After you publish
What lands in your inbox after you publish.
Your release is public now, which means it has been scraped. Over the next week you will get emails about it. We got three in a day on our own most recent release. They sort into three kinds, and only one of them is a problem.
Kind one
The competitor.
Another distribution company offering to do what we do, usually cheaper, sometimes free for the first one. This is fair, and some of them are good.
Read the terms rather than the price. The questions worth asking are what happens if a release is declined, whether there is any refund at all, and how long the placements stay up. Those vary enormously between vendors, and the price is not the interesting part.
Kind two
The flattering writer.
Someone says they saw your announcement, found the angle sharp, and would like to feature you. There is no price in the first email. The price comes after you say yes, and it is usually between $40 and $150. The piece is written by them, published on their site, and in some cases a working link back to your website costs extra on top.
That is content marketing, and buying it is a legitimate choice with your eyes open. Two things to know before you do.
First, some of them will tell you in writing that it is not sponsored content. If you then put “as featured in” on your website, that claim is yours, not theirs. The customer who checks and finds a price list is your customer, not their reader.
Second, if a working link is a paid upgrade, be careful what you are buying. Google's own policy is that links bought to pass ranking signals have to be marked as paid. A link sold to you as a ranking benefit is one your site carries the risk for, not theirs.
Kind three
The one to delete.
You will know it by what it promises. It guarantees you will be cited by named outlets. It promises top placement in AI assistants. It says citations will permanently teach AI models to trust your company.
Nobody can deliver any of that, and we are not being modest. No vendor controls an editor's decision, so a guaranteed outlet is a guess with a price on it. Ask an AI assistant the same question twice and you can get two different answers, so a promised ranking is a coin flip sold as a service. And nothing you buy permanently teaches a model anything.
These emails often carry their own tells. One we received listed two AI assistants as separate products when one had been renamed into the other more than two years earlier, so nobody had read the template in all that time. The fine print at the bottom claimed we had opted in to hear from them. We had not.
The ten-second test
- Does it guarantee a named outlet?
- Nobody can. Walk.
- Does it promise an AI ranking or a search position?
- Nobody can. Walk.
- Does it quote an audience number?
- Ask whether that is people who saw your story, or the combined traffic of a network. It is always the second one.
- Does the link cost extra?
- Then ask what you are actually buying, and whether it is disclosed as paid.
- Is there a real company behind it?
- A postal address, a person's name, a working unsubscribe. Their absence tells you what the rest of it is worth.
Forward it to us.
You do not have to work any of this out alone. Send anything you are unsure about to hello@scorelabs.com and we will tell you what it is, what it costs, and whether it is worth it, including the times the honest answer is yes.
We are not paid either way, and we would rather you asked us than found out later.