Press Release Dos and Don'ts: A Printable Pre-Submission Checklist

Do lead with the news, name every company, person, product and place explicitly, explain where each figure comes from, and keep your company description the same everywhere it appears. Don't invent anything, stuff keywords, republish the same release with small changes or bury the facts under marketing language. Before you submit, work through the double-check list below, from headline to update plan. Print this page and tick each line.

What should every press release do?

Structure

• Follow a clear press release structure: headline, summary, dateline and opening, body, quote, boilerplate, contact.
• Lead with the actual news in the first sentence.
• Use short paragraphs, useful headings, lists and tables where they make facts easier to find.
• Include a clear company description in the About paragraph.
• Include accurate contact information.

Facts

• Identify companies, people, products and locations by their full, correct names.
• Use accurate dates, with the year.
• Give concrete facts rather than descriptions of how good something is.
• Explain where every statistic comes from.
• Include the method for any original research: source, period, sample, geography and limitations.
• Cite authoritative external sources where a claim depends on them.
• Use the words your industry and customers actually use.

Links and media

• Link to the strongest underlying resource, such as the report, product page or source page on your site.
• Add relevant original media: photographs, charts or screenshots you own.
• Make sure the pages you link to can be crawled and indexed.

Afterwards

• Keep your business information consistent across your website, profiles and directories.
• Correct incorrect or outdated information when you find it.
• Measure search, referral, earned media and AI visibility over time.
• Proofread every release, every time.

The anatomy post shows how these pieces fit together in one annotated example.

What should a press release never do?

• Don't invent news.
• Don't invent awards, rankings, reviews or experts.
• Don't stuff keywords or aim for a keyword-density percentage.
• Don't insert large numbers of links with keyword-rich anchor text.
• Don't call a company the market leader, or first in anything, without evidence and a stated basis.
• Don't tell readers how anyone feels about the news. Say what happened.
• Don't use generic AI-generated filler.
• Don't publish the same release repeatedly with tiny changes.
• Don't hide the source of a statistic.
• Don't present company opinion as independent fact.
• Don't create fake third-party corroboration.
• Don't judge success only by the number of syndicated copies.
• Don't bury key facts beneath paragraphs of marketing language.
• Don't block search or AI retrieval bots by accident if you want to be found.
• Don't publish structured data that contradicts what the page shows.
• Don't leave outdated names, addresses, services or leadership details live.

Most of these come down to one habit: replace claims with facts. Here is what that looks like for Acme Plumbing, a fictional plumbing company used throughout our guide.

The vague claims post has more rewrites like these.

What should you double-check before you submit?

Work through these twelve checks in order. Each is a question with a yes or no answer.

1. Headline and summary. Can someone understand the announcement from the first two sentences alone?
2. Format. Is the release divided into logical sections with short paragraphs and useful headings?
3. Entities. Are the names of every company, product, person, location, partner, report and organisation explicit and spelled correctly?
4. Details and facts. Have you verified every number, percentage, unit, date, spelling, place, job title and calculation?
5. Source and method. Can a reader tell where each piece of evidence came from?
6. Consistency. Does the company description match your website and your other official profiles?
7. Links. Does every link work, go to the intended page, use HTTPS and give the reader something useful?
8. Search accessibility. Does the page you link to return a normal response, avoid an accidental noindex tag, allow the relevant crawlers in robots.txt, carry the correct canonical tag, have internal links pointing to it and appear in your XML sitemap?
9. Structured data. If the page has structured data, is it valid and does it match what visitors can see?
10. Spelling, grammar and punctuation. Has someone other than the writer read it?
11. Contact information. Are the organisation name, contact person, email, website and, where appropriate, telephone or address all correct?
12. Update plan. For pages that will stay live, who updates them when the facts change?

Check 8 is easy to skip, because it concerns your website rather than the release. The AI readability post covers it in detail.

What do newswires check on top of this?

Newswires have their own rules, and a release that breaks them can be sent back. These are the ones our editors check every release against before it is filed:

• a headline of 18 words or fewer, in Title Case, that names the company;
• a summary of 45 words or fewer that does not repeat the first paragraph;
• at most three links in the release;
• a quote attributed to a named person;
• no exclamation marks, and no questions in the release text;
• a dateline with the city;
• a media contact block; and
• an About paragraph.

The dateline, contact and end mark post explains why the required furniture matters.

Frequently asked questions

Do these rules apply to the page on my own site too?

Mostly, yes. The facts, entities, sources and consistency checks apply to any page you want people and search systems to trust. The newswire limits, such as three links and an 18-word headline, apply only to the release itself.

What happens if my release breaks a newswire rule?

It may be refused or returned for changes, which delays publication. That is why an editor reviews every media:on release against these rules before it is filed. You can start a release here and send a draft or a brief.

Is it acceptable to call my company a leader in its field?

Only if you can substantiate it and state the basis, for example a published market-share figure with its source. Otherwise, describe what the company does, where and for whom, and let the facts carry the weight.