Commercial vs Informational Press Releases: When to Use Each

Curated by Andrea M., Founder of BlackCube Labs

For a long time, press releases were treated as a simple tool.

You had news → you published it.

No news → you stayed quiet.

That model doesn't work anymore.

Today, press releases are not just about communication. They're about how your company is interpreted by search engines, media platforms, and increasingly, AI assistants that answer questions before anyone lands on your site.

Digital PR practitioners have been living this shift for a while. By securing coverage in relevant publications, they don't just "get mentions", they build high‑quality backlinks and brand signals that search engines treat as endorsements. Now, those same signals are feeding the models that generate AI answers.

Once you see press releases as part of that authority infrastructure, a more important question emerges:

Are you publishing the right type of press release for the visibility you actually want?

The two types of press releases

In practice, almost every effective press release falls into one of two categories. Most companies never separate:

1. Commercial Press Releases

These are milestone‑driven.

They announce something concrete happening inside your company:

• Product launches
• Funding rounds
• Partnerships
• Market expansions
• Major hires or growth milestones

They answer one simple question: "What did you do?"

2. Informational Press Releases

These are knowledge‑driven.

They surface something useful you know about your market:

• Guides
• Research reports
• Trend analyses
• Industry definitions or category explainers
• Educational frameworks or benchmarks

They answer a different question: "What do you know?"

Most companies stop at the first. The most strategic ones design for both.

Why the distinction matters

When someone asks an AI assistant a question, it doesn't just look for web pages to rank. It looks for credible, structured information across multiple sources, then reconstructs an answer. Research on E‑E‑A‑T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) shows that systems like Google increasingly value content that demonstrates real expertise, comes from authoritative sources, and is corroborated across the web.

That has implications for how your press releases work:

• Commercial releases primarily build credibility signals: they show your company exists, ships, grows, and forms real partnerships
• Informational releases primarily build topic‑level authority: they connect your brand to specific problems, categories, and search intents

If you only do one, your visibility is lopsided. You might be "real" but not relevant, or relevant but not clearly established.

When to use commercial press releases

Use commercial releases when something objectively happens.

Typical triggers include:

• Launching a product or major feature
• Announcing a funding round
• Forming a strategic partnership
• Entering a new market or geography
• Hitting a meaningful milestone (users, revenue, installs, etc.)

Done well, these releases can generate:

• Media placements in relevant outlets
• High‑authority backlinks from trusted domains
• Repeated mentions of your brand, leaders, and products across third‑party sites.

Digital PR and SEO teams point out that backlinks from respected news or industry sites send powerful signals about your credibility and relevance, often lifting rankings for key pages and improving domain authority over time. One analysis notes that consistent press release distribution can improve authority not just by links, but also by increasing branded searches and linkless mentions, which search engines treat as trust signals.

What they actually do

At an infrastructure level, commercial releases tell the internet:

They anchor your presence in time (dates), context (what happened), and relationships (partners, investors, customers), all of which are easy for both search engines and LLMs to parse and verify.

When to use informational press releases

This is where most companies leave value on the table.

Informational releases are not about what happened inside your company. They're about what people in your market are already trying to understand.

In this case, common triggers are:

• publishing a substantial guide or playbook
• releasing original research or survey data
• analyzing a new trend or regulatory change
• defining or reframing a category
• updating benchmarks or industry metrics

These topics often overlap with the questions people type into Google or ask AI assistants:

• "What is AI automation?"
• "How does digital PR impact SEO?"
• "What trends are shaping B2B SaaS in 2026?"

Most teams only answer those questions in blog posts.

But when you take that same asset, a guide, a study, a trend analysis, and support it with an informational press release, you:

1. Place the topic on authoritative, third‑party domains
2. Tie your brand directly to specific concepts and queries
3. Provide structured, citable content that AI systems can more easily interpret

Press releases now function as structured trust inputs for AI discovery. Industry analysis notes that consistent entities, clean metadata, and distribution through reputable outlets influence how brands are interpreted and referenced by LLMs, especially as "generative engine optimization" (GEO) becomes a recognized discipline.

What they actually do

At an infrastructure level, informational releases tell the internet:

They don't just say you're in a category, they demonstrate it, in formats that both humans and machines can cite, link, and re‑use.

The strategic difference

If you remember one thing, make it this:

• Commercial releases = credibility
• Informational releases = relevance

Credibility without relevance looks like "a real company no one associates with any particular topic."

Relevance without credibility looks like "someone talking about the topic, but we’re not sure they're a serious player."

You need both to win in modern visibility.

Digital PR and SEO practitioners regularly highlight that high‑quality, news‑style coverage delivers outsized impact on authority compared to low‑quality links, particularly now that AI‑driven features lean heavily on reputable sources. Informational assets backed by structured announcements slot directly into this pattern.

How to combine them

The companies that get the best results don’t choose one type of release. They design a cadence. For example:

• Month 1 → Product launch (commercial)
• Month 2 → Industry guide or framework (informational)
• Month 3 → Strategic partnership (commercial)
• Month 4 → Original research or survey (informational)

Over time, this creates a compounding effect:

• Authority signals grow through recurring coverage and backlinks.
• Topic association strengthens as your brand keeps showing up in content tied to specific queries and concepts.
• AI discoverability improves because models see a consistent pattern of facts and expertise tied to the same entities.

The result: your company becomes easier to find, easier to understand, and easier to trust, whether someone starts with Google, a news site, or an AI assistant.

The mistake most founders make

Founders, brand directors, business owners, say things like some version of: "We don’t have enough news for press releases."

In reality, the issue usually isn't news. It's framing.

• A "minor" feature update can become a tightly scoped product announcement
• A strong blog post can become a formal guide or playbook
• Internal data can become a simple industry snapshot or mini‑report

Digital PR specialists emphasize that what matters is not just what you publish, but how it's packaged and where it travels. Well‑structured releases that share real numbers, clear takeaways, and verifiable details are precisely the kind of assets both journalists and AI systems can work with.

The opportunity is already in your backlog. You just need to design it as part of a visibility strategy, not an afterthought.

Final thoughts

Press releases are no longer just announcements you send when something "big enough" happens. They're part of the infrastructure of how your company is recorded, referenced, and remembered across the web.

• Commercial releases make your company visible as a player: real, active, building, partnering.
• Informational releases make your company visible as a reference: knowledgeable, credible, and plugged into the questions your market is asking.

As AI systems increasingly act as gatekeepers, deciding which brands appear in answers, roundups, and shortlists before a user ever visits a website, that distinction matters more than ever.

You don't have to flood the world with press releases. Please don't. You just have to be intentional about *which type* you're publishing, and *when*, so your company shows up both as a serious operator and as a trusted source, wherever the next decision is being made.

What's next? Well, get your brand published across premium media outlets without doing the outreach yourself, through Premium Release. We help startups, brands, agencies, and growing companies create or refine press releases, distribute them across 600+ guaranteed placements and newsroom systems depending on package, and deliver a clear report within five business days.

Note. All sources of the blog post are available here.