A company press release is about the brand. A personal press release is about the person Google will search. If the lead names the LLC and you appear in paragraph four as “the founder,” you wrote the wrong document. Clients, reporters, and language models retrieve names. They do not retrieve “the team.”

Founders, consultants, operators, and authors keep buying the company version because that is what agencies sell. The agency has a client of record, a logo, and a product to ship. Your name is a byproduct. Then you google yourself and the first result is a LinkedIn login wall. That is not a mystery. There is no dated page on a news domain that treats you as the subject.

This is the instrument for that job: a wire-legal announcement with a dateline, written in the third person, built inverted-pyramid, 250 to 1,250 words, with your full name in the sentences a model will steal. Cited writes that draft from the facts you type. You edit every word. Cited puts it on the wire. Indexed is $79, Get known is $149, Famous is $399. None of that is coverage. It is a public record of a named person doing a named thing on a named date.

If there is no news, stop. A job title is not news. A launch, a hire, a book, a practice, a study is. Bring the fact. The rest is format.

The person is the subject. The company is context.

Read the first sentence of a typical startup blast. “Acme announced today that it has launched a platform to empower teams.” Nobody is in that sentence. The legal entity is the actor. The product is the object. You, the person a buyer will later type into Google, are missing. That is fine if the job is to put Acme in a syndication feed. It is a waste if the job is to make Maya Chen findable.

A personal press release reverses the grammar. Maya Chen opened a practice. Maya Chen published a book. Maya Chen joined as operating partner. Maya Chen released a study. The company, the imprint, the fund, the clinic — those sit next to the name as affiliation, not as the star. When an assistant lifts a sentence, the name has to survive the lift. Pronouns die the moment the sentence leaves the page. Brand nouns survive, which is why company PR keeps producing citations for companies.

This is not a personality profile and it is not a bio. Biography is the last section, the “About” graf the wire expects. The news is an event. You did something that can be dated, placed, and attributed. The release exists so that event becomes a citable page on domains Google and ChatGPT already trust. LinkedIn will not do that. Instagram will not do that. Your own site can help, but your own site is not a news source. The wire is how a private fact becomes a public one.

Founders feel this most when they raise, launch, or leave. Consultants feel it when they open a practice and still look like an employee of their last firm. Operators feel it when they take a role that the market should know about and the only announcement is an internal Slack. Authors feel it when the book exists and the SERP still belongs to someone with the same surname. In each case the missing object is not “awareness.” It is a URL that names you.

A job title is not news

The wire is not a résumé mill. “Jane Doe is a fractional CMO” is a headline you put on LinkedIn. It has no date, no place, and no event. Nothing happened. A reader cannot tell whether this is true today, last year, or as an aspiration. A wire editor can tell, and they will bounce copy that reads like a personal-brand homepage.

The same failure shows up in a dozen costumes:

If you cannot answer “what happened, where, and when” in one sentence that includes your full name, you do not have a release. You have a bio. Bios belong on a site you control. They do not belong on AP News as if they were reporting.

Titles become news only when they are attached to an event. “Appointed chief operating officer of Named Company, effective 1 September, succeeding Named Person” is a hire. “Opened an independent AI audit practice, Northline Audit, in San Francisco” is a launch. “Published The Vendor File, a 280-page guide for mid-market CFOs” is a book. The title is decoration. The event is the story.

Cited will not invent the event for you. The draft is built from what you type. Thin facts produce a thin release. That is safer than a confident lie sitting on a USA Today URL with your name on it. If you do not have news this week, wait until you do. There is a one-week path from a real fact to a dated URL — that is a different article, how to become known in your niche this week — but the fact still has to exist.

What is news

News, for this instrument, is a change in the world that can be stated without adjectives. The wire’s job is to carry that statement onto publisher sites. Your job is to pick a change that is true.

A launch

A product, a clinic, a fund, a newsletter with a real first issue, a cohort with a start date. The lead is: named person launched named thing, in named city, on named date, for named audience. Put the URL in the body, once. Do not call it revolutionary. Do not claim users you do not have. If it is version 3 of something that has been public since 2021, it is an update, not a launch. Say update.

A hire

Two shapes. You joined, or you hired. If you are the subject, “joined” is usually the one that belongs in a personal release. Name the role, the organisation, the start date, and what you are there to do in one concrete clause. “Will help the company scale” is not a clause. “Will run European operations from Berlin, a desk the firm did not have” is. If the company is the one that wants the headline, that is company PR. Write it that way and do not pretend it is about you.

A book

Title, publisher or imprint, on-sale date, and what the book is. Page count if you have it. A named co-author if you have one. A real preorder link, not five. Authors love to write the memoir of why they wrote the book. That is chapter one, not the lead. The lead is that the book exists and can be bought. Reviews you do not have yet do not go in. Blurbs you do have can go in as attributed quotes, verbatim, or they stay out.

