One in Four Press Releases Ships Without a Boilerplate, Five-Year Study Finds
UNITED STATES – August 25, 2026 – One in four press releases goes out without a boilerplate, the short About paragraph at the end that states who the company is, according to a new study of 138,901 press releases by distribution service PR Gun.
Across the five-year corpus, 24.9 percent of releases carried no identifiable About section. The boilerplate is the least glamorous paragraph in the document and the one a reporter uses most: it is where they confirm what the company does, how long it has operated, and where it is based before deciding whether the story is credible.
A release without one forces a journalist to research the company from scratch, and on deadline the more common outcome is that they simply pass. The finding is consistent with newsroom guidance collected in PR Gun’s guide to writing a press release.
PR Gun recommends a three-to-four sentence About paragraph, identical in every release, covering what the company does, who it serves, founding year, and headquarters city, followed by a working media contact. Professional drafting options are compared in the company’s review of the best press release writing services, and distribution formatting requirements are covered in its best press release distribution services guide.
The pattern behind the missing paragraph is consistent across the corpus. First-time issuers omit the boilerplate far more often than repeat issuers, which suggests the paragraph is not being cut deliberately but simply never written: a company drafting its first release focuses entirely on the announcement and never realizes the document is supposed to end with a standing description of the issuer. Agencies almost never make this mistake; self-serve submissions account for the bulk of the gap.
The cost is asymmetric. A reporter evaluating an unfamiliar company has, in practice, two paths: verify quickly from the release itself, or move to the next item in the queue. The boilerplate is the verification shortcut. It also compounds over time — a consistent About paragraph, repeated verbatim across every release, builds a recognizable identity in news databases and search results, so each release strengthens the next. A company that writes it once has solved the problem permanently, which makes the 24.9 percent omission rate one of the cheapest fixes in public relations.
Methodology: PR Gun collected and analyzed 143,576 press releases distributed through ten major newswires between September 2021 and August 2026; 138,901 carried full body text and were used for content analysis. Matching is case-insensitive and counts presence per release, not frequency.
About PR Gun
PR Gun is a press release distribution service that places customer news on AP News, Google News, and hundreds of regional and industry outlets, with packages starting at $49. The company publishes ongoing research on press release effectiveness drawn from its database of more than 140,000 distributed releases.
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