A press release in 2026 is a dated public record of something your company did, written so that people, search engines and AI assistants can all understand it. It still tells journalists and customers about your news, but its longer-lasting job is to put clear, checkable facts about your business on pages other than your own website. Those facts help search engines work out who you are, and give AI assistants something concrete to retrieve when someone asks about your market.
What did a press release used to be for?
For most of its history a press release had one reader: a journalist. You wrote it, sent it to a wire or a list of editors, and hoped someone would turn it into a story. If nobody did, the release had failed.
In the early years of search, releases picked up a second purpose: carrying keyword-heavy links back to a website in the hope of moving rankings. That was never a sound reason to publish, and it does not work. Links inside syndicated releases are nofollow by industry standard, which tells search engines not to pass ranking credit through them. A release is not a ranking shortcut and should not be written as one.
What does a press release do now?
A well-written release does five jobs at the same time.
| Job | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Human discovery | Journalists, customers, partners and investors may come across the announcement |
| Search discovery | Search engines may find the release and follow it back to your own pages |
| Entity understanding | Several pages describe the same company, people, products and places in the same way |
| Corroboration | Independent coverage that grows out of the release is stronger evidence than your own site alone |
| AI retrieval | Public, crawlable pages become available to AI-powered search when they are relevant to a question |
None of these is guaranteed. Search engines and AI systems decide for themselves what to crawl, index, rank and cite. What you control is whether the information you publish is clear, accurate and easy to check.
What is the entity-to-citation model?
A useful way to think about it is a chain of six steps:
ENTITY → EXPERTISE → EVIDENCE → CORROBORATION → RETRIEVAL → CITATION
Each step depends on the one before it.
- Entity. The web has to know who you are: your full name, what kind of business you are, where you operate. A release that opens "Kestrel Dental, a Cardiff-based group of four NHS and private dental practices" defines the entity. One that opens "Kestrel is proud to share" does not.
- Expertise. What do you know well? A release about something you actually do connects your name to a subject.
- Evidence. Figures, dates, methods and sources someone could check. "Treated 9,300 patients in 2025, according to practice booking records" is evidence. "Trusted by thousands" is not.
- Corroboration. Other people confirming the same facts: a trade publication covering your findings, a partner announcing the collaboration too, a directory listing that matches your address.
- Retrieval. When someone asks a search engine or an AI assistant a question in your area, your pages have to be crawlable, indexable and clear enough to be picked up.
- Citation. Only then might an assistant name you or link to you in an answer.
A press release mostly helps with the first four steps. It puts a defined entity, a piece of evidence and a date on the public record, and gives journalists a reason to write something independent. It cannot jump straight to citation. How that last step works is covered in how AI assistants find and cite companies.
What does that look like in a real release?
Take Acme Plumbing, a fictional plumbing firm in Dubai. Here is the same news written two ways. The figures are invented for the example.
Before
Acme Plumbing, a leading and innovative plumbing company, is excited to announce a groundbreaking new report about plumbing issues in Dubai.
After
Acme Plumbing LLC has published an analysis of 4,812 residential emergency plumbing visits completed across Dubai in 2025. The company's service records found flexible-hose failures in 31% of the water-damage emergencies included in the analysis.
The first version gives a reader nothing they could repeat. The second names the company and its trade, and gives a place, a period, a sample size, a finding and where the finding came from.
That one change serves every reader at once. A journalist has a story. A search engine can connect Acme Plumbing to Dubai and to the causes of household leaks. An AI assistant answering "what causes most water leaks in Dubai homes" has a specific, attributed figure it could use.
Why does your own website still matter?
A release points outwards, and it should also point home. For any important announcement, publish the fullest version on your own site: the data, the method, charts, quotes and a plain description of the company. The release then links to that page as its source.
A syndicated copy on a news site is a summary you cannot edit. Your own page is the one you can update, expand and link to from the rest of your site, and it is the page a journalist will want to cite. How to build one is covered in the first-party source page.
What can a press release not do?
It is worth being plain about the limits.
- It cannot make an unclear business clear. If your website does not say what you do, where and for whom, a release will not fix that.
- It cannot manufacture authority. Hundreds of syndicated copies are not hundreds of endorsements. They are copies of your own words.
- It cannot guarantee rankings, media coverage or AI citations. No distribution service can.
What it can do is add a true, specific, dated fact to the public record, carried by many sites at once, and give independent writers a reason to add their own reporting. The difference between that reach and genuine editorial coverage is the subject of syndication vs earned coverage.
When should you write one?
Write a release when something has actually changed: a launch, a new location, original research, a partnership, a senior hire, a milestone you can show the basis for. If you cannot state the news in one sentence that contains a name, a date and a fact, it is probably not ready yet.
The third post in this series, is my news worth a press release?, walks through how to tell.
MEDIA:ON Editorial. Written and reviewed by the MEDIA:ON editorial team, who edit every release before it files.