A practice

Consultants and operators who leave a firm and hang a shingle keep underestimating this one. Opening a practice is news. It has a name, a city, a date, and a scope. “After nine years at a Big Four firm, Maya Chen opened Northline Audit, an independent AI-vendor inspection practice for mid-market CFOs, in San Francisco.” That sentence can be quoted tomorrow by a model and still contain the person. “Maya is passionate about trustworthy AI” cannot.

A study

A research note, a dataset, a paper, a survey you actually ran. Name the study, the date it was released, the population, and one number paired with what it measures. If you do not have a number, you probably have an essay. Essays are fine. They are not this format. Do not invent a finding to make the release feel quantitative. The wire will take a thin true study. It will also take a fake statistic, and then you own that sentence on the public record.

Other events can qualify: a named partnership with a named other party, a conference you are running rather than attending, a filing, a patent grant, a clinic opening a second site. The test is the same. Date, place, person, thing that happened. If you have to squint, it is not news.

Dateline, third person, inverted pyramid

The format is older than the internet and the wire still enforces it because syndication has to look like reporting. You are not writing to your followers. You are writing a document that will be reprinted under someone else’s masthead.

Dateline

The body opens with the city and country, then an em dash, then the lead. SAN FRANCISCO, United States — Maya Chen opened Northline Audit on Tuesday. That string does three jobs. It places the story. It timestamps the page. It tells a parser this is news copy, not a blog post. Cited puts the dateline in from the city and country you enter. If you leave them blank, the wire will not take the copy. Contact name, email, and phone are required for the same reason. The publisher has to be able to reach a human.

Third person

No “I,” no “we,” no “you,” except inside a quote you actually provided. You are not the narrator. You are the subject. “We are thrilled to announce” is the fastest way to get rejected and the fastest way to hand a model a sentence with no name in it. If you want a quote, write one and attribute it. If you do not have a quote, the release ships without one. Cited will not fabricate a quote, a customer, or a number. Neither should you. A quote you made up about yourself, printed on a USA Today URL, is still a quote you made up.

Inverted pyramid

First sentence: the news, with the name. Second and third: the facts a stranger needs to understand the news — what it is, who it is for, when it starts, where it lives. Middle: detail, a quote if you have one, one or two implications that follow from the facts you already gave. Last: the About paragraph, built only from biography you supplied, then boilerplate contact. Do not bury the launch under childhood, mission, or “the problem with the industry.” An editor, a crawler, and a language model all read the top. Write the top as if the rest will be cut, because sometimes it will.

The headline is not a vibe. It needs at least five words, stays under 200 characters, and includes the person’s name. “Northline Audit Launches” fails twice: no person, and it reads like a brochure. “Maya Chen Opens Northline Audit, an Independent AI Inspection Practice in San Francisco” is long, specific, and searchable. The summary is the story in one paragraph, 45 words or fewer. Treat it as the thing that will be pasted into a feed. If the summary does not contain the name and the event, rewrite it.

Plain declarative sentences. No “revolutionary,” “game-changing,” “leading,” “world-class,” “visionary.” Those words are how wires detect advertising. They are also how you drain a sentence of anything a model can treat as a fact. “Maya Chen opened a practice” can be true or false. “Maya Chen opened a leading practice” is neither. It is a claim with no test.

Wire limits: 250 to 1,250 words

The distributor’s body floor is 250 words. The ceiling is 1,250. Under the floor, the copy is rejected. Over the ceiling, the copy is rejected. Cited’s drafts aim at roughly 420, 550, or 800 words depending on the length you pick, clear of the floor rather than sitting on it. Padding to hit 250 with adjectives is how you get rejected for tone after you cleared the count. If the facts are thin, expand on context and implications of what you already said. Do not invent a second announcement to fill space.

Other hard limits, because the compose screen validates the same rules the wire will:

Five links is a feature. You are not writing an SEO article. You are writing a news document that will be mirrored. Stuffing it with your homepage, your booking calendar, your three socials, and an affiliate turns it into a brochure and burns the allowance. One site for the person or the practice. One link for the thing you launched. Stop there unless a third source is actually part of the news.

Length is not quality. A 260-word release with a hard lead will outperform an 1,100-word autobiography that forgets the news. The extra words exist so you can put in the facts a later journalist, a due-diligence intern, or a model will need: the date, the place, the scope, the one number, the About. They do not exist so you can recap your career in chronological order. That is what the last paragraph is for, and it should be short.

