Press release distribution is entering an unfamiliar phase as generative AI systems increasingly influence how people discover companies, products and news. Send2Press, a U.S. newswire operated by NEOTROPE, is expanding an AI Seeding service designed to improve how client announcements surface in conversational search and answer engines, while giving customers tools to run their own AI queries.

Send2Press Expands AI Seeding Strategy as PR Enters the AEO Era

The traditional press release has long been optimized for search engines, journalists and news databases. Now, PR companies are beginning to target another layer of discovery: the AI systems that increasingly answer questions directly instead of sending users through a list of links.

Send2Press, a U.S.-based press release distribution company operated by NEOTROPE, is expanding its AI Seeding campaign for PR and marketing clients. The company launched the initiative in 2025 as generative AI search and answer engines gained wider adoption.

Send2Press now describes the broader practice as AEO, or AI engine optimization. Its approach combines conventional content optimization with manually conducted searches across major AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.

The company’s expansion reflects a broader shift in digital marketing: companies are no longer optimizing solely for Google’s traditional search results. They are increasingly asking how their brands will be represented when a user asks an AI system a question.

AEO takes SEO into conversational search

The first part of Send2Press’s strategy looks familiar to anyone working in SEO.

The company says press release content should contain useful answers to questions potential customers might ask. A hypothetical local query such as “take out tacos in San Diego” illustrates the principle: content needs to provide enough relevant, structured information for an AI system to understand the subject and potentially use it when generating an answer.

That is not radically different from traditional search optimization. The difference is the interface.

A Google search traditionally produces a ranked set of pages. An AI answer engine can synthesize information from multiple sources and produce a response in natural language. That makes entity recognition, contextual relevance and source visibility increasingly important components of digital PR.

The second part of Send2Press’s approach is more unusual.

Send2Press is manually querying AI engines

Under its AI Seeding program, Send2Press staff conduct custom searches and queries across AI platforms rather than relying on automated query systems.

The queries can include the full text of a client’s news announcement, company and product names, names of quoted executives, website references and product imagery where relevant.

The stated objective is to help client brands become more recognizable and discoverable when users subsequently ask AI systems related questions.

There is an important caveat: Send2Press itself acknowledges that the effectiveness of this type of AI seeding is not yet clearly established.

Christopher Simmons, Send2Press co-founder, said the company’s experiments over roughly 15 months have produced what it describes as anecdotal improvements in brand resolution and mentions for related queries. He characterized the benefit as incremental rather than a guaranteed mechanism for influencing AI responses.

That qualification is significant because the emerging AEO market is crowded with claims about improving visibility inside large language models.

The AEO market is still looking for proof

AI search optimization has become an increasingly popular extension of the broader SEO industry. Agencies and startups now market services designed to improve a company’s visibility within ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and other generative search products.

But measuring success is considerably harder than traditional SEO.

Search rankings can be monitored through established positions, impressions and click-through rates. AI-generated answers are dynamic and can vary based on the query, model, location, personalization, available sources and time.

A brand may appear in one AI response and disappear from another. An AI system may also cite a company’s website without sending the company a conventional referral visit.

This creates an attribution problem for marketers.

Send2Press’s decision to describe its own AI Seeding work as potentially incremental rather than definitive is therefore notable. The company says its offering emerged partly in response to AEO providers making aggressive claims about improving LLM visibility while charging substantial recurring fees for automated querying.

Whether manually seeding information into AI systems produces durable changes in model behavior is still an open question. Large language models are not conventional search indexes, and a query submitted today does not necessarily become permanent knowledge available to every future user.

Moving AEO controls closer to customers

Send2Press is also changing how customers interact with the process.

As part of its 2026 expansion, the company’s PRtrax project reporting dashboards now include one-click custom queries that clients can run themselves in connection with their news announcements.

The feature is positioned as an alternative to paying a separate monthly fee for AEO services.

For PR teams, that could prove useful even if AI seeding itself remains difficult to measure. Running repeatable queries can provide a basic snapshot of how a company, executive or product is being represented across AI systems and whether important information is consistently surfaced.

It can also expose gaps in an organization’s digital footprint. If an AI system cannot correctly identify a company, distinguish its products or understand what the company actually does, that may point to broader problems with online documentation and entity consistency.

PR distribution becomes part of AI discoverability

The development points toward a larger change in the relationship between PR and search.

Press releases have traditionally served as syndicated announcements designed to reach journalists, news outlets, search engines and industry databases. Generative AI adds another potential audience: the information retrieval systems that sit between users and the open web.

That does not mean press releases automatically become authoritative AI sources. Nor does submitting or querying content guarantee inclusion in an AI-generated answer.

Instead, PR teams may increasingly need to think about whether announcements contain clear company entities, product descriptions, executive attribution, factual context and answer-ready information that machines can interpret.

For enterprises, the emerging discipline will require more measurement before it becomes a standard marketing line item. AI visibility should ultimately be evaluated against concrete outcomes such as brand mentions, citation quality, qualified traffic, lead generation and changes in how accurately AI systems describe a company.

Send2Press’s expanded offering illustrates an industry still experimenting with those mechanics. The bigger story is that PR distribution itself is beginning to adapt to a world where being found may no longer mean appearing at the top of a search-results page—it may mean becoming part of the answer.

Market Landscape

AEO is emerging at the intersection of SEO, digital PR and generative AI search. Platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude and Perplexity are changing how users discover information, creating pressure for marketers to understand how brands are represented in AI-generated responses.

The market remains immature. Unlike traditional SEO, there is no universally accepted ranking system for AI answers, and results can change between queries. That makes claims about “optimizing” LLM visibility difficult to validate without rigorous testing.

For enterprise marketing teams, the most durable strategy is likely to extend beyond query seeding. Strong first-party content, consistent company and product entities, authoritative third-party coverage, structured information and genuinely useful answers give AI systems more reliable material to interpret.

Send2Press’s approach is therefore best viewed as an experiment within a rapidly developing category rather than a proven replacement for SEO. Its emphasis on manual testing and transparent uncertainty distinguishes it from providers that promise guaranteed AI visibility.

Top Insights

• Send2Press is expanding AI Seeding for PR clients, combining content optimization with manual queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot.
• AEO extends traditional SEO into AI-generated answers, requiring companies to provide clear entity, product and contextual information that conversational systems can interpret.
• The effectiveness of AI seeding remains uncertain, with Send2Press describing observed benefits as anecdotal and incremental rather than guaranteed improvements in visibility.
• PRtrax now gives clients one-click custom AI queries, allowing marketing teams to independently test how their news and brands appear across AI platforms.
• AI discoverability is creating a new PR measurement challenge, as marketers need to evaluate brand mentions, citations, accuracy and business outcomes beyond conventional search rankings.

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