In recent years, the Press Release, a fundamental tool widely used by PR professionals for decades, has found itself increasingly relegated to the industry’s back burner. This does not mean the industry has done away with the Releases! As newer, cutting edge channels of communications powered by digital tech emerged, the staple Press Release began to be seen as just another (among many) PR tool to “take the message”.
The impact of “alternative channels” on the well entrenched Press Release tradition was such that in the 2024 survey “State of the Press Release Report”, 38% of PR professionals came forward to say that the top challenge for them regarding Press Releases was that “releases were not generating anticipated media pickup”.
This was a far cry from the times of the initial arrival of the press release.
The Press Release tradition has been a fundamental pillar of the Public Relations industry. Way back in 1906, PR industry pioneer Ivy Lee issued the first modern press release after a train accident. This act helped prevent the spread of misinformation on the accident and led to the beginning of the corporate communications heritage that is intractable today. Since then, the Press Release became a driving force of the PR industry over the next one hundred years-until alternative and digital messaging streams started their play with the arrival of the internet.
With the arrival of the internet, the immediacy of Press Releases appeared to dim. The pushback on Press Releases was somewhat slowed when they began to define “Press Releases” as ‘news releases. Still, this was not sufficient to restore the status of the beloved Press Release. Until AI arrived!
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) boosted alternative dissemination channels (online, social media etc). As we in the PR industry know, SEO itself has become an online industry. Inadvertently, the boom in SEO (industry) resulted in relegating the status of Press Releases to an parallel dissemination stream, bringing it down from its hallowed status since digital metrices such as online “view counts”, “likes” and number of “shares” (etc) began gaining their importance (rather than the authoritative voice of the Press Release) …until AI arrived!
With the arrival of AI, SEO’s dominance has been challenged. The result? The new PR and content frontier is the “Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)”. GEO’s Press Release Optimisation has become the newest twist in content viral mechanisms. And inadvertently, the humble Press Release is triumphantly making a comeback to the PR’s centre stage!
How does GEO reopen the way for the Press Release tradition? SEO works on keywords, domain ratings, and metadata. They also use rankings. GEO, on the other hand (while not replacing SEO), works with AI powered search engines and helps content to be produced on AI platforms such as ChatGPT.
“Ahrefs analysed 75,000 domains and confirmed what savvy SEOs have started to suspect: the top predictor of appearing in Google’s AI Overview isn’t backlinks or Domain Rating, but unlinked brand mentions on authoritative sites. The correlation? ρ = 0.664—triple the strength of traditional backlink signals.” (Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and the new shape of PR (Ellen Kaross on LinkedIn-August 9, 2025)
As such GEO scans for “context” of the content and does not look at ‘keywords’ or rankings. GEO ‘Optimisation’ is based on structured, clear summaries. GEO also works better along Google’s E-E-A-T framework — experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness- which is not a strong point of SEO.
Due to their authoritative nature, Press Releases, unlike social media posts, can leverage GEO readily (provided they are formulated well).
What is vital to understand is the Release’s ability to grab the attention of the LLM! Among the requirements that the Press Releases need to meet for GEO (i.e. to be ‘formulated well’ and picked up by the LLM) are the credibility of authors (mentioning of their bios, references to other work etc), machine readability of Releases, ability to validate claims made in the Release (such as facts, data and quotes., all of which emphasizes transparency that the LLM likes), and “fresh” content rather than outdated ‘stuff’., stand out.
Important points to note are that GEO does NOT replace SEO, but complements it, and GEO needs to be viewed as one (among many) strategies to optimise content.!
Then, let us greet the humble release with… “Welcome Back, Fella!”
