AI assistants such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode build their answers from pages they can retrieve, and they tend to lift sentences that state a clear, specific fact with a name attached. So write your release so its key sentences still make sense when copied out on their own, then publish it on pages that search crawlers can read.

How AI answers find their sources

An assistant answering a question about your company usually starts with a search. Google's guidance on AI features in Search explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode may run several related searches across subtopics, which it calls “query fan-out,” and link to supporting pages next to the answer. To be one of those links, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet. No special AI text files or schema markup are required.

ChatGPT search and Perplexity run their own crawlers for the same job. So your release needs two things: pages those crawlers can reach, and sentences an assistant can reuse without guessing what they mean.

Compare two openings. “Pipewren is thrilled to announce an exciting new chapter” gives an assistant nothing to repeat. “Pipewren, a Denver company that makes invoicing software for plumbers and electricians, launched a mobile app on September 15, 2026” answers who, what, where and when, and it can be quoted with credit. Pipewren is made up, and we'll use it as the example throughout.

How to write sentences an assistant can quote

There's some research behind this. In a 2024 study on generative engine optimization (GEO), researchers rewrote web pages in different ways and measured how visible each version became in AI-generated answers. Adding statistics, quotations and citations of credible sources worked best, lifting visibility by 30% to 40% on one of the study's two main measures. The tests ran on the researchers' own engine and on Perplexity, so treat the numbers as a rough guide.

Put the news in the first sentence

Your lead should say what happened, who did it, where and when. If the first sentence is all a reader sees inside an AI answer, they should still get the news. Company history can wait until the third paragraph.

Use one name for the company, and say what it does

Give the full company name, what it does and where it's based early on, then keep the name identical throughout. If the headline says “Pipewren,” the body shouldn't drift to “PW” and then “the Denver startup.” An assistant has to work out that all three mean the same business, so don't make it guess. Product names need the same care, down to the capital letters.

Give every number a unit, a date and a comparison

“Invoices grew 18%” is hard to use because nobody knows the period or the baseline. “Pipewren customers sent 18% more invoices in the first half of 2026 than in the first half of 2025, according to the company's billing data” can be quoted as it stands. If a figure comes from someone else, name the source in the same sentence.

Quote a named person who says something useful

Give each quote to a real person with their full name and job title, and make it carry information, such as the reason behind a decision. “We're thrilled to bring this to more customers” could come from any company on any day. “We built the app to work offline because our customers write invoices in basements with no signal” explains a choice an assistant can attribute.

Add a short key facts list

Near the end of the body, list 4 to 6 facts as bullets: what was announced, the date, price and availability, location, and who it's for. “Available in the US and Canada from September 15, 2026” works on its own. “Wider availability than ever” doesn't.

Answer the questions people actually ask

Think about what someone would ask an assistant after hearing your news: what it costs, when they can get it, whether it works in their country, who it's for. Answer one or two of those plainly. “The app costs $12 per user per month and is available in the US and Canada” answers two likely questions in one sentence.

Write the boilerplate as a fact sheet

Fill the “About” paragraph with facts: the name, what the company does in plain words, the year it was founded, its headquarters and its website. Leave out words like “leading” and “innovative.” Nobody can check them, so a careful source has no reason to repeat them. Match the description you used in the lead, and keep it identical from release to release.

A quick test. Paste any important sentence from your release into an empty document. If someone who has never heard of your company can't tell who it's about and what happened, rewrite it.

Publish it where crawlers can read it

An assistant can only cite a page it can reach, so give every release two homes.

The first is distribution to news sites that search engines crawl and index. That puts the same facts on independent domains and gives search-based assistants more places to find them. For the SEO side of those placements, see whether press releases raise domain authority.

The second is a newsroom page on your own site. Publish the full release there as HTML text, not only as a PDF or image, and link to it from your news or blog section. Google lists text content and internal links among the SEO basics that still apply to its AI features.

Don't block AI search crawlers by accident

If your robots.txt blocks AI bots wholesale, perhaps to keep content out of model training, you may be hiding from AI search too. OpenAI's crawler documentation separates the two: OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, while GPTBot collects content that may be used for training. The settings are independent, so you can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot. Sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers.

Perplexity's search crawler is PerplexityBot. For Google's AI features, the control is Googlebot, the same crawler as regular Search. Ask whoever runs your website to check robots.txt and any CDN or firewall rules.

Add structured data to your newsroom

Google says no special schema.org markup is needed for its AI features, so treat structured data as housekeeping. Standard Article or NewsArticle markup can help Google understand a newsroom post and show better title, image and date information in results. Google's Article structured data guide lists the properties, and the markup should match the visible text on the page.

What to cut before you publish

  • Vague superlatives. “Revolutionary” and “best-in-class” are claims with no evidence behind them. In the GEO study, rewriting pages to sound more persuasive and authoritative produced no significant improvement.
  • Keyword stuffing. Repeating “invoicing app for plumbers” six times reads badly, and the same study found it offered little to no improvement in AI answers.
  • Walls of adjectives. Delete the adjectives from a sentence. If it still says the same thing, they weren't doing any work.
  • Claims without a source. “The fastest-growing app in its category” needs a named source and a date, or it needs to go.

See it in practice

A format is easier to copy once you've seen it in finished releases. This collection of press release examples cited by AI shows real brand releases that an AI assistant with web search cited as sources in a dated check, with notes on what made each one easy to quote. Keep one open next to your draft and compare the two line by line, starting with the lead.

What nobody can promise

No one can guarantee that ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google will cite a particular release. These systems choose sources question by question, and they change often. What you control is how the release is written and where it's published, and getting both right raises the odds.

Get the release out

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