How Press Releases Can Help Your SEO (and AI Search Visibility)
Do press releases help SEO?
Yes, press releases help SEO, but mostly through the coverage a release earns.
Google’s spam policies count links exchanged for goods or services as link spam unless they carry a rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attribute. Don’t count on the links in a release you pay to distribute to lift your rankings.
The SEO value comes from what happens after distribution. Reporters write their own stories and link to your site, and your brand gets mentioned on trade publications, local news sites, and industry blogs.
How do press releases help SEO?
A press release helps SEO in four ways:
- Editorial links. When a journalist covers your story and links to your site, you earn an editorial link. Across 15 industries in WebFX’s 2026 backlink study of 1,462 page-one domains, an average of 92.2% of backlinks pointing to page-one sites were editorial links.
- Brand mentions. Coverage puts your company name on news sites and trade publications, even when there’s no link. In Ahrefs’ study of AI Overview brand visibility, brand web mentions showed the strongest correlation with visibility in Google AI Overviews of all the factors studied.
- Top stories visibility. When Google decides a search could use timely news, it adds a “Top stories” section to the first page. A news-style story about your company can appear there while it’s fresh.
- Referral traffic and branded search. Readers who see the coverage click through from the article or search for your company by name later.
How do press releases help AI search optimization?
In a Muck Rack study reported by MediaPost, non-paid media accounted for 94% of all links cited by AI, and press releases accounted for 6%.
That means most of what AI answers cite is earned coverage, and a press release is one way to start it.
Ranking on page one isn’t the only way in, either.
Fifty-three percent of the sources cited by Google’s AI Overviews didn’t appear in the top 10 Google links for the same query, according to researchers who studied AI-generated search results.
A trade publication’s story about your company can earn a citation even if that story never ranks.
Do press releases help with SEO link building?
No. Press releases do not help with SEO link building.
Some SEO firms still create press releases only to build links to your site. Search engines frown on releases used as nothing more than “just another link,” and readers don’t want news when there’s nothing new to announce.
Google News policies don’t allow sponsored content presented as independent editorial content, and publishers must block links in content syndicated for large-scale republishing when link building is the main goal.
Releases that earn coverage give a reporter a real story. Build great content that just so happens to have a link in it.
How to write a press release that helps SEO
Learn how to write press releases that benefit SEO using the following steps:
- Lead with a news angle. Write the release as a story about a current industry issue, with your company as an example.
- Give journalists something to quote. Include original data, a clear expert comment, or a local angle a reporter can use without extra work.
- Pitch the outlets AI answers already cite. Check which publications show up as sources in AI answers for your topic, and send the story to their reporters directly instead of relying only on a wire service. As part of its AI search optimization, Thompson Tractor earned placements in the sources Google AI Overviews cited and saw a 136% increase in visibility in Google AI Overviews.
- Put two or three keywords in the headline and first paragraph. That helps the release and the coverage it earns match how people search.
- Label sponsored placements and control syndicated copies. Mark paid placements as sponsored. Have syndication partners use robots meta tags rather than the canonical link element to avoid duplicate articles in Google News.
How to measure a press release’s SEO impact
Measure a press release’s SEO impact using the following steps:
- Earned coverage and links. Log each article a journalist wrote about the story, and note which ones link to your site.
- AI citations and mentions. OmniSEO®, WebFX’s AI search visibility platform, tracks citations and mentions for your brand and its competitors across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Compare your AI mentions for the release’s topic before and after it goes out.
- Referral traffic and branded search. In GA4, check referral sessions from the outlets that covered the story. In Google Search Console, watch impressions for branded queries in the weeks after distribution.
Leverage press releases with SEO experts
Our online press release services write your company news as stories journalists want to cover. Contact us online get in touch, and one of our digital marketing experts will learn about your needs and provide a no-obligation quote.
