In an era where content must appeal to both human readers and artificial intelligence systems, press releases are proving to be an unexpectedly powerful format, according to Mark Willaman, co-founder of Newsworthy.ai. Speaking on the latest episode of The Building Texas Show, Willaman told host Justin McKenzie that the structured, factual nature of press releases makes them ideal for large language models (LLMs) and modern search algorithms.
“What's intriguing about the press release is it's kind of a perfect document for today's environment. It's current, it's factual, it's structured, it has name entities in it. Machines love that,” Willaman said. He framed the challenge succinctly: SEO gets you into the library, but AI retrieval decides whether you're pulled off the shelf.
The episode, published September 29, 2026, explores how Texas founders, mayors, and economic development corporations can get discovered when local news outlets are thinning and content has two audiences—humans and machines. Willaman and McKenzie outlined a practical playbook that includes running press releases as six-piece campaigns over a 28-day news cycle, curating content into multi-format assets such as articles, short-form audio, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and FAQ blocks through NewsRamp.com, and understanding the nuances of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and grounding. Willaman emphasized that AI training bots scraping a site does not guarantee AI answers will cite it, making structured, entity-rich documents like press releases more valuable than ever.
Willaman’s background lends credibility to his insights. He previously integrated PRWeb into his HR marketing software before reconnecting with David McGinnis to build Newsworthy.ai. The platform now displays a live counter of AI training bots crawling its site, and it transforms a single source release into 30-to-90-second audio snippets for Spotify and Apple Podcasts, AI-narrated video for social media, and zero-click social posts.
McKenzie connected the framework to his own work with Texas mayors, small business owners, and site selectors, noting how the show’s mayor series has helped candidates in communities without a local newspaper reach constituents. Both hosts pushed back on conversion-first thinking, invoking the updated marketing rule of seven touches across five platforms and pointing listeners to McGinnis’s paint-by-numbers book, available free in digital form at newsworthy.ai.
The discussion matters for any organization seeking visibility in an AI-dominated information landscape. As search engines evolve into answer engines, the ability to be cited by generative AI becomes a competitive advantage. Willaman’s argument that the press release format itself is the moat suggests that companies should rethink their content strategies, prioritizing structured, factual, and timely announcements over purely promotional material.
For Texas communities, the implications are particularly acute. With local news outlets declining, mayors and economic development leaders need alternative channels to reach residents and investors. The strategies discussed on The Building Texas Show offer a roadmap for using press releases and multi-format curation to fill that gap and ensure their messages are both human-readable and machine-friendly.
As AI continues to reshape how information is discovered and consumed, the episode serves as a timely reminder that adapting to these changes requires more than just traditional SEO—it demands a deep understanding of how machines retrieve and cite content. Willaman’s insights provide a starting point for businesses and governments alike to future-proof their communications.
