Usually not, if rankings are the only reason. Paid newswire distribution builds links that Google asks publishers to mark as sponsored or nofollow, and those links are meant to pass no ranking credit. A press release can still be worth sending, but the reason has to be coverage and credibility, not backlinks.
This comes up a lot with founders who just raised a round or shipped something big. Someone quotes them a few thousand dollars for a wire distribution package and promises hundreds of placements. The placements are real. The SEO value attached to them almost never is.
We want to be careful here, because the honest answer is not "press releases are dead". It is that press releases do one job well and a completely different job badly, and most people buy them for the second job.
It puts a piece of news in front of journalists and databases in a format they can use quickly. If a reporter picks it up and writes their own article, you earn a real editorial link. The wire copies themselves are a distribution mechanism, not a ranking asset, and Google treats them accordingly.
The distinction matters more than any tactic in this article. There are two things people call "the press release". One is the announcement you write. The other is the hundreds of near-identical copies that appear on syndication sites within an hour. The first can be very valuable. The second is mostly noise.
Services like PR Newswire, Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, and EIN Presswire all sell that second thing. That is their product, and they are good at it. The mistake is buying reach and then measuring it as if you bought authority.
Google names them directly in its spam policies. The link spam section lists "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites" as an example of link spam. Google then says such links are fine as long as they carry a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute.
Read that twice, because it settles most of the argument. Google is not saying press releases are bad. It is saying that a link you paid to place, with anchor text you chose, is an advertisement. Advertisements are allowed. They just have to be labeled, and once labeled they are not supposed to move rankings.
Google's documentation on qualifying outbound links backs this up. It states that links marked with those rel attributes "will generally not be followed", and that rel="sponsored" is now the preferred value for paid placements. Any vendor selling you keyword-rich anchor text in a wire release is selling something Google has published a policy against.
If you want the longer version of this argument, we covered the general case in our piece on whether backlinks still matter, and the anchor text side of it in our guide to anchor text.
Because a hundred sites publish the same text within the same hour, and Google only needs one version of it. Duplicate copies compete with each other and with your own newsroom page. Google's guidance on syndication says the most effective fix is for partners to block indexing of the content entirely.
Google's canonicalization documentation is unusually blunt about this. It states that "the canonical link element is not recommended for those who want to avoid duplication by syndication partners, because the pages are often very different", and that "the most effective solution is for partners to block indexing of your content". Wire services are not going to block indexing of the pages they sell you. That is the product.
So you end up with your announcement scattered across dozens of low-authority domains, none of which rank, while your own version fights them for the same phrase. The odds were never good to begin with. Ahrefs' 2026 statistics report that only 1.74% of newly published pages reach the top ten within a year, and a syndicated duplicate starts well behind that line.
Not in the way the pitch implies. Properly marked wire links pass no ranking credit by design. They can still bring referral visits and put your name in front of people, and a nofollow link is not a penalty. It simply is not the ranking signal you were sold.
Nofollow links are common and normal. Ahrefs found that 10.6% of backlinks to the top 110,000 sites use nofollow, so having them in your profile is unremarkable. The problem is only ever the expectation attached to them.
There is a second issue nobody mentions in the sales call. Ahrefs also reports that 66.5% of links to sites over nine years old are dead. Syndicated copies get pruned, archived, and deleted constantly. You are paying once for an asset that quietly decays, which is a poor trade even if the links did pass value.
When you have real news and a specific journalist you want to reach. Funding rounds, acquisitions, regulatory approvals, major hires, and genuine product launches all clear that bar. The release is worth it because it gets the facts in front of a reporter in a form they can verify and quote quickly.
It is also worth it for the boring compliance reasons. Public companies and regulated businesses often have to distribute announcements through a recognized wire. That is a legal requirement, not a marketing decision, and nobody should be measuring it against organic traffic.
The third good reason is entity building. Search engines and AI models assemble a picture of your company from many sources. Consistent, factual announcements about who you are and what you do help that picture form correctly. That is a slow benefit and it is real, but it is not a ranking hack.
Lead with the news, not the adjectives. Put the single most interesting fact in the first sentence, include a number a reporter can check, name a person who will actually answer the phone, and keep it under 400 words. Journalists decide in about ten seconds whether to keep reading.
The most common failure we see is a release that buries the news under three paragraphs of positioning. If your announcement is that you doubled headcount and opened an office in Melbourne, say that first. The mission statement can go at the bottom where it belongs, or nowhere at all.
Give the reporter everything they need in one place. That means a plain-language explanation of what your company does, high resolution images they can use without asking, and a link to a page on your own site with more detail. If they have to email you for basics, the story usually dies there.
Then host the release on your own domain as well. This is the part almost everyone skips. Your newsroom page is the version you control, the version you can link to internally, and the version that should be canonical for your own announcement. Our guide to canonical URLs and duplicate content covers how to keep that clean.
Sometimes, and we would not build a strategy on it. Systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI features draw on the open web, so newswire pages are within reach. We have not seen a credible public study measuring how often they cite wire copies rather than original reporting, so treat any specific number on this with real suspicion.
What we would say with more confidence is that these systems reward consistency. When your funding amount, founding facts, leadership names, and product description match across your own site, your announcements, and the coverage that follows, the picture holds together. When they contradict each other, the model has no way to pick a winner.
That argues for accuracy and repetition over volume. One clear, factual announcement that gets quoted in three real articles does more for your entity footprint than twenty wire releases nobody reads. This is the same principle that makes original reporting valuable in the first place.
On your own pages and on relationships with a handful of journalists. A single well-built comparison page or a genuinely useful guide will keep earning links and traffic for years. A wire release earns its attention in about 48 hours and then stops. The economics are not close.
If a client comes to us with a few thousand dollars and asks where it should go, we almost always point at the site first. Fixing the pages that already get impressions, building the two or three pages a competitor uses to beat you, and making the whole thing load fast are all cheaper and more durable than distribution.
The exception, again, is real news. If you have it, send the release, and then do the harder work of emailing ten reporters who cover your space personally. The personal emails are what produce the coverage. The wire is just the paperwork.
Send one if you have news a stranger would find interesting and a reporter you want to reach. Skip it if the goal is backlinks or rankings, because Google has published policies that make those links ineffective by design. Spend that budget on your own pages instead, where it compounds.
None of this is a reason to be cynical about PR. Good coverage is one of the most valuable things a growing company can earn, and it does help search indirectly when journalists write their own articles and link to you because they want to. The trap is buying distribution and calling it authority.
If you are weighing a PR spend against fixing your site, we are happy to give you an honest read on which one will do more for you this year. Let's talk, and you can reach us at phoenix.studio.
Tell us where you want to go. We'll tell you how we'd get you there.