Press Release: is it worth doing it in 2026?

My observations about the controversial digital marketing tactic.

Publishing a Press Release is quite a popular tactic for marketing a B2C product. I’ve heard about it when I just launched my product, but at that time I was busy with lots of different things and, in general, I was way too distracted. So I knew about that, and I obviously ignored it for quite some time.

A few months ago, I’ve stumbled upon some press release service and started thinking about that again. And this time, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve chosen a new feature on our website that I wanted to share with the world, registered at PRLog.org, and submitted an article. It costed me $49 and promised a distribution of the article across the 8000+ subscribers, Google News, other news websites and more.

Have I noticed any effect on traffic?

Not really. At least, not an immediate one. To be honest, I was expecting some kind of spike in traffic, but it didn’t happen. However, after a while I noticed a bunch of new backlinks from the multiple websites that published that article. And I think it made some positive effect on the website rankings and slightly improved the trust. But it’s far from magic.

Another shot

A couple of weeks ago I decided to do it again. I used the same service and the package. This time the publication took me even less time, because I had the pre-filled account already, which is nice. Again, no immediate effect. I keep monitoring the website, but when you apply multiple tactics at the same time, it’s difficult to say certainly what exactly caused the increase or decrease in traffic and visibility.

What is common perception about Press Releases?

I’ve recently read a discussion on this topic on Reddit. And you know, in the digital marketing space, and among SEO folks specifically, I noticed controversial opinions. Some people claim that it positively impacted their websites, at the same time others say that it may have a bad impact and search engines don’t value press release distributors. What I noticed is that the majority of backlinks are indeed not the best quality. But, I also didn’t see any domains with high spam rating. That’s why I still believe that it shouldn’t do any harm.

Thoughts

So, what do we get from such a press release? A bunch of average backlinks obviously. And in my opinion it’s definitely worth doing for new projects. When you have low Domain Rating / Domain Authority, I think it’s more for the good. You need at least some visibility. And it’s exactly what you get quickly with a Press Release. But it certainly becomes less efficient when your project is gaining weight.

What do you think? Are you practicing press releases for your business?