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📝 By Pressonify Team 📅 October 18, 2025 ⏱️ 10 min read
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Why Your Press Releases Are Invisible to AI—And How Pressonify Fixes That

The rules of media visibility have changed. Here's how we're building press releases for the Citation Economy.

Last month, we analysed 680 million AI citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Grok. What we found should concern every communications professional: traditional press releases are increasingly invisible to the systems people actually use to find information.

When someone asks ChatGPT "What's the best project management software for startups?" or Perplexity "Which Irish companies are leading in AI?", they're not clicking through ten blue links anymore. They're getting a synthesised answer—and if your brand isn't cited in that answer, you might as well not exist.

Welcome to the Citation Economy. And welcome to why we built Pressonify differently.

The Problem: AI Search Engines Don't Read Like Humans

Here's what most PR platforms get wrong: they're still optimising for a world where Google shows ten blue links and journalists manually scan press releases.

But that world is disappearing fast:

  • 60% of searches now terminate without a click to any website
  • ChatGPT processes 5.9 billion visits monthly—more than most news sites combined
  • 47% of Google searches now show an AI Overview before any traditional results
  • By 2028, AI-driven search is projected to surpass traditional search traffic entirely

The uncomfortable truth? AI systems don't "read" your press release the way a journalist does. They parse, extract, and synthesise. They're looking for structured data, entity consistency, and citable facts—not clever headlines or flowery prose.

And each AI platform has radically different preferences for what it trusts.

How Different AI Platforms Choose What to Cite

This is where it gets interesting. Our research revealed that the major AI search engines operate like completely different ecosystems:

ChatGPT heavily favours Wikipedia (27% of citations) and established news sources. It almost entirely ignores Reddit and user-generated content (<0.5%). It wants authoritative, encyclopaedic content with verifiable facts.

Google AI Overviews takes the opposite approach—43% of its citations come from blogs, with Reddit and community content making up a significant 5%. It rewards conversational, accessible content that real people engage with.

Perplexity sits somewhere in the middle, with a strong preference for expert sites (like NerdWallet in finance or ConsumerReports for products) and inline citations. It values content that shows its working.

Grok integrates directly with X (Twitter), pulling real-time social signals and trending conversations into its responses.

A single press release format cannot optimise for all of these simultaneously. That's why most press releases fail in the Citation Economy—they're optimised for none of them.

The Pressonify Approach: AI Discovery Protocol (ADP)

We didn't build another press release distribution service. We built an AI discoverability engine.

At the core of Pressonify is our AI Discovery Protocol—a systematic approach to making your news citable across every major AI platform. Here's how it works:

1. Multi-Format Content Generation

Every press release you create with Pressonify automatically generates three optimised variants:

The Authority Version — Structured for ChatGPT and fact-checking AI systems. Encyclopaedic tone, clear attribution, front-loaded answers to who/what/when/where/why. This version includes embedded FAQ schema that AI systems can extract directly into their responses.

The Conversational Version — Optimised for Google AI and Gemini. Blog-style accessibility, community-friendly language, designed to appear alongside the Reddit discussions and expert blogs that Google's AI prefers.

The Real-Time Version — Built for Grok and social-first AI systems. Trending hooks, quotable soundbites, and formatting that works when syndicated to X and LinkedIn.

You write once. Our 16-agent architecture transforms your announcement into platform-specific content that each AI system recognises as citable.

2. Comprehensive Schema Markup (Automatic)

Here's a statistic that changed how we think about press releases: schema-enhanced pages are 30% more likely to appear in rich results, and AI systems demonstrably prefer structured data when building their responses.

Most PR platforms either ignore schema markup entirely or implement basic versions that miss the point.

