The Death of the Press Release Is Overstated

The Rumor

For years, marketing departments have whispered the same refrain: the press release is dead.

Social media killed it. Content marketing killed it. AI killed it. Journalists ignore them. Nobody reads them. They’re SEO spam. They’re marketing theater.

The rumors got loud enough that some companies stopped writing them.

That was a mistake.

The Reality

The press release isn’t dead. It’s morphed. The companies winning at earned media and search engine optimization aren’t abandoning press releases—they’re using them smarter.

Real journalists still read press releases. Journalists use them. Press releases still generate backlinks that power your SEO. The format still works because it solves a specific problem that no other tool has replaced: getting real news into the public record and the search index at scale.

The confusion came from oversaturation. For two decades, companies treated press releases like spray-and-pray marketing. Every product tweak, every feature update, every vaguely positive event got a release. The format got abused. Journalists learned to ignore the noise.

But the format itself didn’t fail. The deployment strategy failed.

Why Journalists Never Stopped Using Them

A journalist working on a deadline doesn’t start with social media or company blogs. She starts with what’s official: company announcements, regulatory filings, press releases.

Press releases serve multiple functions simultaneously:

Authority source. A formal press release is on record. It’s attributed. It carries weight in an article. “The company announced” is better than “the company reportedly.” That distinction matters for credibility.

Source material. Reporters use releases as the foundation for research. They pull quotes, facts, dates, and context. A well-structured release with concrete details saves hours of reporter time hunting for basic information.

Accessibility. Small companies without PR teams get coverage through press releases that might never happen through direct outreach. A journalist searching for “Series A funding in martech” finds your release in the newswire index and builds a story around it.

Time stamp. Press releases create a dated record. That matters. Journalists verify when something happened by finding the original announcement. That’s how facts get locked down.

Journalists didn’t stop reading releases. They just stopped reading the bad ones.

The SEO Signal That Won’t Die

Press releases create a specific SEO signal: third-party verification of your news.

When you publish a press release through a major newswire service—Cision, eSpeed, PR Newswire, or others—those sites index the content. Those sites have domain authority. Those sites link to your site.

That’s a backlink. Google sees it. Google sees that a third party (the newswire) considered your news noteworthy enough to index and distribute. That’s a signal that your announcement is legitimate and relevant.

The signal gets stronger if the release gets picked up by other news outlets. Your own website link carries weight in Google’s ranking algorithm. Earned links from news organizations carry even more weight.

This is why AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and search engine optimization both reward press releases. Your release becomes source material for other articles, videos, and search snippets. Every mention and link is a vote for your expertise and newsworthiness.

A company launching a product can write a blog post. That’s content. A company syndicating a press release announces news. Google treats those differently.

The Companies Getting It Right

Look at any software company doing well in organic search. Look at any hardware company scaling. Look at any B2B startup with real inbound.

They publish press releases. Not constantly. Not for everything. But for the moments that matter.

When Figma raised $200 million in Series E, they published a press release. When Stripe expanded to new markets, they announced it. When HubSpot acquired a new company, the news went out through wires.

These aren’t dinosaur companies clinging to outdated tactics. These are modern companies that understand the SEO and PR mechanics well enough to use the right tool for the right job.

Contrast that with companies that abandon press releases entirely. They lose something: the third-party amplification, the backlinks, the news index presence, the journalist source material. They replace it with blog posts and social posts. Both are valid formats, but they don’t create the same signal.

The best approach is not either-or. It’s both-and.

A product launch gets a press release AND a blog post. The release goes to newswires and journalists. The blog post lives on your site and goes deep into the thinking and customer benefits. Different purposes. Different audiences. Different SEO effects.

The Rules for Not Failing

The death rumors persisted because too many companies got the execution wrong.

Rule One: Press releases are for news, not marketing. If your announcement wouldn’t make a journalist’s story interesting, don’t write a release. Launching a feature? Maybe. Announcing a partnership with a major company? Yes. Hitting an internal milestone? Probably not.

Rule Two: Write for journalists, not keywords. A press release stuffed with search terms is a press release nobody will read. Journalists smell marketing copy from a mile away. Write like a newswire editor. Lead with the news. Quote a human executive. Provide context. Include details that make the story real.

Rule Three: Distribute through real channels. Dumping your release on your website doesn’t count. Use a newswire service. Those services get your release into journalist databases, news aggregators, and search indexes. That’s where the signal comes from.

Rule Four: Timing matters. Publish your release the same time you’re making the announcement public—not weeks later. Journalists move fast. If your news is in a press release but not in your email, your blog, or your social channels on the same day, you’ve already lost momentum.

Rule Five: Frequency creates noise. One strong release per quarter beats four weak ones per month. Journalists remember companies that announce real news. They ignore companies that treat releases like marketing spam.

What This Means for Your Strategy

If you’ve abandoned press releases, bring them back. Not for everything. For real news.

Funding announcements. Major partnerships. New product lines. Significant hires. Awards. Expansions. The moments that matter.

Write them well. Distribute them through newswires. Combine them with blog content and social amplification. Track the backlinks and the search rankings that follow.

The press release isn’t dead. It’s just not a marketing tool anymore. It’s a PR tool. It’s a search engine signal. It’s source material for journalists.

And that’s exactly what makes it work.

The Bottom Line

Every few years, a new marketing channel kills the old one. Email died to social media. Websites died to apps. Blogs died to video. Each time, the “dead” channel adapted instead of disappearing.

Press releases are the same. They’ve been around for over a hundred years because they solve a real problem: getting news to the people and systems that matter.

Journalism, search engines, and public record all rely on them. Rumors of their death are, as Mark Twain supposedly said about his own death, greatly exaggerated.

The companies winning right now know this. They use press releases when it makes sense. They skip them when it doesn’t. They combine them with other tactics. And they win more coverage and better search visibility as a result.

That’s not a relic of the 20th century. That’s a tactic that works.