Why Press Releases Matter More Than Ever in the Age of AI Search

Curated by Andrea M., Founder @ BlackCube Labs.

Intro

For years, marketers loved declaring press releases dead. I was one of them.
They felt like relics from another era, something big companies faxed to newsrooms in the 90s so a journalist might maybe care enough to write a story. In most startup circles, "hey, we should do a press release" has been a running joke, or a last‑minute checkbox on a funding announcement.

Then, something unexpected happened: large language models went mainstream.

In 2025, AI assistants went from "cool demo" to default starting point for millions of people searching the web. One analysis estimates that AI tools now generate around 45 billion monthly sessions worldwide, roughly 56% of global search engine volume. Over the same period, Google's share of search‑related activity is estimated to have fallen from about 89% in 2023 to roughly 71% by Q4 2025, as AI assistants and AI layers inside search products absorbed more of the discovery surface.

McKinsey describes this shift as a "new front door to the internet", noting that AI‑powered search is already influencing hundreds of billions in annual revenue decisions. When that door changes, every assumption about visibility, SEO, and "brand awareness" has to
be re‑examined.

And almost overnight, press releases started to look very different.

Modern AI systems rely heavily on structured, factual, cross‑referenced information, the exact format that a well‑crafted press release creates when it hits reputable wires and media sites. In other words, what used to be "old‑school PR" is now quietly becoming an essential input into how AI search, media platforms, and assistants decide which companies are real, credible, and worth mentioning.

This article is for founders, operators, agencies, and SEO partners who feel that tension every day: you're doing a lot, but you're still strangely invisible when it matters most.

AI changed how the internet discovers information

Doesn't it feel like you woke up in a different internet? Well, you're not wrong.
By 2025, more than half of US adults had used a large language model like ChatGPT at least once, and the share of people using AI tools for daily search roughly doubled in a single year. Analysts estimate that AI search and assistants now account for more than half of global search engine volume, with usage growing faster than traditional search ever did at a similar
stage.

At the same time, search results themselves are changing. Google's AI Overviews and similar features from other players increasingly answer queries directly on the results page, without sending traffic to individual websites. One study found that when AI Overviews appear, the
likelihood of users clicking through to the traditional organic listings can drop by more than a third. Across the broader landscape, estimates suggest that around 58–60% of all searches now end without any click at all, and that number can exceed 80% when AI layers fully satisfy the query.

A large Semrush analysis of over 10 million keywords found that between late 2024 and early 2025, the share of commercial queries triggering Google’s AI Overviews more than doubled, and navigational (often branded) queries saw AI Overviews go from negligible presence to double‑digit percentages. In plain terms: AI is no longer just summarizing blog posts at the
top of the funnel; it's increasingly intervening when people are comparing tools, prices, and brands.

That's the new reality your company is operating in, whether you've acknowledged it or not.

The Visibility Gap

Over the years, I've spoken with dozens of founders and marketing teams. It's striking how often the same pattern emerges. A company may have:

• a great product
• a strong website
• active social media profiles

…but when you search for the company online, you mostly find their own website. Maybe a few directory listings, maybe a handful of minor mentions, but very few credible media stories and very few independent references that tell your story from a third‑party point of view.

In a traditional SEO world, that was already a problem.

In an AI‑first discovery world, it's a systemic risk.

If AI layers are answering more questions directly, and a majority of searches already end without a click, then a brand that only shows up on its own site is effectively invisible in the new discovery stack. When an AI assistant scans the web to understand your company, and mostly finds your own materials, it struggles to build conviction that you're established, relevant, or trustworthy compared to competitors with broader coverage.

Many companies exist on their own domains and social feeds. They don't yet exist in the ecosystem of independent coverage, citations, and cross‑references that modern search engines and AI assistants rely on to make decisions.

What AI systems are really looking for

Search engines have been moving toward trust and authority for years, codified in frameworks like E‑E‑A‑T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Google's own guidance and leading SEO practitioners now treat high‑quality backlinks and brand mentions from relevant, credible publications as among the clearest signals of
that authority.

Digital PR has become the practical way to earn those signals at scale. One Moz case study reported a 219% year‑on‑year organic traffic uplift to key pages driven primarily by targeted digital PR campaigns earning relevant coverage and links. As one digital PR lead at Moz
put it, backlinks and mentions from “relevant, credible and established
publications” remain some of the oldest, and still most reliable, signals of
online authority. As AI search layers sit on top of this infrastructure, they inherit that logic.

Modern AI assistants are very good at:

• extracting entities (company names, products, founders, markets) from structured content like news releases and articles
• connecting those entities across multiple independent, reputable domains
• noticing when descriptions are consistent, same category, similar positioning, same leadership names, in multiple sources

If your company name, product, and core value proposition show up in a Business Wire release, a niche industry outlet, a regional business publication, and a few specialist blogs, AI systems see a pattern: the same entities, described consistently, across independent, trusted domains. If they see that pattern for a competitor, but not for you, it's not hard to guess
whose story is easier to include in an AI‑generated answer.

