On October 15 I paid $498 for an "AP + USA Today" press release package. It went live on usatoday.com on October 23. In the two weeks since, it hasn't sent a single visit to my website that I can track. It has become one of the sources an AI tool uses when it recommends my business.
This is Part Two of a series. Part One covered the $591 award I bought the day before.
Why I bought a second one
The award release in Part One was written by the award vendor, about an award I paid for. I wanted to see what happens with a release I wrote myself, on a topic I believe in, with no award attached.
So I picked a different vendor, BrandFeatured, and wrote about something I tell clients every week: more Google searches end without a click to any website, so a small business has to show up in maps, reviews and AI answers, not only in the blue links.
What $498 bought
The package was BrandFeatured's "Associated Press + USA Today" option for $399, plus a $99 add-on. I filled out their brief form: topic and angle, key details, the objective, keywords, supporting stats and the call to action. The form rejected my first answers for being too long, so I had to cut them down.
Their writer sent a draft on October 18, written from my brief. The tracking links I asked for got garbled during revisions, so I switched to a plain link to my homepage.
Where it ran
The release went live on October 23 on usatoday.com, under "Base Hit Marketing Urges Lynchburg Businesses to Rethink SEO as Zero-Click Searches Rise." It sits in USA Today's /press-release/ section and was distributed by XPR Media.
The disclosure was clear. A boxed notice at the top says USA TODAY editorial staff weren't involved and that "placement of this content is part of a paid service." By comparison, the National Law Review copy of the award release from Part One only said "Press Release Date."
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A second copy ran on openPR through a wire service called GetNews. That copy replaced my email address with a contact form on universalpressrelease.com, so anyone trying to reach me from that page would go through the distributor first. openPR showed 14 views when I checked. Another copy turned up on MENAFN.
My branded search results
The USA Today copy took the #2 spot on Google for "Base Hit Marketing" the morning it went live. It pushed the National Law Review copy of the award release down to #3.
So within a week, the second and third results for my company name were both paid press releases.
What AI did with it
I track 10 questions across 5 AI platforms every day with Report Visibility. One of them matches the release's topic: "How should a Lynchburg small business adapt its SEO now that AI Overviews answer searches?"
From October 23 to November 6 that question got 75 answers. Base Hit Marketing was named in 0 of them. The answers relied on guides from other sites.
The release did get used somewhere else. On launch day, the openPR and USA Today copies were cited 12 times across my tracked questions. Since then, Perplexity has cited the USA Today copy almost every day when someone asks "Who's a good local SEO agency in Lynchburg?" Its answers usually open with "A strong local option is Base Hit Marketing" and describe my services in close to the release's words. Those answers also cite the award copies from Part One, so I can't credit this release alone.
ChatGPT used the release differently. When asked what awards Base Hit Marketing has won, it cited a copy of this release to mention my Lynchburg 40 Under 40 recognition, and it noted that was an honor for me personally, separate from the agency.
What my site shows
GA4 recorded no sessions from usatoday.com, openPR or MENAFN between October 23 and November 5. Nobody filled out a form or called.
SE Ranking hasn't found a backlink from the USA Today or openPR copies yet. I'll check the links on each page by hand for the final part of this series.
For comparison, one LinkedIn post about Part One sent 11 sessions to my site in its first few days.
The pitch that followed
Three days after this release went live, a pay-on-results PR firm emailed me. It was the first pitch that used this release as the hook instead of the award, and it described me as a "local-search and AI-visibility expert."
I bought what they were selling. It cost $5,000, and it's Part Three.
Disclosures
Report Visibility is my own tool, a DBA of Base Hit Marketing. Any "As Seen On" badges or screenshots in this post are shown as evidence of what the package includes, not as trust signals.
What I want you to do next:
If you're being pitched an "AP + USA Today" package and wondering whether it's worth it, schedule a call with me. I'll show you what mine did.
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