Write the sentences a model will steal

Search and assistants do not “understand your brand.” They retrieve strings. The strings they like are standalone, dated, and attributed to a named person on a high-authority domain. That is the entire game, and it is why a personal release is shaped the way it is.

Build at least three sentences that still make sense if they are the only thing a reader ever sees. Each one must contain your full name, not a pronoun. Pair a number with what it measures whenever you have a number. State the date. Do not hedge (“aims to,” “hopes to,” “may help”). Hedging is how a true fact becomes an unusable one. The full method sits in how to write a press release AI assistants will quote. The short version: if the sentence cannot be pasted into a briefing note without adding “this is about [you],” it is not a citation. It is glue.

This is also why first person fails twice. It fails the wire, and it fails retrieval. “I opened a practice in San Francisco” becomes, out of context, an anonymous claim. “Maya Chen opened a practice in San Francisco” is a record. Write the second one every time, even when it feels stiff. Stiff is the point. News copy is stiff on purpose.

Founders

If you have a communications team, they will want the company name in the headline. Sometimes they are right. A Series B, a recall, a merger — those are entity events. You can still put the founder in the lead when the founder is the news: leaving, starting the next company, publishing the thing only they could publish. Do not let a product launch that is actually about you get rewritten as “the company announced.” Once the company is the subject, every downstream citation belongs to the company. That is expensive to unwind.

Solo founders and very small teams should default to the personal form. There is no brand yet. The brand is the name. Treating the LLC as famous is how you end up with a release nobody searches. Name the person, name the product, name the city. Put the company in the About.

Consultants

Your buyer already knows how to hire a firm. They do not know how to find you. After you leave, the old employer’s site still ranks. A personal release for a new practice is how you put a competing, dated document on domains that outrank a PDF résumé. Scope the practice. Name the buyer. Name the city you work from. Do not list every service you might one day offer. A practice that “does strategy, ops, brand, and fractional everything” is not a practice. It is a LinkedIn headline with an invoice.

Client names go in only if the client agreed. “Worked with a Fortune 50 bank” is a nothing-sentence that also happens to be unverifiable. “Inspected vendor models for a named mid-market CFO group under a written mandate” is better only if every word is true. When in doubt, leave the client out and keep the discipline, the years, and the opening date.

Operators

Operators are used to being invisible on purpose. That is the job inside the building. It is a liability outside it. The next board, the next fund, the next company that wants you to run the thing, will google you and find a GitHub, a Slack screenshot, and silence. A hire release — you joining, with a mandate — is the cleanest personal news most operators will ever have. Use it. If you are not joining anyone, a study, a playbook you published, or a practice you opened on the side can be the event. A title change with the same employer and the same work is not.

Authors

The book is the news. Interviews are coverage, which this instrument does not buy. What the wire can do is put the title, the on-sale date, and your name on pages that Google News and assistants already ingest. That is useful the week the book exists and useless if you wait until the launch week is over and you are asking for “awareness.” Write the release as if a bookseller has to understand it cold. Title, author, date, what it is, where to get it. The childhood story goes in the memoir, which you already wrote.

What this is not

It is not a journalist assignment. Nobody at USA Today is being told to profile you. Distribution is syndication: the copy is reprinted onto publisher sites. Some of those sites are ones a stranger would recognise — AP News, USA Today, Yahoo Finance, Benzinga, on the packages that include them. Most of the rest are not. The report lists the live URLs. Count those. Do not count “potential impressions.” Do not screenshot a logo pack. If the URL is not there, it does not count. How Cited works is the honest version of that pipeline.

It is not fame. Fame is a long project. Being findable is a dated URL. One release will not make ChatGPT “know” you as a standing authority. It can give the model a sentence to quote when someone asks a question your fact answers. That is the job. Treat any vendor who guarantees a profile, a ranking, or a citation as someone selling a different product with your money.

It is not a substitute for a story. If a reporter already wants you, send them an email. A wire dump is a poor pitch. The release is the primary document they can cite after they decide to write. Mix the two jobs and you will be disappointed by both.

What Cited actually does

You type a name, what you do, and the news. A launch, a hire, a book, a study, a new practice. AI fills a wire-legal draft in third person from those facts only. You edit every word. Nothing spends in the customer path. The order sits until we submit it through publisher syndication, which we resell. Pickup is a list of live pages, not a promise that a masthead assigned a reporter.

Three packages. Indexed, $79: a wire-legal release, 300+ publisher sites, Google News indexing, a placement report, a URL you can send a client. Get known, $149: the 500+ blast, TV and radio networks, written so an assistant can quote you, and you can stack USA Today or AP News on top. Famous, $399: Get known plus USA Today (otherwise $179) and AP News (otherwise $199), the Yahoo / MarketWatch network, podcast and do-follow add-ons. À-la-carte that stack is more. A comparable EIN blast starts at $149 and does not write the copy. Agencies that will write and place start around $1,500 and they will still want to make the company the subject.

