give you is the structure the real pitch followed, which is the part that transfers.

• Subject line = the category, not the company. The reporter should see the story, not your logo. The frame carried the subject.
• First two sentences: the frame and why now. Stripe for AI agents, and the specific reason the agentic-web story was live that quarter.
• The named source, offered plainly. Shashank, co-founder and COO, available for an interview, with a defensible opinion on why centralized models and gated data are the roadblock to decentralized AI. Reporters want a person who will go on the record with a position, not a comms contact.
• One concrete proof point. A real number that stood up (the node network at scale), not a wall of metrics.
• Under 180 words. A Forbes contributor decides in the preview pane. Length is a tax on that decision.

Embargo etiquette

People ask whether this was an embargoed exclusive. The honest answer on the specific Forbes contributor timing is that the exact embargo terms are the founder's to disclose, not mine. But the etiquette that governs a placement like this is worth stating clearly, because getting it wrong burns the relationship that produced the placement.

• Offer an exclusive, or a clean embargo, never a blast dressed up as one. If a reporter is giving you a real feature, they get the story first or they get a genuine hold time, not a press release you also sent to forty inboxes.
• Confirm the embargo in writing. "Embargoed until [date, time, timezone]" in the email body. A verbal embargo is not an embargo.
• Do not break your own embargo. No founder tweet, no Telegram teaser, no partner cross-post before the reporter publishes. One leak and the next pitch to that outlet is dead.
• Give a realistic hold window. Seven to ten days is standard for a considered feature. A 24-hour embargo on a category story reads as pressure.

The full version of this, with the reporter-side view of why embargoes get respected or ignored, is in the CoinDesk pitch guide, which carries a worked embargo email template.

What the placement actually produced

This is where most "we got into Forbes" stories stop, right at the screenshot. The screenshot is not the result. The result is what the anchor let you do next.

Concretely, the Forbes feature produced three things that a vanity mention never does:

• A validated frame the whole stack inherited. Decrypt, Benzinga and the CryptoDaily conference interview all opened from the Stripe-for-AI-agents framing Forbes had already put in print. The category was no longer in question.
• A durable, citable source. In 2026, a Forbes feature is one of the most-cited domains inside Google AI Overviews, which now appear on roughly half of US searches (Heroic Rankings, 2026). A named, dated Forbes piece placed in 2024 keeps compounding as AI search grounds on it.
• A reusable proof asset. The placement anchors the founder's bio, the deck, the next pitch, and the site. A tier-1 byline is leverage you spend for years.

On hard traffic and conversion numbers from the Forbes referral specifically: those are the client's to share, and I will not publish figures I cannot stand behind. What I will say is that for a category story, the referral click is rarely the point. The point is the citation, the frame, and the doors the anchor opens. Google's own guidance is blunt that chasing inauthentic mentions is a dead end and that first-hand, non-commodity expertise is what earns visibility (Google Search Central, 2026). A real Forbes feature, earned by a real founder with a real opinion, is the authentic version of exactly that.

What made this repeatable, and what did not

The transferable parts: the category frame, the single named spokesperson, the reporter-beat match, the calendar anchor, and the discipline to stack downstream outlets off the tier-1 piece rather than firing everything at once. Run those five and you have a real shot.

The parts that were specific to Gaia: a genuine technical thesis that survived a reporter's scrutiny, a founder who was actually good on the record, and a live agentic-AI news cycle that a Forbes contributor was already covering. You cannot manufacture a real thesis or a fake founder voice. If those are not there, the honest move is to build the story before chasing the logo, which is the argument in the tier-1 PR trap.

The honest disclaimer

Not every AI startup can run this. Three things have to be real first: a technical thesis that holds up under a reporter's questions, a named founder willing to defend a specific opinion, and a calendar moment in the next 90 days a journalist can anchor to. If two of the three are missing, a Forbes push will either fail or, worse, land and expose a story that was not ready. Fix the story first. If all three are real, the Gaia playbook is a fair map of how to run it.

Have an AI story that deserves a category, not a press release? See the full Gaia AI case study, the AI startup PR program, or the wider AI startup PR playbook.