Free press release sites in 2026: I sent my startup's launch to 7 of them. Does a press release help SEO?
I launched Pinateca, a project management tool I built as a Trello alternative, on September 24. My company is in Tokyo, so I did the Japanese press release first and then tried to get the English version out without paying for distribution.
Most lists of free press release sites are years old. About half the sites on them are gone or paid now. Here is what I found when I actually signed up and submitted, in the order I did it, and what a free press release distribution did for a startup that had launched the day before.
Why I bothered
I did not expect a press release to go viral. I had three smaller reasons.
The first is trust. When someone hears about a new tool, they search its name. If the only result is the tool's own site, it could be a weekend project. I wanted a dated release on real news sites to show up next to it, so a buyer, a marketplace reviewer or a possible partner can see there's a company behind it.
SEO too. Each reprint is another page with the product name and a link back to my site. My English release was in Google News within hours.
And a record. The launch date now sits on sites I do not control.
Get a phone number ready
Almost every service asks for one. PRLog verifies it with a voice call before you can publish. IssueWire's guidelines say a release without a valid email and phone number in the contact section won't be accepted. EPR Network wants the phone number inside the body. If you don't want your mobile number on hundreds of news sites, use a company landline. Also have an email on your own domain (several sites reject free email addresses) and your full company address.
Pick the first site before anything else
Some services reject a release that already appears somewhere else. EIN Presswire's editorial guidelines say a significant majority of each release must be original content. So I sent it there first and waited until it was distributed before touching any other site. For the later sites I rewrote the headline and the opening paragraph each time.
EIN Presswire: the only one that got real reach
EIN normally charges per release, but after my Japanese release went out they emailed me an offer: the next release free, valid for 30 days, no card. The catch is that your account has to be verified first, which took about a day. The submit button simply does not appear until then.
It was approved the same evening. The distribution report two hours later listed AP News, around 250 USA TODAY Network local papers, about 19 TV station sites, a few hundred other local and lifestyle sites, and news databases like Meltwater. It was also sent to 145 journalist contacts in Japan and 211 in the US. A few hours later they told me it was in Google News.
To be clear, these are automatic reprints. No journalist wrote about it. They also emailed me within a day asking me to buy another release.
openPR: read the terms
openPR lets you post one release every 30 days with no account. But its terms say a free release must not be distributed through any other service. I nearly skipped it. Then I checked real examples and found releases sitting on openPR weeks later with the same headline and body as on GlobeNewswire. I sent a version with a different headline and opening. Releases go live on weekdays only, and not right away.
IssueWire: rejected once, then resubmitted
The first release is free. It needs a business profile before you can post, and the headline has to start with the company name and stay under 100 characters.
Mine was sent back the next day with one line: rewrite it according to the PR format. I compared it with releases on their newsroom. Theirs were plain paragraphs. Mine had bullet lists, bold subheadings and a pricing list, which read like an ad. I rewrote it as ten paragraphs and one sentence about price, and resubmitted.
PRLog
Free, but the limit's 500 words in total, counting the title, summary and date. Links are shown as text you can't click, and there is no photo on the free tier. You need a company email and a phone number they verify by voice call. I trimmed mine to about 400 words.
EPR Network
https://express-press-release.net/
Sign up with a username and email. The submission screen is a plain WordPress editor. They ask for a contact name, phone and email inside the body. Review takes days to weeks.
PR․com
Free releases can't contain links. The trap is on the distribution page: $100 is selected by default. To stay free you choose the custom option, enter $0, and pick only one category. Four categories asked me for $60.
PressReleasePoint
https://www.pressreleasepoint.com/
Your first release is written inside the signup form. The company description needs at least 75 words and the management section 50 words with at least two job titles, so "Founder and CEO" rather than just "Founder". The employee count can't be 0. Headlines are 40 to 120 characters, and the body starts with "City, Date /PressReleasePoint/". One release every three months.
The ones that didn't work
PRSync threw a server error at signup. 1888PressRelease blocked me with a captcha that never passed, even in a normal browser. PRFree has no links or images on the free plan. Pressat, PR Fire, EmailWire, NewswireToday, PRBuzz and i-newswire are closed or paid now. ABNewswire ended its free plan, and Rocket PressWire is free for US businesses only.
What came back: signups, and a lot of offers
Signups first. New accounts came in the same week, including the first one from a Japanese company. I checked the server logs for where the signups in the first two days came from. That company found Pinateca through ChatGPT. The only signup from outside Japan came from Indie Hackers. None of them clicked through from AP News. But ChatGPT has to learn about a product from somewhere, and hundreds of pages with the name on them can't hurt.
Then the offers. Within two days I had a free distribution offer from EIN, an affiliate network listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange asking to list Pinateca, a Japanese news site asking to carry the release, and an SEO agency selling guest posts.
Yes, those are sales pitches. But I had sent releases through the same free services for my Mac apps before, and nothing like this came back. My guess is that people who sell to businesses watch these feeds for B2B tools, and a Mac app for individuals just isn't on their list. I asked the affiliate network for their terms, since it could become a sales channel.
The SEO agency was the funniest. They found my EIN release and wrote to say press release links are weak, so I should buy guest posts from them instead. Paid links go against Google's spam policies, so I did not reply.
Would I do it again?
Yes. It took an afternoon and it got into Google News. If you only have an hour, do EIN (if you get the offer) and IssueWire.
Apart from the reprints, has a press release ever got someone to actually contact you?
From what I've seen, free press release sites barely move SEO. The links are usually nofollow and the pages get buried or dropped from the index within a few weeks. The part worth checking is whether any of the 7 got picked up by Google News or a real outlet, because that's where actual referral clicks come from. I'd judge each site by signups, not by how many places republished it.
Just reread your post, you already had the Google News pickup and the ChatGPT signup. That second one is the interesting part. I'd check in a month whether ChatGPT still brings Pinateca up for a Trello alternative.
Yeah, it went out through EIN and was in Google News the same day. And someone really did sign up through ChatGPT. The weird part is when I search in my own ChatGPT, Pinateca doesn't come up, so I have no idea what they actually asked it.
Interesting. How are you measuring whether it is working?
Good point. Did you test that with users before committing to it?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Nice, this makes a lot of sense. What's been the most surprising part of it so far?