Why press releases alone aren't enough anymore, and what PR teams are doing about it

Why press releases alone aren't enough anymore, and what PR teams are doing about it

Getting a press release out used to be the job. Now it's the starting point.

According to PR Newswire's 2025 State of the Press Release Report, 33% of PR professionals say their biggest challenge is not generating the media pickup they expected. That number has stayed stubbornly high, and it reflects something structural. The way people find information has changed, and communications strategies are catching up.

Gartner predicts some earned media budgets could double by 2027. The reason, as reported by Inc., is that AI is replacing traditional search as the primary way consumers discover brands, drawing heavily from earned, third-party sources when building its answers.

PR Newswire shares insights into why communications strategies now demand a coordinated approach to break through the noise and capture the attention of fractured audiences and AI bots.

How AI search is changing brand discovery

AI-powered search tools no longer return a list of links. They synthesize, summarize, and recommend, pulling from sources that aren't determined by ad spend.

Similarweb's 2026 Generative AI Brand Visibility Report found that 35% of U.S. consumers now use AI at the product discovery stage, compared to 13.6% who use traditional search. AI holds a more than 2-to-1 advantage at every stage of the purchase funnel until the final transaction. By the time a consumer opens a search engine, the shortlist is often already formed.

Similarweb also tracked what happens when AI platforms send visitors to websites: In its data, those visitors convert at a 7% rate, compared to 5% from Google referrals. The volume is lower, but the intent is higher.

For brands not appearing in AI responses, the loss is invisible. No bounce rate, no impression count. The consumer just moves on.

Crafting content specifically for discovery and summarization by AI models, a practice sometimes called generative engine optimization (GEO), is a skill most PR teams haven't had to develop until now. As Courtney Sandora, owner of marketing consultancy Go Social, told Inc.: "AI doesn't rank brands like Google. It learns narratives from trusted sources."

On the media relations side, the volume problem hasn't gotten easier either. According to Cision's 2026 State of the Media Report, more than half of all journalists receive more than 50 pitches per week. Generic pitches will be deleted.

What a modern campaign actually requires

The multichannel approach isn't new. What's changed is why it matters and what it needs to accomplish: a consistent drumbeat of authoritative content that both journalists and AI systems will trust.

That starts with a clear foundation before any content is produced:

• One clear takeaway. If the core message is ambiguous, every downstream asset suffers.
• A defined audience, including the AI tools they use to discover information.
• A "so what." Why this story matters, right now, to this reader.
• A one-sentence summary that can anchor every format without contradiction.
• From there, the goal is to repurpose the story, not duplicate it.

The content types doing the work

Luckily, many communicators are already using the exact types of content that AI models are learning from to build summaries and generate answers. "PR pros are perfectly positioned to adapt," Orbit Media's Andy Crestodina explains. "The goal is a large, visible digital footprint, but with AI, it's more about providing rich, descriptive content that the AI can understand and recommend. It's less about traditional links and more about ensuring your brand and expertise are well-represented in text."

According to Cision's State of the Press Release Report, 91% of communicators repurpose their press release content. This coordinated push of multiple content types across earned, owned, paid, and shared channels, paired with the right distribution strategies, ensures a consistent message LLMs use as authoritative signals. Different content types surfaced in different places also help to ensure a brand's story reaches the right audiences in the right places at the right time.

Press releases remain the standard format for verified announcements. Cision's report found 66% of journalists still want news through this channel. A well-structured release that is factual, organized, and clearly sourced is also among the most AI-discoverable formats a team can produce. Despite past reports that the press release is dead, press releases are a credible resource with a structured format that can even include FAQs-a goldmine for LLMs.

Personalized pitches matter more as inboxes get fuller. With most journalists receiving more than 50 pitches a week, a pitch that doesn't demonstrate familiarity with the reporter's beat gets deleted. One journalist surveyed by Cision put it directly: "Think deeply about why you are pitching me a story idea, then show me in the pitch that you understand why I would want to bite on it as editorial content." Simply put: Do the homework.

Earned-media articles are bylined, editorially compliant pieces that can be placed in third-party publications. Newsrooms are dwindling, and editors need content. With articles, brands can help editors fill in content gaps. Earned pickups satisfy AI's preference for independent, third-party sources, contribute to the citation pool AI draws from, and reach audiences through editorial environments that carry their own authority. Gartner's forecast is based on earned media's influence on AI search.

Blog posts on owned channels extend reach and signal consistency. Sixty-seven percent of communicators are already repurposing press releases into blog posts, according to the 2025 State of the Press Release Report. Regular, substantive owned content tells search engines and LLMs that a brand has standing in its field.

Video travels in ways text doesn't. Thirty-two percent of journalists value multimedia content from PR teams, including video, per Cision's State of the Media Report. Subtitles and transcripts aren't optional; they're how video content gets indexed and cited across platforms.

Social content works best when it's built for amplification, not just distribution. The 2025 Cision-PRWeek Comms Report found 53% of PR professionals consider branded social among the most effective formats for influencing behavior, and 52% identified employees as the most effective influencer type.

Data visualizations and infographics give journalists something they can use directly. Nearly half of journalists in the 2026 State of the Media Report said they actively want original data and research from communications teams. A well-made infographic also travels long after initial placement, shared across platforms.

Building the record that AI learns from

A failure to adapt to the new rules of content discovery means ceding the narrative to competitors or, worse, to misinformation. The stakes are no longer just about getting coverage; they are about creating a steady drumbeat of content in the digital record.

A press release alone is not enough. A campaign that combines distribution, earned placement, owned publishing, and social amplification increases the chances of citations, and each piece reinforces the others over time. AI systems learn from that consistent record when forming the recommendations that a growing share of consumers are acting on.

Here are four practices that hold this together.

Plan the full campaign before publishing anything. A press release written without a downstream pitch, blog post, and social strategy in mind is a missed opportunity.

Keep the message consistent, not uniform. The core facts stay the same across formats. Tone and length shift to fit the channel.

Repurpose with a purpose. A press release becomes a blog post; that post becomes social copy; the data becomes an infographic. Each version should serve a distinct role, with the content being tailored to each platform.

Measure the whole picture. Pickup, reach, AI-search citations, and social engagement, together tell the story that any one metric can't.

The brands that show up in AI recommendations didn't get there by accident. They earned coverage, published consistently, and built a record that AI systems could learn from. That's the new job.

This story was produced by PR Newswire and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.

Copyright 2026 Stacker Media, LLC

This story was originally published July 1, 2026 at 7:35 AM.