The honest numbers on press releases and AI citations
We sell press releases. Here is the published research on how well they work for AI visibility, including the parts that are bad for us.
Short version. If your only goal is being recommended by ChatGPT when someone asks for the best provider in your category, a press release is a weak instrument and you should spend the money elsewhere. If you have genuine news and you want it discoverable across search, AI surfaces, feeds and audio, a release is a reasonable tool and structure matters more than spend.
Reviewed and updated September 27, 2026. We date these pages because the rules in this field change and undated advice ages badly.
What the citation research shows
The largest published analysis examined more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini across seventeen industries. It classes press releases as their own category and finds they appear almost exclusively in industry-trend responses, at several times the rate they appear in best-of queries. Paid and advertorial content overall earned a very small fraction of citations. Editorial journalism and earned media dominate.
Read plainly: a release can surface for news-shaped questions, and is close to invisible in the evaluation answers where a recommendation would actually convert.
What the tracking research shows
A separate study followed 245 distributed brand stories for four weeks and measured how often the brand was present in related answers. Average presence ran around 20 percent on Google AI Overviews and 19 percent on AI Mode, down to around 13 percent on Perplexity and 9 percent on ChatGPT. Medians were roughly half the averages, with ChatGPT near 3 percent.
That is a different measurement: brand present in the answer, rather than brand's own page cited as a source. Both findings are true at once, and the gap between them is the whole argument about where PR budget belongs.
What moves the needle regardless
The consistent finding across the structural research is that a large share of citations come from the first portion of a page, and that pages written answer-first, with descriptive headings and extractable comparisons, are cited considerably more often than higher-authority pages without those properties. Specific numbers get quoted. Vague superlatives do not. Original data is cited at several times the rate of standard content.
All of that is a writing and formatting discipline, which is why we can deliver it at $99 rather than $699.
How this research shapes every release we publish
Facts in the opening lines
The who, what, when, where and the numbers go in the first paragraph. If a system only reads the top of the page, the top of the page has to contain the announcement.
Claims as discrete statements
Every release ships a claims file listing each fact as a standalone, attributed, dated sentence. Retrieval systems quote sentences, so we hand them sentences.
Entity disambiguation
Organization markup links your business to its real profiles, so a system can tell which company with your name is being discussed.
Numbers over adjectives
Our editorial pass replaces unverifiable superlatives with specific figures, or removes them. A claim nobody can check is a claim nobody will quote.
Cadence over one-offs
Citation sets get rebuilt on roughly a four-week cycle rather than held indefinitely, which is why the annual plan is built around monthly publishing.
Multiple readable formats
HTML, markdown, JSON and audio. Different systems reach for different formats, and producing all four costs us nothing extra.
What we will never tell you
- That we can get you cited by any specific AI system.
- That a release will appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode or any answer product.
- That any file or markup format guarantees inclusion anywhere.
- That the numbers above will hold. This field changes fast and we date everything for that reason.
What we will tell you is that the pipeline runs, the artifacts ship, the structure follows what the research supports, and the receipt shows you what happened. That is the part that is actually ours to promise.
Structure is the part you can control
We write for extraction because that is what the evidence supports. Nobody can sell you a citation.
Press releases and AI search
Do press releases help with AI visibility?
Marginally, and in one specific place. Analysis of more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini found press releases appear almost entirely in industry-trend answers rather than the evaluation answers that decide shortlists, with paid and advertorial content overall earning a very small share of citations. A separate study that tracked 245 distributed brand stories measured average brand presence around 20 percent on Google AI Overviews and around 9 percent on ChatGPT, with medians roughly half those averages.
Why do those two studies disagree?
They measure different events. One counts how often a press release URL is the source an engine cites. The other counts how often the brand appears in the answer at all, whether through its own site, a syndicated copy or an unlinked mention. A release can put your name into an answer without your page ever entering the citation set.
What actually gets content cited by AI engines?
Structure and specificity more than distribution spend. Research on LLM citations found a large share come from the first portion of a page, and pages built with answer-first paragraphs, descriptive headings and comparison tables are cited substantially more often. Original data and proprietary research are cited at several times the rate of standard content.
Does an llms.txt file help?
It is an emerging convention rather than an established standard, and no major engine has committed to it. We publish one because it costs nothing and gives any system that does read it a clean map of what is here. We would not sell it as a visibility strategy.
Should I buy press releases to get into ChatGPT?
Not on its own. If that is your only goal, the evidence points toward earned editorial coverage and genuinely original published data doing considerably more work. A release is a reasonable part of a wider effort, particularly for news-shaped announcements, and it is a poor substitute for being worth writing about.