How to get a press release on AP News

You cannot submit a release to AP News directly. It reaches apnews.com through a wire or a reseller, sits on a press-release path rather than in the editorial stream, and carries a label saying the AP news staff was not involved in its creation. Published prices for the same placement run from $310 as a flat add-on on Cision's 2024 card down to a $52.20 wholesale rate; we no longer sell it on its own, and it is named on both of our packages.

An AP News placement lives at a URL shaped like this:

apnews.com/press-release/globenewswire-mobile/improbable-invests-2m-in-otomato…-87d1bc97b05d9a0360fb2ca5cb312d50

Read the second segment. It is not /article/, and it is not named after AP. It is named after the wire that fed the release — globenewswire-mobile on that one, marketersmedia on another we traced, and prnews-io on the example a reseller publishes in its own catalogue. AP runs a hub per originating wire, and your release lands in the one belonging to whoever your vendor bought from.

The page tells the reader it was paid for

The label AP puts above the body is not subtle:

PRESS RELEASE: Paid Content from GlobeNewswire - Mobile. The AP news staff was not involved in its creation.

There is no byline. The author slot carries a timestamp and nothing else — "Published 11:16 PM CDT, February 22, 2026" on the release we read. Across thirty-plus syndicated pages we checked, no human was credited anywhere.

That disclosure is a feature, not a defect. It is the difference between a paid page and an earned one, and a buyer who understands which one they bought is a buyer who will not be surprised later.

What it costs, and through which route

We do not sell an AP News placement on its own any more — nothing here is sold individually, because a price with no checkout behind it is a claim the code cannot honour. It comes inside both of our packages — Launch and Headline — and otherwise on request. Our wholesale is $52.20: the supplier's apnews plan lists at $58 and we buy credits at $0.90 on its published reseller ladder, so the rate is arithmetic rather than a negotiation.

That is one rung on a ladder that runs from Cision's published $310 flat add-on down to $52.20, and the whole ladder — with what genuinely changes as you descend it — is in its own article. The short version: the price is telling you about the vendor's cost base, not about the placement.

What the link does

Measured, on live pages, and the answer is not one answer.

Same masthead, three months apart, opposite outcomes. On AP News specifically, the wire decides your link — which means anyone selling you an AP placement for a link is selling you a coin flip whose odds were set by a supplier decision you were never shown. Our catalogue therefore records AP's link status as unconfirmed rather than picking a side.

Two honest caveats. Those are two releases, not a rate. And both were read by opening the pages one at a time in an ordinary browser, for the reason below.

Nobody can check AP News automatically

AP News's robots.txt, read again on 29 August 2026, carries exactly one directive that matters to you: Disallow: /press-release/*, under User-agent: *.

/article/* is allowed. The press-release path — the only path your release can occupy — is not. The same file then blocks thirteen named agents from the entire domain, ClaudeBot, GPTBot, CCBot, PerplexityBot, anthropic-ai and Claude-SearchBot among them, each with a bare Disallow: /.

Under the Robots Exclusion Protocol that is an instruction a well-behaved crawler obeys. Our own automated verification rate on AP News is therefore 0.00, permanently, and no better crawler will change it. When we confirm an AP placement, a person opens the URL. We would rather say that plainly than let you assume a machine did it — checking a placement yourself takes about ten minutes and works on exactly the same principle.

There is a second implication worth sitting with. If AP tells AI crawlers to stay off the whole domain, an AP placement is a weak instrument for showing up in machine-generated answers. Some vendors sell it as precisely that. The robots file is public; read it before you believe them.

Where it sits in what we sell

• On its own: quote-on-request. Nothing here is sold individually any more.
• In a package: included in Launch and Headline. It is the one outlet both share, and which package fits your industry decides what else arrives with it.

A package is therefore the route to it, and both of ours carry it.

Who should buy it

Buy it if you want a citable page on a masthead a stranger recognises — a line in a fundraising deck, a "coverage" link in a sales email, a third-party URL with your announcement on it that resolves for a long time. That is a real thing and AP is among the strongest names you can attach it to.

Do not buy it if you are buying a backlink. On the two releases we opened, one gave three and one gave none, and nobody sells you the wire-level control that would decide it.

Do not buy it if your case depends on independent verification you can hand to a sceptic. AP has told every automated agent to stay out of this path. We will open it by hand and tell you what we saw; what we cannot give you is a machine-generated audit trail, and we would rather you knew that before you paid than after.

Do not buy it a second time. One AP hub page per announcement is what exists. A second submission through a second wire produces a second URL in a second hub, which is how a large outlet count gets built, not how reach compounds.