USA Today and AP News, on this product, are network placements: live URLs on real domains. They are not a reporter calling you. If you need the screenshot, buy the package that includes the URL. If you need a feature, hire a publicist and have news they can sell. Do not confuse the two on purpose.

The draft will look plain. That is the format working. You can rewrite any sentence. You cannot rewrite the laws of the wire. Stay in third person. Keep the dateline. Keep the name in the lead. Stay inside 250 to 1,250 words. If the AI wrote a fact you did not supply, cut it. If it used a pronoun where your name should be, put the name back. Then ship.

If the job is to stop being invisible this week, write the release. If you do not have an event, do not buy one. Wait until something happens that a stranger could print without lying. Then put your name on it, in the first sentence, in the third person, under a dateline, and let the wire do the only thing it is good at: making a private fact public.

Questions people ask before they write one

Can I issue a personal press release if I already have a company?

Yes. The company can appear as the affiliation. The test is the lead. If the first sentence still works when you delete the company name and keep the person, you wrote a personal release. If it collapses, you wrote company PR and put your name in it. Both are valid. Only one of them makes the person the thing a search returns.

What if my only news is that I exist?

Then you do not have news. Open the practice, finish the book, take the seat, release the study, ship the thing. The release is the record of that event, not a substitute for it. A week is enough to go from a real fact to a live URL. A year of “building in public” without an event is not a pipeline. It is a diary.

Do I write it myself or let the model do it?

Let the model do the format. You do the facts. Cited’s draft is the inverted pyramid, the dateline, the third person, the name stuffed into the sentences that get copied. Your edit is where you kill anything you would not say in a deposition. That split is the product. A blank page produces either first-person marketing or a bio. A raw model with no wire rules produces adjectives. You want neither on a news domain.

Will Google News and ChatGPT pick it up?

Google News indexes timestamped pages on trusted domains. A wire release is how a named person gets one of those pages. Assistants cite high-authority, dated news with a named person and a specific fact. That is the shape. It is not a guarantee. One page is a source. It is not a personality. If the URL never goes live, nothing happens. The report is the list of URLs. Read it.

How long should this take?

The draft is a minute if you already know the news. The edit is as long as it takes you to stop adding adjectives. Fulfilment is not instant because we do not spend credits from the customer path; the order queues, then we submit. Plan for this week, not this hour. If you need a masthead on a deadline, buy the package that includes that masthead and have the copy clean before you pay.

What do I send a client after?

The live URLs. Not a mockup, not a logo sheet, not a PDF of the draft. One link on a domain they recognise is worth the rest of the blast. If you cannot open the page in an incognito window, you do not have “as seen in.” You have a receipt.

Questions

What is a personal press release?

A wire-legal announcement that treats a named person as the subject, not the company brand. It opens with a dateline, stays in the third person, and leads with an event: a launch, a hire, a book, a practice, or a study. The company can appear as affiliation. Google and ChatGPT retrieve names; they do not retrieve “the team.”

When is a job title not news?

When nothing happened. “I am a fractional CMO” is a LinkedIn headline: no date, no place, no event. A title becomes news only when it is attached to something a stranger could print — appointed, opened, published, released — with a city and a date. If you cannot say what happened, where, and when in one sentence that includes your full name, you have a bio, not a release.

How long should a personal press release be?

The distributor’s submission limits are 250 to 1,250 words. Under the floor or over the ceiling, the copy is rejected. Cited’s drafts aim at about 420, 550, or 800 words so they sit clear of the floor. The headline needs at least five words and stays under 200 characters. The summary is 45 words or fewer. At most five links in the body.

Can I write a personal press release in first person?

No. The wire expects third person throughout. “I” and “we” read as advertising and produce sentences that lose their subject the moment a model copies them. Use a quote only if you actually provided one, attributed. Cited will not invent a quote.

What does Cited charge for a personal press release?

AI writes the draft from your facts; you edit every word; Cited distributes it. Indexed is $79 (300+ publisher sites). Get known is $149 (500+ sites; stack USA Today or AP News on top). Famous is $399 and includes USA Today and AP News. No subscription. Orders queue for manual fulfilment so nothing spends until the copy is ready.

Will a personal press release get a journalist to write about me?

No. A wire is syndication, not an assignment. Feeds reprint the copy onto publisher sites. Some of those sites are ones a stranger would recognise — AP News, USA Today, Yahoo Finance on the packages that include them — and most of the rest are not. Count live URLs. If you already have a reporter who wants the story, email them. The release is the primary document they can cite, not the pitch.