How $5 Press Releases Hack Google AI Overviews

0:00 If you're a startup battling other startups, this could be crazy. The idea is you can anonymously social proof your own company with a press release that you write. So you control the language. You can say whatever you want and people see this and it makes your company, your brand name look really good. You pay super little money to distribute the press release and then you get what you write quoted in AI overviews or you could do it for a competitor. You could do it for a competitor and you can say whatever you want. So the inspiration for this comes from Harperit on Twitterx and he shared how he manipulates AI overviews in Google. It's really short.

0:45 He said, "I ran a test to prove that dedicated AI SEO geollo or AEO or whatever you want to call it services are BS. It's just SEO rebranded. Bought a $5 press release to say a zero domain authority agency I created is now offering geo services." So domain authority, that's how authoritative a a website is. And the more authority your website has, the easier it is to show up on Google, especially for high competition keywords, for competitive searches. So anyway, this guy buys a $5 press release to say that a 0 out of 100 domain a domain authority agency I created is now

1:33 offering geo services. So basically no authority for this website. And Harpit says, would you look at that? I influenced the AI overview. You can say anything. AI will repeat it because AI is a parrot. Press release SEO is from what year? I was probably still learning my ABCs in primary school. And he shared the screenshot is and he hides the name of the brand. Is this brand a good SEO agency? And the AI overview says yes, it is generally considered a reputable SEO agency. According to barchart.com, they are a Vancouver-based provider of SEO and digital marketing services with this is from the AI overview with a focus on helping businesses grow their online visibility. Barchart.com also notes they

2:19 have a near five-star rating. Additionally, they are known for their experience in generative engine optimization, GEIO, which is a specialized area of SEO that focuses on getting businesses found on AI powered search platforms like Chat GPT and Google's AI overviews in addition to traditional search engines. So, he created this new agency, basically a madeup agency, no domain authority, wrote this press release, distributed it for $5, and then when you search the brand name on Google, the AI overview just parrots what the press release says. And the reason that this is crazy is because if you are a startup, and that's why I'm that's why I started the episode with if you're a startup battling other startups, brand names are

3:04 not competitive at all. bigger brands, those will have competitive brand names, people who want to show up or control the narrative for those brands because they're bigger. But if you're a startup, if you're a startup, nobody's writing about you, and so you can control the narrative right away. Same goes for your competitors. Very few people are writing about them. Maybe some are, but very few. You can still kind of control the narrative. And this is different from what I shared recently on this show on episode 734 of the podcast Gaming LLMs and Google best lists. This guy on LinkedIn said, "Here's the play. Take any affiliate site in your niche. Scrape the content. Swap out the branding, the logo, the author, the domain. Leave the rest intact. Spin up 10 to 15 clones. Host them for $200 a month. Publish one

3:50 page at a time. Sit back and wait." The person said not the best content, not the most trustworthy source, just the most statistically reinforced and said these these are no traffic websites, garbage user experience still cited in chat GPT. The reason that what I share from Harperit is different from this is because this person is advocating creating brand new websites and using those brand new websites to influence AI. And that one actually that one had a lot more doubt behind it. that tactic had a lot more doubt behind it. And there was a lot of people in the comments saying, "Oh, I I don't really know about this." And if you're creating a new site and then you're trying to game AI with a new site, that new site you have to you might have to build links to the new site so that the AI

4:38 will believe it's authoritative enough to a site, just some modeicum of of links. There are all these unknowns with that. But if you are paying someone $5 or $15 or $25 or whatever to distribute a press release, they might put it in just standard press release places like bar chart or some lowquality spammy sites that at least have been in operation for a while and have some links built to them and those are the sites that's going to train the AI to say what you wrote in the press release. So Harperit's strategy to influence AI overviews is different. And again, a lot of these cheap press release services, so for example, Fiverr, I found one for $15 on Fiverr. Some somebody who will distribute your press release for $15 on

5:24 Fiverr. I found on SEO clerk one that was just $5. And so these might be simple press release sites or some might be some spammy sites, but again, these are more existing sites. And if you are targeting an extremely undertargeted keyword like a brand name, Google will be very generous when they have gaps to fill and they will use lowquality resources. If there's not a lot written about something and Google needs more to say and it's not in the category of YM L, your money your life, Google will be very generous with the resources that it uses more accurately that it cites. So this is the play. Start by testing this yourself, not with your own brand. Write

6:10 a press release. Save it as a PDF. The press release is for a unique brand name that does not exist. Make sure that there is nothing written about this brand name. It is a unique brand that does not exist. Then pay for a cheap press release distribution service. I've done lots of press release distribution in the past, but I've always used PR Log for distribution, and I've paid several hundred for that. It could be worth it if this works really well. It still could that could still be worth it because that's higherend. You will get better results with that. But we're just testing the strategy with a with a basic $5 to $15 to $20 press release distribution. So, use one of those cheap press release distribution services for the press release that you wrote about

6:57 the the non-existent brand. And so the press release goes out, it goes to all these different places and then wait a week and then see what comes up when you Google that madeup brand name. And if your press release comes up and especially if it is if it is cited in an AI overview, then it's like, oh, bingo. All right. Wow, this works. And it very well might. This sounds like the type of thing that could work. And then you could try it. If you wanted to try it for your own brand, then you could do it. Then I don't know if I would link to my own brand because I I would have to look at the places that the press release is appearing in. If the press release is appearing in a lot of shady websites, I might not necessarily want backlinks from them. So I don't know if I would link to my own brand name in the

7:43 press release. But because the brand name is low volume, so it's not searched a lot and the language in the press release is positive, it would still be it would still ultimately good for be good for the brand because the language that you write gets cited in AI overview, cited in other places and you you are controlling the narrative for your own brand name and then this type of thing can be used for lots of other ways like I shared at the beginning of the show. That's all that is all for this episode of the show. So, I thought this was a crazy thing. I wanted to share it. If you are learning SEO and you want to save years off your SEO learning experience, my 13 1/2 hour SEO course will give you just that. It took me a decade to learn what to focus on and importantly, what not to focus on,

8:30 and that's what I teach in the course. That's at compactkeywords.com. You're going to love it. Oh, thank you to all the people who purchased Compact Keywords today. This was indeed an amazing day. And that is all for episode 736 of my daily digital marketing show. 736 days in a row doing this podcast. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow. B.