Why your press releases need an update in an AI world (even the good ones)
Cybersecurity comms involves a lot of press releases. Product launches, funding rounds, threat research and partnership news are the bread and butter of the job. But there is a new reader in the mix, and it has different expectations than journalists. AI platforms are increasingly the first stop for buyers researching vendors, and press releases are one of the many sources they use to inform their answers to user queries.
However, most press releases are still written purely for a human editor’s inbox, not for a system that is scanning for facts it can lift and cite. Getting the structure wrong means a valuable release might be passed over in favour of your competitors when it comes to how AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini see the industry.
Structure matters as much as substance
AI systems retrieve chunks of text at a time and usually give the most weight to the opening of each section.
A release that spends two paragraphs on preamble, context, and hype before it gets to the actual announcement works against itself.
The good news is that your human audience is just as keen to get to the point. You can meet the needs of both audiences by ensuring your announcements always lead with the claim, front-load the data, and answer who, what, when, where and why in the opening lines.
With some fine-tuning, a well-written release can meet the needs of journalists as well as informing LLM platforms.
Precision matters too. Vague framing like “the company today announced enhancements to its offering” gives an AI system nothing concrete to extract. Specific, named claims – what the product does, which platforms it covers, what problem it solves – are far more citable.
A short FAQ or bulleted summary of key facts at the end makes a release even easier to parse.
Your newsroom is doing more work than you think
Media distribution gets a release out into the world, but it is often the permanent home for that release – your own newsroom or press page – that AI retrieval systems return to later. Pages that lack substance, those that are buried in your site map, or hard for automated searches to crawl are losing value from coverage you have already earned.
It’s worth double-checking that your press releases live somewhere accessible and aren’t gated or formatted in PDFs that likely won’t be retrieved by AI. A well-maintained newsroom becomes a durable reference point, not just an archive.
A small change with a big payoff
Adding AI into the mix doesn’t change what makes a release newsworthy, just how you write it once the news value is there. A handful of structural habits, applied consistently, mean the releases you are already writing start working harder for you in places you cannot yet measure.
The changing role of press releases is also just one small piece of a much bigger shift in how AI visibility works for cybersecurity vendors.
If you want the full picture, our new eBook digs into what else is changing and what to do about it. Get your copy below and contact our team to learn more.