Speaking truth (PR) to power (AI search)
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
Wednesday! Over on X yesterday, the CEOs of OpenAI and xAI got into a tangle about Apple showcasing Sam Altman’s AI app more often than Elon Musk’s on iOS. Apple was forced to say publicly that it doesn’t hate Grok (more or less), but the entire situation was messy.
Ignoring the petty drama, how are the two companies doing? Often, we find interpersonal conflict where unequal results are coming to the fore. What’s weird in this case is that both companies have models that perform well against benchmarks. OpenAI’s GPT-5 models are showing up on OpenRouter (implying product-market fit), and xAI’s share of corporate AI spend has finally risen to the point of measureability. You might think that the pair had better things to do than squabble.
Today, we’re looking at the return of the press release, Perplexity’s Chrome gambit, and making a final note on forced revenue share at the Federal level. To work! — Alex
📈 Trending Up: The budget deficit … tariff passthroughs … being petty … GPT-5 flexibility … tagging GPUs … no shit … CoreWeave’s revenue (not its stock) … Fractal Analytics … Australian rare earths … rain … heat … no, really …
Bullish’s IPO, after it priced above expectations at $37 per share. The IPO window is open open.
📉 Trending Down: Journalist lifespans in Gaza … Amazon … getting along with Russia … Neuralink’s market lead? … IRL friends … driving domestic consumption in China … Jalisco New Generation … planetary health …
Yep, press releases are making a comeback
The other week, we posited that in the era of AI search, press releases would reclaim some of their prior primacy. The argument was simple: High-quality information pertinent to user queries is increasingly behind crawler paywalls, leaving a void that press releases could fill. A release is a company talking about itself — and, often, its industry — so as search moves from list of results to answer this, press releases as individual nuggets of information could become a fecund source of signal.
The post was born out of a call with my friend, Medium’s Amy Widdowson.
Some folks pushed back, arguing that if our argument holds up, then corporate blogs would retain just as much juice as a release sent through a wire service. Instead of theorycrafting a response, CO reached out to several GEO-focused startups to get their take (GEO is the AI-search equivalent of SEO).
Chris Andrew, CEO and co-founder of Scrunch AI (website, Crunchbase), said that our thesis is at least directionally correct (emphasis added):
In an AI search first world, structured, authoritative content is king, and press releases tick all the boxes. They’re time-stamped, attributed to a credible source, they aren't paywalled, and they are distributed in a consistent format. Press Releases are also often redistributed on media sites looking for fresh content. These sites are also making their content accessible to AI Agents/Crawlers where a lot of the tier 1 media players are blocking AI from retrieving content. Press releases are a critical part of the strategy in an AI first world."
We also reached out to Profound (website, Crunchbase), a startup that just raised a $35 million round for its GEO work. The company’s CEO and co-founder James Cadwallader connected CO with Erik Carlson, the CEO of Notified (website, Crunchbase). Notified owns GlobalNewswire, a service that publishes press releases. Cadwallader said that our question was timely, as his company is “about to announce a partnership with Notified based on this exact insight.”
Hot damn, bullseye. Ok, let’s hear from Notified’s Carlson (emphasis added):
In short - I completely agree with your friend's thesis - and we are partnering with Profound to prove it.
AI Search disproportionately indexes on citing owned channels (Company Websites, Newsrooms), followed by 'high quality, non editorial content' which includes Press Releases. I am trying to redefine the value of the press release from your father's stodgy, formal announcement, to a tool that influences search and brand perception.
Finally, we reached out to AthenaHQ (website, Crunchbase), and heard back from Andrew Yan, its co-founder and CEO. He writes (emphasis added):
We've seen PR be one lever for AI Search that has definitely elevated the role of PR to having influence over AI, but have also seen on-page actions be just as effective. Our approach is there's no one magical solution for AI Search, but rather a collection of actions across multiple teams for AI Search visibility.
Given the three perspectives, I think it’s fair to say that, along with corporate blogs and similar, in the era of AI search, the old-school press release will gain some prominence, and perhaps a lot.
The GEO market is hot. Apart from Profound’s new round, Evertune AI just raised a $15 million Series A to work on the same problem.
Perplexity’s perplexing pitch
In terms of earned media, AI search startup Perplexity announcing a $34.5 billion unsolicited bid for Google’s Chrome browser is a doozy. Everyone in the worlds of business and technology media covered the announcement. It was a headline bonanza.
Yes, it’s a weird deal. Perplexity is valued at around $18 billion after its most recent $100 million funding round. Cross that with the fact that the company’s revenue is in the low nine-digits, and it appears that we’re watching a trout try to swallow a dolphin. (Or perhaps a dolphin trying to swallow a whale? Insert your preferred aquamarine analogy as required.)