In the age of generative AI platforms, the way people research, gather news, and make decisions is sometimes based on nothing more than a simple question and an agent-driven response. Will your company’s name come up when potential customers ask ChatGPT for answers or advice? This article by PR@ctical on Substack brings up an interesting idea: can the age-old press release be your ticket to a myriad of generative AI citations? Matter’s SEO/GEO specialists say it is.
As AI continues to shake up how PR and marketing leaders think about enhancing brand visibility and credibility, controlling the AI-driven search landscape is certainly at the top of everybody’s mind. In fact, generative AI’s impact has been so influential that mainstream distribution sites are catching on. Within the last two months, both GlobeNewswire by Notified and EIN Presswire have announced platform integrations that help vendors optimize for and track the impact of generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. It’s clear that press releases can have a huge impact on generative AI citations by acting as a primary source of information for AI models to gather from, especially when they’re distributed through reputable channels and optimized for LLM readability — which can be done with a few strategic tweaks.
By approaching your press release drafting with a deliberate plan of action, PR and communications teams can create a document that is more than just a news disseminator and instead, a calculated tactic for winning long-lasting visibility. Our team dove into this example press release, also from PR@ctical on Substack, to recommend the following:
- Break complex topics into short, listicle formatting. Humans and AI alike prefer information presented in organized, digestible bites. When LLMs scour the internet, information presented in bullet points or lists is easier to parse and retrieve, upping the chances of inclusion in a Gen AI citation.
- Make sure target keywords and semantically related keywords are interlaced throughout the copy. In the example press release, keywords such as “Zen Media,” “performance marketing,” “growth agency,” and “top PR” are naturally scattered throughout the release’s body, serving as essential metadata that improves the discoverability of your content by LLMs.
- Include an “FAQ” section at the bottom of your release — and be strategic about its format. While not a usual aspect of the traditional press release, a “frequently asked questions” section gives companies the opportunity to embed three to five natural-language questions inside the body of their release, creating easy, machine-friendly hooks. To increase citability even more, make sure you’re putting FAQs into a bulleted format, or consider creating specific FAQ boxes through code. Although Matter’s SEO/GEO experts haven’t often seen FAQ blocks used on external publisher sites, incorporating them into your own company website can still be an effective strategy.
- Behind the scenes, a website’s code can label each section of the FAQ clearly — for example, marking the question as “FAQ-question” and the answer as “FAQ-answer.” This helps search engines and AI because they don’t have to decipher which text is a question and which is an answer; the code already tells them. Consider what kinds of questions a potential customer would type into a Gen AI platform like ChatGPT, and make those the FAQs at the bottom of your release.
- Add tags to the press release so it appears next to related content. Similar to keywords, adding tags to a press release is conducive to AI citations because it provides the model with structured, descriptive metadata that helps it to better understand, index, and retrieve relevant information.
Optimizing your press releases for generative AI visibility doesn’t mean reimaging the entire drafting process. Instead, some minor, intentional tweaks can significantly increase your chance of being cited by these tools and help you reap the benefits of that coverage.