Everything You Need to Know About Newsworthy.ai, Distribution, and SEO

I’ve been in the newswire business since 1997, when I launched PRWeb.com — the first SEO-optimized online distribution platform designed to drive traffic to press releases. We helped hundreds of thousands of companies gain online visibility at a time when search engines were still new. Back then, press releases were a powerful SEO tool, and we knew it.

But times have changed.

Search engines are smarter. Strategies that once worked — like blasting the same press release to hundreds of sites — now hurt more than help. Recognizing these changes we’re once again leading the industry forward with Newsworthy.ai by rethinking how distribution works in today’s SEO and AI-driven world.

🚫 Yesterday’s Strategy: Posting to 500+ Sites

Not long ago, syndicating a press release to hundreds of websites was considered a smart tactic. Today, it’s a liability. That kind of mass distribution creates duplicate content issues, which hurts your chances of ranking in search results.

At Newsworthy.ai, we’ve embraced Google’s E-E-A-T philosophy: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. SEO now favors content that is relevant, credible, and vertically aligned with its audience.

That’s why we created Newsramp.com — a companion platform purpose-built for vertical alignment and deeper content integrity. And here’s the kicker: any press release newswire can use it and a growing number of them do. We built Newsramp.com for the entire industry to help improve press release distribution in the age of AI and modern SEO.

✅ Targeted, Smart Distribution — Not a Firehose

While we have access to hundreds of media endpoints, your release won’t be blasted indiscriminately. Instead, our AI ensures it reaches the right audiences. Let’s say your press release is about an HR technology company based in Texas — we’ll align your distribution with HR, technology, and regional news channels that are most relevant.

Yes, your release will still hit general news streams, but more importantly, it will be curated for the verticals where it has the best chance to matter.

We take it even further: rather than reposting your press release word-for-word, our AI generates unique bylined articles and other content formats based on your original press release. These are editorial-quality pieces — not just clones — and we never post the same content to more than one site. Where appropriate, we include your original backlinks.

🔗 A Word About Backlinks

If your primary reason for using a newswire is to build backlinks, Newsworthy.ai may not be the right fit. There are plenty of services that will take your money and post your release on spammy sites with dofollow links. We’re not one of them.

Yes, you can include links in your release. But if that’s your only goal, you won’t find a sympathetic ear here.

I say this as someone who made a small fortune in the early days of SEO. But the backlink game is over. Today, it's about visibility and discoverability, not link volume, not domain authority. Your audience, search engines and AI are all looking for credible, context-rich content, not link manipulation.

🚨 Links ≠ Visibility

We’ve learned that many platforms now deprioritize content with too many outbound links. Why? Because Google’s free traffic is scarce, and once a site gets a visitor, it wants to keep them — not send them away. That means your link-heavy press release might not get surfaced at all.

Visibility matters more than backlinks. That’s the reality now — and we’ve built our platforms to help you win it.

🔍 Brand Mentions > Backlinks

In the age of AI and agentic search, brand mentions have more weight than backlinks. Google, ChatGPT, and other large language models already know how to associate your brand with your website.

The key is feeding these models with original, high-quality content. The more your brand is mentioned in relevant, trustworthy contexts, the more likely it is to show up in AI-generated responses.

So stop obsessing over anchor text and start focusing on how often and in what context your brand appears in the digital conversation.

🤖 AI Is in Our DNA

When Mark and I founded Newsworthy.ai in early 2022 (ancient history in AI terms), we made AI a core part of the mission. It’s in our name — Newsworthy for your story’s relevance, and AI for the technology that powers our distribution.

Here’s what we use AI for:

• Classifying and tagging press releases by topic and region.
• Curating and creating unique, bylined articles and other content formats for placement.
• Intelligently routing content to the most relevant endpoints.
• Preparing your content for LLM ingestion, increasing its chance of showing up in future GPT and AI queries.
• Translating content to other languages for global audiences.

We're not just using AI to streamline operations — we’re using it to maximize human visibility in a machine-filtered world.

And yes, we’ll even help you optimize your own site to feed this same ecosystem. Just book a time to meet with us.

🔄 Back to the Basics

At the end of the day, it still comes down to the fundamentals:

• Create something worth talking about.
• Craft a compelling story.
• Share it with the right people— in an appropriate format for the platform where they consume it

That’s where we come in. We're building content-safe, SEO-responsible platforms that protect your reputation and your rankings.

You work hard to make your brand newsworthy — we’ll make sure the right people see it.