Do press releases help you get cited by AI?

Think back to how AI assistants choose sources: they search, read the candidates and summarize them. For questions like "what is [brand]?", "who makes [product]?" or "new tools for [task]", news pages are natural candidates: they are recent, factual in tone, and on domains with long histories.

A press release distributed through a newswire is republished on many news sites, including financial portals and local news networks. Each copy is a page that:

• names your brand, product and category in the headline and first paragraph;
• states facts you chose: what you do, for whom, prices, figures, a founder quote;
• is dated and labeled as a press release, so it reads as a primary source for your own announcement;
• is indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo, and reachable by AI search crawlers.

For a new brand, that can turn "no sources mention us" into dozens of them within a day or two.

• It is not journalism. Sites label it as a press release. AI assistants and readers can tell the difference, and it does not carry the weight of an independent review.
• It does not guarantee a citation or a recommendation. It adds candidate sources; the assistant still decides what to use for each question.
• It does not replace third-party opinion. "Best X" questions are answered from reviews and lists. A release announces; it does not rank you against competitors.
• Syndicated copies are often nofollow and many are on pages with little traffic. Value for backlinks is real but modest; see press release backlinks.

• Headline: brand name + what it is + the news. "Acme launches Ledger, AI bookkeeping for freelance designers" beats "Acme redefines the future of finance".
• First paragraph: answer who, what, for whom, when and where in two sentences. This is the passage most likely to be quoted.
• Facts with numbers: prices, user counts, funding amount, integrations. The GEO research found statistics and quotations increase how much engines use a source.
• One clear quote from a named founder that states the problem and the solution, not superlatives.
• A boilerplate with your one-line description, used identically everywhere. See press release boilerplate.
• Links to the product page and a page that explains the category.

Our guide to writing a press release covers structure; the templates give you a starting point.

Before the release, record what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude say for your brand prompts and a few category prompts. One to two weeks after, run the same prompts. Look for news pages among the citations, and for facts from your release appearing in answers. See how to check what AI says about your brand.