In this blog, Hugh Cadman, Interim Head of Content, discusses:
- The growth of AI search online and the impact on B2B tech brands
- Why press releases are now doubly effective at hooking attention
- The new AI visibility metrics to be aware of
The press release – the cleverly-crafted copy that announces anything from a new product or service to research findings – is it still relevant in the era of AI search?
Unequivocally, the answer is yes. AI-powered search is transforming the effectiveness of the press release for brands seeking greater visibility because it hooks in readers and algorithms alike.
A good release grabs the attention of human audiences when they visit a website or read it in a publication. But what doubles is potency, especially in B2B tech PR, is that its format is ideally suited to AI models during a search engine’s retrieval and ranking process.
Many AI search models like press releases
That’s true for searches in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews. The latter are the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results. Nobody can ignore the scale of AI search now.
ChatGPT has 700 million weekly users, while more than 2bn people engage with Google AI Overviews each month and Microsoft Copilot has 33m active users.
You might think that reliance on AI-generated summaries will reduce the impact of press releases. But releases follow a defined structure that signals reliability and makes it easier for AI to parse and understand. For a company wanting to boost its profile, this is a major benefit, helping its content and its name stand out when users ask AI-powered questions.
Google’s AI, for example, analyses content in the same way as traditional searches, following the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust) which determines so much of the way brands or businesses are recognised online.
Visibility goes one way – upwards!
A business that publishes a release on its website and distributes the content through a network like PR Newswire, as well as relevant trade media titles, expands the content’s visibility by many factors because of its ability to feature in traditional search and AI-powered results.
A release that is linked to by other reputable sources also does more than drive traffic to a website – it helps validate authority – which is vital for brand elevation. High-quality backlinks bolster overall SEO performance and boost visibility, and they also increase the likelihood that your brand appears in AI-assisted results where provenance and credibility signals matter.
Making press releases even more visible
In Performance PR campaigns, there are other ways of enhancing the attractiveness of press releases to AI that go beyond adding bullet points at the top. The inclusion of multi-media elements such as video helps AI interpret content more effectively, for example.
And journalists have caught up – 1 in 3 explicitly want multimedia elements from PR teams, with more than half more likely to pursue a pitch if it includes visual assets with your story.
Reputable research is a mainstay of B2B tech PR and a release that provides reliable and original new data obviously adds credibility to a story and provides evidence audiences seek. But authoritative data also attracts AI, helping engines rank content more effectively. Therefore, when planning your next research project, it’s important to think about the media headlines from the very start.
New measurements of success
After a release has been distributed to media outlets, published on a company’s own website in line with GEO best practice, or disseminated through a commercial network, platforms such as Google News or Discover may highlight it as a featured result.
Yet in this new world of AI search, traditional metrics such as click-through rates and simple measurement of website traffic are no longer the primary indicators of success. A growing share of visibility now happens without a page visit. Buyers are discovering brands through summaries, citations and third-party references long before they arrive on a website.
That means measurement needs to broaden. Alongside coverage volume and quality, PR teams are increasingly tracking indicators such as share of voice on priority topics, the frequency and prominence of brand mentions across authoritative sources, and backlink quality. They are also interested in branded search demand over time, and whether the brand is cited in AI-generated answers for the kinds of category questions that influence early-stage shortlists.
Just as importantly, teams need to track the accuracy of how the brand is described, not only how often it appears.
This is where press releases play a bigger role than announcement mechanics. They help establish, and reinforce, the narrative a brand wants to own, so that when a company is cited, its story is interpreted in the right way and includes the key messages that matter most to the business. Consistency across releases, coverage, and owned content increases the chance that AI systems and human readers connect the brand with what it wants to be known for.
You need a steady flow of content including press releases
AI search engines are constantly evolving and can integrate new content and rank it within hours, underlining the need for regularly updated or fresh content. On a website this dictates the need for a steady flow of well-written pieces that meet the evolving requirements of AI search while hitting the mark with audiences reading them directly.
In a B2B tech organisation, the capacity to maintain that pace is often constrained by time, competing priorities and the reality that not everything warrants a press release. The goal is not a constant stream of announcements. It is a consistent flow of credible content, supported by media coverage. This gives search engines and AI systems enough high-quality signals to understand the market you operate in, the problems you solve and the proof that supports your claims.
These are all areas that Performance PR partners in the B2B tech sector can take care of, ensuring content is regular, relevant and optimised for AI search. With AI-powered search so rampant, the right partnerships and proactiveness from your PR team are essential.
If you need expert content and media support to meet the new requirements of AI-powered search, contact the team today.
