Use a press release when the goal is getting journalists to notice and write about something, and a blog post when the goal is having your own, fully controlled version of the story that ranks on your own site. They are not interchangeable, and treating a wire-distributed release like an SEO tactic, or a blog post like a substitute for media outreach, wastes the strength of both.
What actually happens to the links inside a wire-distributed press release?
They are not supposed to carry SEO weight, and Google says so directly. Google's current spam policies name "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites" as a form of link spam, under the advertorials and native advertising section of its search documentation. The exception the same page gives is a link "qualified with a rel='nofollow' or rel='sponsored' attribute," which is exactly what reputable wire services already attach. This is not a new rule. A Google Webmaster Central hangout from 2013, reported by Search Engine Land, has Google's John Mueller comparing press release links to paid advertisements and recommending nofollow even on plain, unoptimized ones, to be safe.
The same Google documentation is careful to separate the links from the service itself. Its site reputation policy says "wire service or press release service sites" are not treated as inconsistent with that policy, meaning distributing through PR Newswire, Business Wire or a similar network is not, on its own, a penalty risk. The risk is specifically in expecting a followed, keyword-optimized link buried in release copy to move your rankings. It will not, and has not been expected to for well over a decade.
So what is a press release actually good for?
Reaching the small number of people whose job is to decide what becomes news: journalists, editors and the wire's own distribution network. A release's value is discovery, not links. PR Newswire describes its own network on its homepage as reaching "500K+ media outlets, newsrooms and influencers worldwide," which is the actual product a wire service sells: simultaneous reach into inboxes and newsroom systems a single company could never build on its own. A release is also a dated, formal record that something specific happened, which is useful when you need a timestamped, citable version of an announcement for legal, financial or regulatory reasons, not just a marketing one.
What a release is bad at is nuance. Wire services and the outlets that pick up releases expect a tight, factual structure: what happened, who is involved, a quote, boilerplate. That structure is exactly why a press release is the wrong format for a long explainer, an opinion, or a complex technical story that needs room to breathe.
What is a blog post actually good for?
Owning the full, permanent, linkable version of your own story, on your own domain, with no character limit and no nofollow requirement on your internal links. A blog post on your own site can rank for the long-tail questions people actually search, can be updated after the fact if a detail changes, and can link to other pages on your own site with full SEO value, something a wire-distributed release structurally cannot do. It is also the better home for an announcement that is interesting but not really news: a product update, a milestone that matters to your existing customers more than to the general public, or a point of view a trade reporter would call an op-ed rather than hard news.
The tradeoff is reach. A blog post sits on your own site waiting for someone to find it. It does not, by itself, land in front of a single journalist, and it will not get your announcement into outlets that a founder actually wants coverage in unless you separately pitch it or pay to distribute it.
Why wire services exist even though their links carry no SEO weight
Because reach and SEO are different jobs, and a wire service was never selling the second one, whatever some distribution packages implied in the 2010s. The case for paying for distribution rests on getting your news in front of the right inboxes fast, particularly for time-sensitive announcements like a funding round, a leadership change, or a regulatory filing where the audience is specifically journalists, analysts and investors who monitor wire feeds. That is a real, specific audience a blog post sitting on your own domain simply does not reach on its own.
A practical rule: pick by audience, not by habit
Ask who actually needs to see this first.
- Journalists and analysts need to see it, and it is genuinely time-sensitive. A funding round, a signed partnership, a regulatory milestone, an executive change. Use a release, distributed through a wire service or sent directly to a built media list, and back it with a blog post on your own site that holds the full version with more context and internal links.
- Your existing audience needs to see it, and it is not really news to anyone else. A product update, a feature launch, a culture or hiring post, a longer point of view. Use a blog post. A release for this kind of update usually gets ignored by the outlets it is sent to and does nothing for your own site's SEO either.
- It needs to exist as a formal, timestamped record more than it needs an audience. A compliance disclosure or a technical correction. A release, even with limited pickup, creates the dated public record a blog post does not carry the same weight for.
What about doing both?
This is the default for anything with real news value. Send the release to reach media and wire pickup, and publish the fuller version as a blog post on your own domain at the same time, with the release itself linking back to it for anyone who wants more detail than wire format allows. How a partnership announcement is actually structured is a good template for this split: a short, factual release for the wire, and a longer post that can carry quotes, data and context a release format has no room for.
Does this change for AI visibility rather than traditional SEO?
Not much, and for the same underlying reason. An AI assistant answering a question about your company is weighing the same kind of signals a search engine already does: independent coverage, consistency across sources, and which pages look authoritative rather than self-published. A wire-distributed release that gets picked up and written about by an actual outlet contributes to that record the same way any earned mention does. A release that sits unread on a wire service's own site, with no pickup, contributes very little, the same way it always did for traditional search. The format was never the thing doing the work. The pickup was.
The direct answer, for anyone who read this far
Pick the format by who needs to see the news and how fast, not by which one feels more official. A press release is for reaching journalists and getting discovered by a wire network, with links that are not supposed to carry SEO value and were never meant to. A blog post is for owning the full, permanent version of the story on your own site, where it can actually rank. For anything with real news value, publish both: the release to reach media, the post to hold the detail and the links. If you are not sure which your next announcement needs, tell us what you are planning to announce.
