According to a Muck Rack analysis of over one million AI-generated citations, citations tied to press releases distributed through major wire services increased fivefold between July and December 2025. For a format that most communications teams had quietly started treating as an afterthought, that is a significant number. It points to something changing in how these documents are being read, stored, and reused well after the original publish date.
The reason has less to do with press releases becoming more popular and more to do with what AI tools are actually looking for when they pull information. A press release is structured, dateable, and attributable. It lives on credible domains and is written in a way that makes specific claims easy to extract. For a system trying to find reliable answers quickly, that combination is useful in ways most communications teams have not yet caught up to.
The larger implication is that press releases are beginning to act less like media outreach and more like permanent entries in a company’s digital footprint. Instead of disappearing once the news cycle ends, they continue operating as searchable, attributable sources that AI systems can return to later when generating answers.
When you look at the releases actually getting picked up, they share a few things in common. They are specific rather than broad, grounded in facts rather than brand language, and written in a way that makes it easy to extract a clear claim. They include data, direct quotes, and enough structure that a reader or an LLM can follow the logic without having to work for it. The releases that get skipped tend to read like marketing copy. Wording may sound professional on the surface, but it is too vague to be genuinely informative or helpful. Timing has more impact than most teams expect. Content updated or published within the last 10 months is significantly more likely to be cited. A steady cadence keeps your name in circulation and gives AI something current to work with when a relevant question comes up.
Most teams reach for a press release only when something major happens, but there is a lot of publishable content in between. A proprietary survey, a meaningful company milestone, a founder taking a clear position on an industry shift. Each one creates a dated, attributable entry on a credible domain that AI can find and reference long after it goes out. A company publishing four to six substantive releases a year builds a very different footprint than one that surfaces once every eighteen months. At Zilker Media, we help clients find those moments and put them on the record consistently enough that their name keeps showing up.
If you are not sure how your press activity is translating into AI visibility, our AI Discoverability Audit is designed to show exactly what signals are being recognized and where stronger positioning can be built.