Pressonify automatically generates:

  • NewsArticle schema with datePublished, author, headline, and description—exactly what AI systems scan for when determining source authority
  • Organization schema linking your brand entity consistently across every mention
  • FAQPage schema embedded directly in your release, making your content extractable for voice assistants and AI-generated answers
  • SpeakableSpecification markup for voice search optimisation—because Alexa and Google Assistant are AI search too

You don't configure this. You don't think about it. It happens automatically for every release.

3. The llms.txt Standard (Future-Proofing)

You may not have heard of llms.txt yet. You will.

Proposed in late 2024, llms.txt is essentially a "robots.txt for AI"—a standardised file that tells AI systems exactly what content matters most on your site. Think of it as giving ChatGPT and Perplexity a curated reading list instead of forcing them to crawl your entire website.

Here's the honest assessment: no major AI company has formally adopted llms.txt yet. Google has explicitly said they have "no plans to support" it.

But OpenAI's GPTBot is already hitting /llms.txt endpoints on websites that have them. The standard is being discussed seriously in technical circles. And implementing it is low-effort with significant potential upside.

Pressonify generates an llms.txt file for every client newsroom, automatically updated with each new release. When (not if) AI systems start formally supporting this standard, our clients will already be optimised.

4. Entity Consistency Engine

AI systems build profiles of brands and topics based on how consistently entities appear across the web. If your press release mentions "Acme Corp" but your LinkedIn post says "ACME Corporation" and your website says "Acme"—you're fragmenting your entity signal.

Our platform enforces entity consistency across every distribution channel. Same brand name. Same product names. Same key terminology. Every time.

This sounds simple. It's actually one of the highest-impact optimisations for AI discoverability—and almost nobody does it systematically.

5. Strategic Distribution Matrix

Here's something the research made crystal clear: where your press release appears matters more than ever for AI citation.

Traditional wire services (PR Newswire, Business Wire) still have value for journalist reach and SEO backlinks. But AI systems show distinct preferences for certain source domains.

Our analysis found that press releases appearing on finance.yahoo.com and businessinsider.com generate significantly higher AI citation rates than those distributed only through traditional wires. LinkedIn articles get cited by Google AI. X threads influence Grok.

Pressonify's distribution isn't just about reach—it's about strategic placement on the specific platforms that AI systems trust and cite.

The Numbers That Matter: Position-Citation Correlation

We haven't abandoned traditional SEO. We've built on top of it.

Here's why: 40.58% of AI citations come from content that already ranks in Google's top 10 results. The correlation between traditional search ranking and AI citation probability is remarkably strong:

  • Position #1 in Google → 33.07% AI citation rate
  • Position #10 in Google → 13.04% AI citation rate
  • Beyond page one → 75% reduction in citation probability

AI systems use search engine indexes as their primary source pool. If Google hasn't identified your content as authoritative, most AI systems won't find it either.

That's why Pressonify press releases are built SEO-first, then enhanced for AI discoverability. We're not replacing the fundamentals—we're extending them into the new paradigm.

What This Means for Your Next Announcement

The press release isn't dead. But the press release that ignores AI discoverability is dying.

Every announcement you make is now competing for two types of visibility: the traditional media pickup and Google ranking you've always optimised for, plus the AI citation that increasingly determines whether your brand appears when people ask questions.

At Pressonify, we've rebuilt the press release from the ground up for this reality. Not as an afterthought or add-on feature, but as the core architecture of how we think about news distribution.

Your competitors are still writing press releases for 2015. Their content is invisible to the systems that matter in 2025.

Ready to be discovered?

Pressonify.ai is an AI-powered press release platform built for the Citation Economy. Our 16-agent architecture transforms your announcements into AI-discoverable, multi-platform content that gets cited—not just published.

[Get Started] | [See How It Works] | [Talk to Our Team]

Related Reading:
- The AI Discovery Protocol: Technical Deep Dive
- Schema Markup for Press Releases: A Complete Guide
- Why llms.txt Matters for Media Relations
- Case Study: How [Client] Increased AI Citations by 47%

Last updated: December 2025