A video doing the rounds on TikTok this week makes a simple promise. Pay about $80 for a press release, call yourself the top expert in your field, and Google's AI will repeat it to anyone who asks.
The example in the video is a marketer whose press release describes him as a leading expert in a niche SEO topic. Ask Google who the top expert in that niche is, and the AI Overview names him, citing the release.
It's a clever trick. It also tells you a lot about how AI answers are built, and why most businesses shouldn't copy it.
How the trick works
Press release distribution services push one article out to dozens of news-style websites at once. Single releases start at around $80 with smaller wires such as AB Newswire. EIN Presswire's basic release costs $149.
The method in the video has three steps. Put the phrase you want to own at the start of the headline, the subheading and the first sentence. Make the claim in plain words, such as 'the top expert in X'. Then let the wire copy it across enough sites that it looks like a widely reported fact.
For a narrow question that nobody else has written about, that can be enough. Google's AI looks for pages that answer the question directly. A press release that says exactly what the question asks, repeated on many sites, is an easy source to lift from.
Why it works at all
AI answers don't check whether a claim is true. They check whether it's stated clearly, repeated, and found on pages that look credible.
We saw the same pattern when we looked at paid 'best of' lists. In our study of what AI engines cite when they recommend firms, the sources that won were the ones that answered the question in the plainest words, not the ones with the most authority.
A self-written press release exploits that gap. It works best on questions with almost no competition, which is exactly why it looks impressive in a video and does much less for a real business in a real market.
What Google's rules say
Google's spam policies list, as an example of link spam, "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites". Paid links are fine if they're marked as sponsored or nofollow. Keyword-stuffed links in paid releases are not.
Google also has a policy on site reputation abuse: publishing content on someone else's site mainly to borrow its ranking strength. Many press release sites are built for exactly that, and Google has been demoting them.
Even if nothing gets penalised, the result is fragile. The claim lives on low-value sites that can be dropped from the index at any time. And the first time a prospect asks a follow-up question, the AI has nothing else to say about you.
The bigger risk: being found out
If you sell expertise, your reputation is the product. A potential client who searches your name and finds a release in which you call yourself the best in the world will draw their own conclusions.
It's also easy to spot. The same wording on thirty news-style sites, published on the same day, with no journalist's name on it, looks exactly like what it is.
The honest version that actually works
Press releases aren't the problem. Empty ones are. Here's what we'd do instead, and what we're doing ourselves.
First, release real news. A new product, a client result you're allowed to share, or original research. We're preparing a release for our study of 1,000 UK firms and AI recommendations, because the numbers are new and someone might want to quote them.
Second, let the facts do the talking. Say what you found or what you launched, in the first sentence, in plain words. Don't write 'the leading expert'. Write what you did.
Third, mark paid links properly and don't stuff keywords into the anchor text.
Fourth, fix the sources AI already uses. Your own website, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and directories that are actually cited in your category matter more than any one release.
Check what AI says about you first
Before spending anything on press releases, find out what ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI already say about your business, and which pages they quote. Most firms we test are either missing completely or described with out-of-date facts.
You can check where you stand with our free AI Visibility Score. If you'd like help planning a release around real news, get in touch.