How to Get Featured on AP News

AP is a not-for-profit cooperative owned by its member news organisations. Member outlets pay for access to AP copy, photos and video, and they republish it, which is why one AP story about a company can appear in hundreds of local papers within a day, each on its own domain, each with its own audience.

Three consequences follow, and they explain most of what is confusing about AP:

• The multiplier only applies to AP's own reporting. Wire distribution to members carries stories written by AP journalists. Nothing you submit enters that stream.
• Bureaus, not a single newsroom. AP covers territory through state and regional bureaus. For a company that is not nationally significant, the bureau is the only realistic door.
• Standards are the product. AP's value to members is impartiality, so promotional framing is not a stylistic problem for them. It is a disqualifier.

When a vendor sells “guaranteed AP News placement”, this second thing is what is being sold, essentially without exception. There is nothing wrong with buying it, as long as you know which one you bought and describe it that way afterwards.

This is the underused route. A state bureau has to cover its whole territory with a small team, which means bureau reporters are genuinely looking for regional stories, and a company that is part of one can get into AP copy without being nationally notable.

AP reporters write constantly about the economy, and economic stories need businesses to make them concrete: someone who can say what a tariff did to their input costs, what a labour shortage did to their schedule, what customers stopped buying this quarter. Being that person is a role you can apply for.

• Answer journalist requests, consistently. Qwoted, Featured and Help a B2B Writer carry requests from wire and national reporters. Three answers a week, every week, is the entire discipline.
• Speak in specifics, not positioning. “Our freight costs rose 14% between March and September, and we moved two routes in response” is quotable. “We are passionate about customer value” is not.
• Be verifiable. AP checks. A real company, a real title, a real phone number, and documents to back the numbers you quote.
• Accept the small mention. Two sentences in an AP economic story that runs in 200 papers is worth more than a glowing article nobody syndicates.

Introduce yourself to the bureau's business reporter before you need anything: one short email saying what you do, what data you have and that you answer the phone on deadline. That email is how source lists get built.

This is our product, described plainly. A distribution network places your release on partner sections of large publishers, apnews.com among them. The page is labelled as a press release, the text is yours, no reporter is involved, the links are normally nofollow or sponsored, and nothing is sent to AP member outlets.

Worth buying when you want:

• a dated, permanent third-party record of a milestone, which is what due diligence and procurement actually look for;
• third-party pages in the results when someone searches your company name;
• broad crawlable reach, including the structured, recent sources that AI answer engines tend to cite;
• a predictable timeline around a launch, when earned coverage cannot be scheduled.

Not worth buying if you expect:

• an AP byline, wire pickup by member papers, or any editorial vetting;
• followed links and a domain rating increase: see what domain rating actually measures;
• a defensible “as seen on AP” claim. Link to the page and let people see what it is instead.

Our Authority package covers this route: written release, distribution across the network that includes AP News, Business Insider and Yahoo Finance, and a report with every live URL so you can inspect each placement yourself. Up to 7 business days. Routes 1 and 2 cost nothing but time, and if what you need is AP's multiplier, they are the only routes that produce it.

The AP Stylebook is the house style of most American newsrooms. A release written in it survives contact with a reporter: less rewriting, fewer questions, and an immediate signal that you have done this before. The rules that catch people out most often:

• Dates. Abbreviate months with a date: Jan., Feb., Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec., and spell out March, April, May, June and July. No ordinals: Nov. 6, not November 6th.
• Numbers. Spell out one through nine, use figures for 10 and above, and use figures for ages, percentages, money and dimensions.
• Titles. Capitalise a formal title before a name, lowercase it after: “Chief Executive Jane Doe”, but “Jane Doe, chief executive of…”.
• Attribution. “said”, not stated, noted, explained or enthused. Always after the name, always past tense.
• One space after a period, no Oxford comma in a simple series, and no company-style capitalisation of ordinary words such as Platform, Solution or Industry.

The deeper habit matters more than the rules: AP style strips out adjectives. If the text still reads as marketing after you have applied the style, the problem is the content, not the formatting.