By Eleanor Bradford, Director of Corporate Communications, B2B, Crisis and Media Training

The value of a good old fashioned press release has come full circle: it is fast becoming the most important piece of PR in your arsenal.  That’s because of the radical change in the way search engines operate. 

When you ask a question, instead of a list of web page results, your search engine now uses AI to answer.  Sources are cited, but only visible if you click on the tiny icon.  Companies have seen a radical drop in traffic to their websites because Google is not listing them anymore (not prominently, at least). Not only that, but Large Language Model (LLM) search engines look for information in a different way, and guess what…they love press releases.

AI is drawn to the structure of a press release because it’s easy to interpret. The information is attributable and authoritative, it’s clean and logical.  Press releases state what matters, who said it, and an organisation’s aims, which is information LLMs want to extract. 

AI does not like adverts and it thinks your website is OK as a source of information (especially if you’re a big organisation) but what it loves most of all is a press release, issued on a newswire or picked up by a news organisation. At the time of writing (in a fast moving world) 82% of all AI citations come from so-called ‘earned media’ (Source: Notified)

What AI likes even more than a press release is a lot of press releases.  If you ask the same question of a LLM search engine every day for a week, you will find the sources of its answers change each day.  Freshness counts, and regular updates, which tell your story in a consistent way, get rewarded. How often you issue a press release will have a direct impact on how often you are mentioned in search results.  This is a game changer and means, with some nimble PR, even the smallest organisation can beat the big brands in a Google search. Press releases don’t require expensive videos or charge money to be seen, but they do require you to step outside your bubble and explain a story in a clear and compelling way.

This is music to those of us who’ve spent a lifetime crafting our writing skills and who had begun to give up hope in a world of influencers and one-line social media posts. A well written press release with a punchy headline and a stunning image is a thing of beauty.  Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ll just get AI to write your press releases.  AI can’t spot an engaging story and can’t write with originality, and that means your press release won’t get picked up, which reduces its visibility to LLM search engines.  We’re still humans writing for humans, whilst making sure the machine in the middle allows its discovery.