How to Use AI to Write Press Releases From WordPress Blog Posts

A lot of bloggers and small business owners live in that gap - great content on one side, media distribution on the other, and no clear bridge between them. That's started to change, quietly but faster, with AI writing tools. Before ChatGPT launched in late 2022, AI-generated press releases were a novelty, accounting for roughly 1.5% of releases published through distribution places. That number has since climbed to nearly 25% and it's still rising. The tools have become capable enough that what used to take a PR professional half a day can now take a blogger twenty minutes.

The time savings alone are hard to ignore. Some content teams report cutting their publishing time by as much as 75% once they build AI into the press release workflow; it's not because AI does the thinking for you - it's because it handles the structural heavy lifting and it lets you focus on the facts that actually need your judgment, like your angle, your quotes, and your contacts list.

I'll walk you through how to make that workflow happen using your existing WordPress content as the raw material. I'll talk about how to prepare your blog post for the conversion process, which AI tools are worth using, how to prompt them effectively, and how to edit the output so it reads like something a journalist would actually open.

What Makes a Blog Post Press Release-Ready

Before you touch any AI tool, it helps to look at your blog post and ask one honest question: why would a journalist care about this? That single question does filtering work on its own.

Not every blog post is worth pitching to the press. A lot of posts are helpful, well-written, and good for SEO without having anything that qualifies as news. The difference matters because press releases that aren't actually newsworthy tend to get ignored - and sending too many of them can hurt your credibility with journalists over time.

What you're looking for is a post that contains an announcement buried inside it. Think about posts where you revealed a new product, shared original research, announced a partnership, hit a known milestone, or responded to something actually happening in your industry. Those are the posts with press release potential. A general "tips and tricks" roundup, no matter how popular, usually isn't one of them.

Signals That a Post Is Worth Turning Into a Press Release

Here's a helpful way to review any post before you follow the process. Run through these questions and see how many you can answer with a yes.

Does the post announce something new - a product, a feature, a service, or a partnership? Does it include original data, a survey, or research your company conducted? Does it mark a milestone like an anniversary, a funding round, or a number worth talking about? Is it tied to a current event or trend that journalists are already writing about? Would people outside your company find this legitimately interesting - not just your existing audience?

Three or more yeses means that post is a strong candidate. One or two yeses might still work, depending on how strong those signals are. Zero yeses means the post probably belongs in your content library and not in a reporter's inbox.

What Gets Buried (and Why It Matters)

Newsworthy content gets buried in blog posts all the time. A company might publish a long educational post and mention halfway through that they just crossed 10,000 customers. Or they'll wrap a product launch inside a how-to guide. The information is there - it just isn't framed as news.

That's actually where the AI workflow covered later can become helpful - it helps you pull that buried angle to the surface and restructure it into a format journalists expect. But it can only work with what's actually there.

A common pitfall is trying to force this process on posts that don't have anything legitimately newsworthy in them. That gives you press releases that feel thin and unconvincing - and no amount of writing fixes a weak story. Being selective at this stage saves you time later and keeps your press outreach credible.

How to Connect WordPress to an AI Writing Workflow

Once you know which posts are worth turning into press releases, the next step is to get that content in front of an AI tool in a way that works. There are a few options for this, and the right one can depend on how frequently you publish and how much you want to automate.

The easiest path is a manual copy-paste workflow. You pull the text from your WordPress post, drop it into an AI writing tool like ChatGPT or Claude, and prompt it to rewrite the content as a press release. It takes a few extra minutes, but it gives you full control over what goes in and what comes out.

If you publish on a schedule, a semi-automated setup saves repetitive work. Tools like Zapier or Make let you connect WordPress to an AI tool so when a post goes live, the content is sent over automatically for processing. You still review and approve the output, but the handoff happens without you having to do it manually each time.

