"The press release is dead" has been a headline every year since about 2006, which makes it one of the longest-lived corpses in marketing. The honest answer is more useful than the obituary: press releases stopped doing one job decades ago, and they still do five others that nothing else does as well. Whether they "work" depends entirely on which job you're hiring them for.
The job they no longer do
Let's concede the critics' point first, because it's correct: a press release on its own does not generate news stories anymore. In the fax-machine era, a wire release genuinely was how newsrooms found stories. Today an editor's feed carries hundreds of releases a day, journalists find stories through their own beats and sources, and the odds that a wire release alone produces an earned article are close to zero for a typical business announcement.
If what you want is a journalist writing about you, the release is supporting material and direct pitching is the actual mechanism. Anyone selling distribution as a coverage machine is selling 1998.
So why do sophisticated companies still send them? Five jobs.
Job 1: The permanent record
A distributed release is a dated, third-party-hosted, verbatim statement of fact: we raised this much, we launched this product, we hired this person, on this date. That record does quiet work for years:
- Investors doing diligence find a clean announcement trail instead of piecing history from your blog.
- Partners and enterprise customers verify claims against something that isn't your own website.
- Your own future announcements have something authoritative to link back to.
No tweet, blog post, or LinkedIn update carries the same evidentiary weight, because none of them passed through third-party editorial review onto independent sites. This job alone justifies a $99–$300 distribution for any material company event.
Job 2: Owning your search results
Search your company name. For a small business, that page is often thin: your site, your socials, maybe a directory listing. A distributed release adds dated news results to that page, on recognizable domains, within hours. That matters at two moments:
- When customers check you out. Third-party news results for your name read as legitimacy in a way your own site can't.
- When something needs context. A company with a healthy trail of announcements is much harder to misrepresent than one whose entire search footprint is its own homepage.
Individual placements decay (some portals purge wire content after 30–90 days, as what happens after you submit explains), but the indexed record and the durable placements persist.
Job 3: Being citable to AI systems
The newest job, and increasingly the quietly important one. When someone asks an AI assistant "what does [your company] do?" or "who are the main players in [your niche]?", the answer is assembled from sources the system considers credible, and wire-distributed news is squarely in that corpus. A company with zero distributed releases is, to these systems, a company with mostly self-published claims.
Nobody can promise you AI citations, any more than they can promise coverage, and you should distrust anyone who does. But the asymmetry is real: releases are cheap, the systems demonstrably ingest news syndication, and the companies showing up in AI answers about their categories are disproportionately the ones with a public news trail. It's the same "record" job as #1, extended to a new reader that never sleeps.
Job 4: The credibility surface
The placements themselves (AP News affiliates, MSN, Benzinga, market sites) become raw material for your own marketing:
- The "as seen on" logo bar that measurably lifts landing-page conversion.
- Third-party links for your press page, pitch decks, and sales follow-ups.
- Proof-of-legitimacy for app store reviewers, ad platform verifications, and marketplace onboarding, all of which literally ask for news coverage links.
Is a syndicated placement the same as an earned article? No, and don't pretend otherwise to anyone who'd check. But for the dozens of small trust decisions customers and platforms make about you, a real placement report beats a bare homepage every time.
Job 5: Disclosure and announcement hygiene
Some announcements need a formal, timestamped, widely-distributed statement regardless of whether anyone writes about it: funding closes, acquisitions, executive changes, regulatory milestones, security incidents. Public companies are legally required to use wire distribution for material news, and private companies borrow the same machinery because it works. The release is the canonical version of events, the one thing every partner, employee, and reporter can be pointed to, and having it prevents the game of telephone that otherwise fills the gap. A structured template exists for each of these announcement types precisely because the format is the point: a funding announcement has conventions, and following them is what makes it legible.
What "working" looks like, concretely
Reset expectations to match the actual jobs. For a well-built release on a $150–$300 distribution:
- 100–400 placements in the report, a handful on recognizable domains. For the specifics, see the cost guide.
- News results for your company name within 24–48 hours.
- Links and logos you'll reuse for years.
- Earned articles: zero, unless you pitched. That's not failure. It was never the product.
When they don't work at all
The five jobs share one dependency: there has to be actual news. A release about nothing ("company continues doing what it does") creates a record of nothing, ranks for nothing, and gives AI systems nothing to cite. The failure mode isn't the format. It's distributing non-announcements because a monthly release quota felt professional. One real announcement per quarter beats twelve empty ones, at a twelfth of the cost.
Bottom line
Do press releases still work? For getting journalists to write about you: no, and they haven't for years. That job belongs to pitching. For creating the permanent record, owning your name's search results, feeding AI systems credible source material, building a credibility surface, and disclosing material news properly: yes, better than anything else at the price. Hire them for those five jobs, skip them when there's no news, and ignore both the hype and the obituaries.
Have actual news to announce? [See how RepuPR plans and distributes it](/how-it-works), with [public pricing](/pricing) and no sales call.