How to Get Your Press Releases Cited by AI
Join Jesse Wynants, Jasper Flour, Kate Bystrova, and expert guest Christopher S. Penn to explore:
- The 3-stage system AI models use to decide what to cite
- Why press releases are uniquely built to get cited by AI
- How to test whether your press release is AI-ready
There's no such thing as an "AI ranking" SparkToro ran the same brand questions through ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI thousands of times. The same list of brands came back in the same order less than 1-in-1,000 times. Any tool selling you a fixed visibility score is selling you something that doesn't exist.
GEO isn't "SEO for AI" It's a 3-stage system: what's already in the model's training data, live web search, and relevance scoring. Traditional SEO still matters more than the AI hype cycle has let on.
What makes a press release AI-citable Press releases are unusually well-suited to get cited – they're fact-dense, quotable, and dated. The details that help: cutting hedge phrases from stats ("about 30%" becomes "30%"), putting your best facts and quotes upfront (AI tools often only read the first 400–600 words), and keeping the basics AI expects – quote, boilerplate, dated facts. Try our free AI Press Release Optimizer to test your own release against this.
Why blocking AI crawlers kills citations Some newswires and publishers block the bots that fetch pages in real time to answer a query – not just the ones scraping for model training. If a site blocks that citation-time bot, your release can't be cited from there, no matter how well it's written. All the more reason to prioritise your own newsroom. Use the free AIView tool from TrustInsights to see how your site stacks up.
The tools worth checking out AIView shows whether your newsroom (or any site) is blocking AI bots. Bing Webmaster Tools' AI performance tab shows exactly what Copilot is citing your content for. Google Search Console now shows impression data for AI Overviews. And growing your email list helps too – brands mentioned in someone's Gmail inbox are more likely to surface in Google's AI answers.
Brand building is the best investment AI tools reward established players, so if you're the underdog in your space, budget and effort spent on brand – company or personal – beats almost anything else you could do for AI visibility.
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Christopher S. Penn: Co-founder & Chief Data Scientist @ Trust Insights
Christopher S. Penn is the Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights. An internationally renowned keynote speaker and authority on analytics, data science, and machine learning, he has been a pioneer in the field of AI for marketing since 2013. Christopher is an eight-time IBM Champion in IBM Data and AI and the co-host of the award-winning Marketing Over Coffee podcast.
He is the best-selling author of over two dozen marketing books, including Almost Timeless: 48 Foundation Principles of Generative AI and AI for Marketers. Throughout his career, his data-driven strategies have served prominent global brands such as Twitter, T-Mobile, McDonald's, and Cisco Systems. Christopher is widely recognized for his ability to demystify complex AI concepts and provide practical, actionable strategies that empower marketers to achieve breakthrough results.
Jesse Wynants: CEO @ Prezly
As always, your host will be our very own founder and CEO, Jesse Wynants. Together with co-founder Gijs and the rest of the Prezly team, Jesse has spent the past ten years building a tool completely focused around one thing: building relationships. Managing your media list and knowing which contact is the best fit for your story is a huge part of that!
Jasper Flour: Growth Marketing
Growth marketer at Prezly, focused on SEO and GEO and how brands get found in an AI-first world.
Kate Bystrova: Storyteller @ Prezly
Kate is responsible for the majority of the words on this website, including the ones you are reading now. Despite a background in the written word, she has now – perhaps foolishly – made her first foray into video content, which you can enjoy (or perhaps endure) on this very page. Her expertise lies chiefly in marketing, comms, editorial, and cheerily arguing about the prevailing topics of any given day.
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