For high-volume sites, a fully automated pipeline is worth the setup time. This usually means connecting your RSS feed to an AI generator and then routing the output to wherever your press releases need to go - an email list, a distribution service, or a separate CMS. It's a bigger lift to configure, but once it's running, it largely takes care of itself.

Workflow Type	Effort Level	Tools Needed	Best For
Manual copy-paste	High	AI writing tool	Occasional releases
Semi-automated	Medium	Zapier or Make + AI	Weekly publishers
Fully automated	Low	RSS + AI + CMS integration	High-volume sites

Users who move from manual to automated workflows report saving around 75% of the time they used to spend on press release production. That number resonates with content teams because press release writing pulls away from the work they actually want to do. Cutting that time down means more room for strategy, outreach, and the creative side of content marketing.

Start with whatever level of automation matches where you are right now. A manual workflow is a fine place to start - you'll get a feel for what AI output looks like before you build anything more complex around it. You can always layer in automation later once the process feels natural.

Prompting AI to Transform Blog Content Into a Proper Press Release

With your workflow connected, the next step is telling the AI what to do with your blog content. This is where things go wrong - they paste in their post and ask for "a press release version," then wonder why the output reads like a blog post with a dateline applied to it.

The AI should have a job description - not just a content swap.

A prompt pulls elements from the blog post and tells the AI how to use each one. Think of it as briefing a writer who has never worked in PR before. Hand them the raw material and explain the format at the same time.

How to Structure Your Prompt

Break your prompt into a few working parts. Start by identifying what the AI should extract from the post, then tell it how to arrange those pieces.

Here is a structure that works in practice.

• Tell the AI to write in third person and formal news style - not conversational, not casual.
• Ask it to pull the core announcement or finding and lead with that as the headline.
• Direct it to identify the two or three most newsworthy facts and place those in the opening paragraph.
• Instruct it to format any quotes in attribution style, using a name and title rather than a first-person voice.
• Ask it to end with a boilerplate paragraph about the company and a short call to action or contact line.

You can paste this prompt directly before the blog content in the same message. The AI will treat the instructions and the content as one job. If you want tighter control over how the AI handles your content, setting up post writing preferences in advance can reduce the amount of correcting you have to do after the fact.

Watch Out for Tone Drift

AI tends to mirror the tone of whatever you feed it. If your blog post is chatty and uses "we" and "our team," the output will lean that way too - even though you asked for something formal. It helps to add a line like "do not use first person at any point" and "write as though this is being submitted to a wire service."

That last part matters more than it sounds. Wire editors and journalists expect a press release to follow a rhythm - who, what, when, where, and why - in roughly that order. If you write your prompt toward that standard, the AI has a target to hit instead of a general direction to wander in.

You might also ask the AI to flag any claims it can't verify from the blog content alone - this protects you from publishing a press release with inflated or invented facts that looked fine in a rough draft. Tools that automatically add citations or references can also help you keep factual grounding built into your content from the start.

One final pass to check the quote attribution, the company name formatting, and the dateline will go a long way before you send anything out.

From Publish to Press-Ready Without the Panic

That matters more now than ever. The AI press release market is expected to grow to over $2 billion by 2032, which means the communicators who get comfortable with these tools will have an edge as adoption furthers. You don't need to wait until the workflow is perfect to start.

A few habits will keep the quality high as you build this into your content schedule:

• Always review AI output before distributing. Even a well-prompted draft can miss your brand voice or misrepresent a nuance - a quick read-through catches what automation can't.
• Keep a swipe file of strong press releases in your niche. The more you train your eye for what good looks like, the faster you'll spot what needs adjusting in your AI drafts.
• Treat your prompt as a living document. Refine it each time based on what worked and what didn't, and it will produce better results with every use.

You already have the blog content. Now you have the process. Put them together and your story in front of the right audience can become quite a bit less scary - and quite a bit more steady. If you want to keep that momentum going, auto-queuing and scheduling posts with AI can help you stay consistent without the manual overhead.