What a free press release did for my startup in 5 days, and what I'd do after launch instead
Last week I wrote about sending my startup's launch press release to seven free sites.
That post was about getting it out. This one is about the five days after. I launched Pinateca, a project tool for teams, on September 24, and the English release went out through EIN Presswire that evening.
Reprints on about 800 sites, 3 visitors from them
EIN's distribution report looked great. AP News, around 250 USA TODAY Network local news sites, about 19 TV station sites, a few hundred other local and lifestyle sites, 145 journalist contacts in Japan and 211 in the US. It was in Google News within an hour.
Then I opened GA4 for September 24 to 28 and filtered sessions by source.
・EIN Presswire: 2
・EIN News: 1
・AP News, the local news sites, the TV sites: 0
For comparison, my Japanese release on a small domestic site brought 10 sessions in the same window. The reprints are pages that partner sites generate automatically. Nobody wrote them and, as far as I can tell, nobody reads them.
What Ahrefs showed
I checked pinateca.com with Ahrefs' free authority checker four days after the release.
・605 links pointing at my site
・554 sites linking to it
・about 4% of those links count for search
Almost every reprint marks its link so that search engines ignore it. Domain Rating stayed at 4.3 out of 100. So you do get a lot of pages with your name on them, you just should not expect the links to move your search ranking.
The first pitch arrived 44 minutes later
The release went live at 13:10 UTC. At 13:54 I got an email with the subject "An Interview request". The last line said there's a nominal fee for promoting the story.
Over the next five days:
・a UK wire offering to put my release on 65 regional news sites (price after they see it)
・a magazine publisher who'd already written a draft feature about me, with a lower price if I answered within 48 hours
・another wire promising coverage on big finance and business sites
・an agency wanting whether ChatGPT suggests my product (it does, more on that below)
・a shared spreadsheet of sites, sent to me and 14 other companies at once
・EIN itself, twice, wanting me to send the next release with them
Some of these are real services. But they're all written like editorial outreach ("interview", "feature", "we'd love to cover you"), and the price is always in the last paragraph or the second email. If a stranger found you through a wire service, scroll to the bottom before you get excited.
For what it's worth, this doesn't happen to everything I ship. Earlier in September I sent releases for two Mac apps, SpaceDeck and Koffret, through the same kind of free Japanese services, and got nothing back but the listing confirmations. Pinateca's Japanese release, on the day it went out, brought the EIN offer, an affiliate network listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and an influencer agency. My read is that the people who sell to companies watch these feeds for B2B tools. A Mac app someone buys for themselves doesn't look like a customer with a budget. A SaaS billed per seat does. (I also used one extra Japanese site for Pinateca, so it's not a perfectly clean comparison.)
The one free offer
One pitch didn't ask for money. A site called CB Herald wanted to republish the release for free. I said yes, sent the Word file they asked for, and it went up four days later with a normal-looking article page and a link that search engines do count.
I also looked at the site itself. It has 7,039 posts, and 6,957 of them are under the same admin account. It is not in the Tranco top million. It is a reprint site. I am glad of the link, and I do not expect a single visitor from it.
Where the signups actually came from
Six people signed up on their own in those five days. I traced each one through the server logs.
・ChatGPT: 3 (Japan, Israel, Poland)
・IH: 1
・my Facebook post: 1
・my newsletter: 1
・the ~800 reprint sites: 0
The ChatGPT ones are easy to spot because ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links in its answers. For the Polish signup there's an extra detail: 16 minutes before they landed, my logs show a request with the ChatGPT-User user agent fetching my home page. That is ChatGPT reading the page live to answer someone's question. Someone who replied to me on IH pointed me at that trick, and it is the closest I have come to seeing the instant an AI points someone to you.
Google's AI answers were citing me too, and not because of the release. Search Console shows my pages appearing in AI features from September 13, eleven days before launch day. The pages being cited were blog posts comparing competitors' free plans. One of them ranks 2nd to 3rd for "clickup free plan limitations" in regular search as well.
What I'd do after launch next time
In the order I'd do it:
1. Send one free wire release, and expect pages, not people. If you get a free offer from EIN, take it. It costs an afternoon and gets your name onto hundreds of pages, which can only help an AI that is trying to work out whether you exist. Read the terms first, though. openPR's terms say a free release can't also go out through another service, so I didn't send it there.
2. Write the posts people are already searching for. Not "we launched" posts. Posts that answer questions your buyers type before they've heard of you. For me that was "what's the catch with ClickUp's free plan" and "how many people does Asana's free plan allow". Those got cited by Google's AI answers before the launch did anything.
3. Get listed where your users already are. I cannot prove this one yet. Pinateca went live in the Zapier app directory on September 18 and in Pabbly Connect on September 28, and no signup traces back to either so far. I'd still do it first thing, since people browse a directory when they're actually looking for a tool, which is more than anyone does on a reprint page.
4. Watch your logs for AI traffic. A grep for utm_source=chatgpt.com and ChatGPT-User is enough to start. If your marketing pages are cached at a CDN, those fetches can stop at the edge and never show up in your server logs. My home page is not cached, which is why I caught that one fetch, and it's also why I know I'm missing the others.
5. Set a rule for the inbox before it fills up. Mine is simple. Anything that found me through a wire service and calls itself an interview or a feature gets read to the last paragraph before I reply.
Next time
I'd send it again as long as it's free. I just won't read the distribution report as a result anymore.
If a paying customer ever came to you from a wire release, which site was it on?
Hey, just wanted to say this is super useful; thanks for the time and effort. I'm surprised at the 3 visitors, but it's impressive how much reach you had across from the release. I think your point about focusing on "what is the question people are already asking, in which my link would be useful?" is the most valid.
Thanks, glad it was useful. The 3 visitors surprised me too. The report listed AP News and hundreds of local sites, and not one person came from any of them. Half of the sign-ups that week came from ChatGPT answers instead.