Building Content for the Algorithm: Mark Willaman on Why the Press Release Is a Perfect Document for AI
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In the latest episode of The Building Texas Show, host Justin McKenzie travels to San Antonio for a conversation with Mark Willaman, co-founder of Newsworthy.ai. Published September 29, 2026, the episode tackles a question every Texas founder, mayor, and economic development corporation now faces: how do you get discovered when your content has two audiences—humans and machines—and local news outlets are increasingly thin on the ground?
Willaman and McKenzie map a practical playbook for brand discoverability in the AI era. They explore why the press release is a near-perfect document for LLMs, traditional SEO, and generative engine optimization; David McGinnis's 28-day news cycle and the strategy of running press releases as six-piece campaigns; multi-format curation through NewsRamp.com into articles, short-form audio, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and FAQ blocks; and the role of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), grounding, and why AI training bots scraping your site does not guarantee AI answers will cite you.
Willaman, who previously integrated PRWeb into his HR marketing software before reconnecting with McGinnis to build Newsworthy.ai, argues that the format itself is the moat. "What's intriguing about the press release is it's kind of a perfect document for today's environment. It's current, it's factual, it's structured, it has name entities in it. Machines love that," he tells McKenzie. He offers a memorable frame for the whole conversation: SEO gets you into the library, but AI retrieval decides whether you're pulled off the shelf.
The discussion goes deep on mechanics. Willaman explains how Newsworthy.ai now displays a live counter of AI training bots crawling its site, walks through schema and entity structuring behind the scenes, and describes how a single source release is curated into 30-to-90-second audio snippets pushed to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, AI-narrated video for Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, and zero-click social posts. McKenzie connects the framework to his own work with Texas mayors, small business owners, and site selectors, noting how the mayor series has helped candidates in communities without a local newspaper reach constituents. Both push back on conversion-first thinking, invoking the updated marketing rule of seven touches across five platforms and pointing listeners to McGinnis's paint-by-numbers book, available free in digital form at newsworthy.ai.