The Press Release Is Not Dead. It Is More Powerful Than Ever — If You Know How to Use It

In a world where artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of visibility, the humble press release has quietly become one of the most strategic tools in a communicator’s arsenal. Here’s why — and how to get it right.

by Johnson JohnRose, a communications strategist with over four decades of experience in journalism and PR

Spend enough time on both sides of the journalist’s desk — and I have, across four decades — and you develop an instinct for what lasts. Trends come and go. Platforms rise and fall. But the press release, that much-maligned, frequently declared dead, resolutely practical document, keeps finding new ways to matter. In 2026, it matters more than ever. Yet most businesses are still getting it badly wrong.

The reason is not nostalgia. It is artificial intelligence. When your potential customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview which supplier to trust, which product to consider, or which company leads their sector, the answer they receive is not plucked from thin air. It is drawn from sources those systems have been trained to consider credible. Press releases, distributed through reputable wires and picked up by established media, sit squarely in that category. Research now suggests that up to 90 per cent of the citations driving brand visibility in large language models come from earned media — exactly what a well-crafted, widely distributed press release generates. This is not a niche digital marketing consideration. It is the new front line of brand reputation.

The Shift That Changes Everything

Search behaviour has changed more dramatically in the past two years than in the previous decade. Google’s AI Overviews now trigger on a significant proportion of all searches, and when they do, users click through to source websites less than half as often as before. They read the summary. They move on. If your brand is not in the summary, it simply does not exist for that user at that moment. The same dynamic applies across ChatGPT — now used by some 800 million people weekly — and Perplexity, Gemini, and the tools that will follow them.

What feeds those summaries? Authoritative, structured, clearly written content from trusted sources. Which is precisely what a properly constructed press release, written to journalistic standards and distributed at scale, provides. The discipline of generative engine optimisation — GEO — is now a genuine specialism, but its foundations rest on principles any experienced PR professional will recognise: credibility, clarity, and consistent earned media presence.

What a Good Press Release Actually Requires

After years of reviewing thousands of releases — and before that, binning hundreds as a journalist — the difference between one that works and one that does not comes down to a small number of fundamentals. First: it must be genuinely newsworthy. A product launch, a significant appointment, a data-driven finding, a bold public position. If the news angle does not hold up, no amount of polish will compensate. Journalists and AI systems alike are skilled at detecting the difference between content that informs and content that merely promotes.

Structure matters equally. The inverted pyramid — leading with the most important information and building downwards through supporting detail — is not an old-fashioned convention. It is the format that serves both hurried journalists and AI parsing systems best. A strong headline, a crisp opening paragraph, substantive supporting content, a meaningful quote, and a clean boilerplate. Each element has a job to do. If any one is weak, the whole release suffers.

Tone is where ambition most frequently overreaches. The moment a release tips from informative into promotional, its credibility evaporates. Journalists stop reading. Editors dismiss it. And critically, AI systems — which are increasingly trained to weight content by perceived trustworthiness — rank it lower.

The Multimedia Opportunity Most Brands Miss

One area where even experienced communications teams leave reach on the table is multimedia. Releases accompanied by high-quality images, video, or a press kit consistently generate deeper engagement and greater longevity across platforms. In a media environment that is both accelerating and increasingly visual, a text-only release is a missed opportunity. The content investment is usually modest; the uplift in coverage and discoverability is not.

Your Narrative, or Someone Else’s

The brands that will define their sectors over the next decade are those that understand a simple truth: in an AI-mediated information landscape, the organisations consistently publishing credible, well-structured, widely distributed content are the ones that get cited. The ones that get cited are the ones that get trusted. And the ones that get trusted are the ones that win.

The press release has never been just about getting a mention in a trade publication. It has always been about controlling your narrative in the court of public opinion. Today, that court is presided over by AI. The rules have not changed as much as the arena has. Get the fundamentals right, distribute with purpose, and write with the discipline of a journalist rather than the enthusiasm of a marketing department. Your story is worth telling well.