I would distribute it to the machines that answer your customers, not to a wire. If you are a small business with a concrete fact to announce and customers who ask AI assistants what to buy or who to call, publish a permanent page under your own verified domain, in the discovery files the crawlers read, with tracking that tells you when an assistant quotes it. A wire still makes sense in a few cases, and I cover them below. What that route costs and includes is on the press release distribution for small businesses page.
Why I came at this from Shopify, not PR
I came to press releases from Shopify, not PR. When I help a shop owner get a foothold in their niche, the established brands already own the search results and the ad budgets. So I searched "press release distribution for small business" the way an owner would and found the same five results everyone finds: two guides and three services, eReleases, Pressat and JournoLink.
All three services sell the old meaning of distribution, which is getting a release in front of journalists and news sites. None of them mentions AI search at all. I expected some pickup when I started tracking what actually happens to a release. What I found was that the reader has changed. In a month of tracking, not one visit to a release came from a news outlet, and the pages were being read by AI crawlers within hours.
What the tracking shows
In the 30 days to late October 2026 the Pressonify newsroom was fetched 3,659 times by AI crawlers and viewed 412 times by people.
- Of the last 9 releases we published, 8 were cited by an AI engine within a week, most in position 1 of the answer, and the ninth on day 30.
- Of the 71 citations recorded since 28 September, 64 came from Perplexity, 5 from Gemini and 2 from Claude.
- Crawlers arrive on day one. PerplexityBot fetched the GPSBob release 5 times on the day it went live.
- Vulnverse's release was cited 17 times in its first week, NILA-AV 13 times and Ezi Home Services 8 times.
If you want the timing in more detail, I wrote it up in How Long Until AI Cites Your Press Release, and the mechanics are in our guide to getting cited by ChatGPT.
What the other side charges
These are the prices as listed on their own pages on 27 October 2026.
- eReleases sells PR Newswire distribution in three packages: Buzz Builder at $399, Newsmaker at $499 and PR Pro at $699, with 30% off a first release for new customers. It says it has "27,315 happy press release customers" and 28 years in business.
- PR Newswire direct lists about $350 for a local release and $805 national per 400 words, plus a $195 annual membership.
- Pressat sells UK distribution on Press Association and NASDAQ circuits at "one fixed price", with no figure on its home page.
- JournoLink is listed by Google at from $105 per release. Its page could not be opened.
- Pressonify is €9.95 for a company's first release, €49.95 after that, or €200 for a 5-pack at €40 each. The details are on the pricing page.
Why publishing for the engines works for small businesses
The cost of entry is close to nothing, and the incumbents have not shown up to compete for AI citations yet. None of the five pages that rank for the query mentions AI.
A release that names the company and states one plain fact can be the only well-structured page on the internet that answers "who is this company", so the engine quotes it. PlantGift, a plant gift shop I run, was recommended by Perplexity over Interflora for "free plant gift delivery Europe" on the strength of one release and one page on its own site that said the same thing. The full story is in How Perplexity Recommended PlantGift Over Interflora.
When a wire still makes sense
- A listed company has regulatory disclosures that must go through a recognised circuit. Pressat says so on its page for UK and EU listed companies.
- A business whose customers are reporters on a specific beat, not buyers asking an assistant, needs the reporters.
- A business with nothing concrete to say gets nothing from either route.
If you need PR Newswire, eReleases resells it from $399.
Rules of thumb for your release
Choose the route by who you need to reach
Pick one: a journalist you can name, a wire for a disclosure, or the AI assistant your customer asks.
Put the company name in the headline
17 of the 20 questions we check per release are brand questions. Two releases with brand-less headlines had 0 citations after 6 days until the titles were fixed. If you want help with wording, try the free headline generator.
State one fact a machine can quote word for word
A price, a date, a place. Write the About paragraph as the answer to "who is this company". Then say the same fact on your own website so the two sources agree.
Do not pay for guaranteed syndication
A guarantee that your text appears on pages nobody reads is not a result. And never publish a claim you cannot stand behind, because the engine's trust in the page is the whole asset.
The verdict
If you have a concrete fact and customers who ask AI assistants, publish for the engines. Expect crawlers within hours, citations within about a week, mostly on Perplexity as of October 2026, and almost no human traffic to the page itself. Do not expect journalists. Pressonify does not email them and is not a newswire. If you are a listed company with a disclosure, use a recognised circuit.
The honest version of "press release distribution for small business" in 2026 is this: distribute to the machines that answer your customers, measure it, and keep the money you would have given a wire. When you are ready, the press release distribution for small businesses page has the price and the steps, or you can generate your first release straight away.