Some analysts now talk about generative engine optimization (GEO): intentionally shaping the structured signals and third‑party references that AI assistants use to decide which brands to surface. Whether you use that term or not, the underlying reality is the same, your authority
signals now have to convince algorithms that no longer need to send anyone to
your site to generate an answer.

Why Digital PR fits the AI discovery model

It's funny because press releases were designed long before AI search existed, yet they fit the modern discovery environment unusually well. A professional press release follows a structured format that includes:

- A factual headline
- A clear announcement (what's new and why it matters)
- Supporting information (context, numbers, market)
- Executive quotes that attribute opinions to real people
- A company description or boilerplate that anchors who you are and what you do

This is exactly the kind of content that both traditional search engines and LLMs can parse confidently. Entities are named clearly, relationships are explicit, dates are obvious, and there’s a clean separation between facts and attributed opinions.

When a press release is distributed across multiple media platforms and reputable syndication networks, something even more important happens: it creates repeated references to the same company across trusted domains. Those repeated references, with consistent naming and positioning, become strong credibility signals for AI systems trying to decide whether your
brand is a serious player or a random website.

Think of a well‑structured press release as a compact, machine‑readable authority document: it tells the world (and the models) who you are, what's new, and why you matter, in a format that can be cleanly ingested, indexed, and re‑used. And because it can lead to downstream coverage, it doesn't just live on one domain; it propagates through an ecosystem of sites that AI assistants already trust.

From classic SEO to Authority Infrastructure

Most teams are still investing heavily in classic SEO levers:

• publishing long‑form blog content
• optimizing landing pages
• maintaining social channels
• running campaigns to capture intent around specific keywords

None of that is wrong. But it's incomplete.

In a world where AI layers and answer engines are handling more of the interaction, discoverability depends on something broader than "is your site optimized?". It depends on whether you're meaningfully represented in what we might call the authority infrastructure of the internet: the network of references, citations, and cross‑checked facts that sit across news sites, industry publications, databases, and knowledge graphs.

Digital PR, done thoughtfully, not as a vanity exercise, sits at the intersection of:

• Search visibility (through relevant, high‑quality links and mentions)
• AI visibility (through structured, repeated signals across trusted domains)
• Category positioning (through the way your story is framed by independent sources)

For agencies and SEO partners, this is increasingly non‑optional. As AI assistants absorb more commercial and navigational queries, ignoring digital PR means risking that carefully earned rankings never get seen, because the answer is already provided higher up the stack.

For founders and brands, it's the difference between:

> "We have a website and some tweets"

and

> "We are recognized, referenced, and described consistently across sources that AI systems already trust"

Where press releases fit today

So where do press releases fit in a modern, AI-aware strategy?

Not as one‑off, "we raised a round" blasts that nobody reads. And not as low‑quality link‑spam that AI systems will learn to ignore. Instead, as a recurring discipline:

Codifying meaningful moments
Product launches, integrations, partnerships, milestones, or category moves, each turned into a
structured, factual document that AI and search can understand.

Seeding authoritative narratives

Making sure your positioning, language, and key claims are articulated consistently wherever you appear, on the wire, in pickup articles, and in the boilerplates that keep
getting reused.

Feeding the broader ecosystem

Giving journalists, bloggers, analysts, and creators something concrete and quotable to work from, which in turn generates more independent references.

When you handle this well, you're not "doing press releases" in the old sense. You're building a durable, cross‑domain record of your company that AI systems can lean on when they decide how to answer the next "Which tools should I use for…?" query.

A personal note

I didn't come back to press releases because I missed writing them. I came back because, looking at how AI search was evolving, it became obvious that the brands who would win the next decade weren’t just the ones with the best landing pages, they were the ones with the strongest authority footprint across the web.

At BlackCube Labs, we designed Premium Release as a done‑for‑you way to solve that specific problem: helping teams who are already stretched thin turn their real milestones into structured, credible signals that search engines, media sites, and AI assistants can't easily ignore.

It's not about hacks or hype; it’s about doing the unglamorous, compounding work of showing up in the right places, with the right story, again and again.

If you're a founder, marketer, or agency partner and you recognize yourself in this great product, solid site, decent content, but a thin public footprint, the next logical step isn’t another blog post. It's to start closing your visibility gap by making sure your company exists not just on your own domain, but across the authority infrastructure that now powers
both search and AI. Whether you do that with us or on your own, the important thing is that you do it, intentionally, and soon!

Because the internet is already re‑learning who matters. The question is whether you’ll be in that training data when it counts.

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.