Why the number is smaller than agencies imply
Coverage counts get inflated by syndication. One story picked up by a regional network can appear on forty sites, all with the same text and often no link. That is one placement reported as forty.
Ask for linking root domains, deduplicated, with the URLs. The honest number is always lower and always more useful.
What good looks like
Ten links from publications your buyers actually read beats fifty from sites they have never heard of. Relevance to your category now matters more than raw domain authority, both for Google and for whether AI assistants pick the source up.
One national placement often does more for brand search than the rest of the campaign combined.
The metric that matters more
Track whether the coverage moved anything: rankings on your commercial pages, branded search volume, and whether your brand started appearing in AI answers for category questions. Links are the mechanism. The movement they cause is the outcome.