How to check a press release placement yourself

Four things are worth confirming on every row of a coverage report, in this order: the page loads, your release is actually on it, the link to your site behaves the way the report says, and the page says who paid for it. About ninety seconds each. A twelve-row report is a ten-minute job, and you need a browser and nothing else.

This is the check that turns a send receipt into a coverage report. Nobody has to take our word for any of it, which is the point.

Everything below was measured against live pages in August 2026, on outlets we sell. Where a check has a failure mode, the example is one we reproduced.

1. Open it in a browser, not in a link checker

Paste the URL into an ordinary browser tab. Do not start with curl, a broken-link plugin or a spreadsheet formula, because on several outlets those tools get a different answer from the one a reader gets.

Street Insider returns 403 to every HTTP client we tried, while its robots.txt explicitly permits those paths — the block is a Cloudflare firewall rule rather than a policy, and the page loads normally in a browser. Those are two different systems saying two different things: RFC 9309, which standardises the Robots Exclusion Protocol, governs only what a well-behaved crawler agrees not to request, and a firewall is under no obligation to agree with it. Benzinga returned 403 on two of three passes even at 1.5 seconds between requests, and its robots.txt is itself behind a challenge page. Digital Journal behaves the same way. On those three outlets, a tool reporting a dead link is reporting its own rejection, not your placement.

The opposite failure is worse, and no tool will warn you about it.

2. Confirm the page is your release, not a page shaped like it

A 200 response has not told you the page contains your announcement. Some sites answer any URL matching a pattern with a 200 and a plausible article — a soft 404, which is Google's own name for a page that returns a success code while showing an error or no real content.

We reproduced this twice on theglobeandmail.com. Requesting an article ID that has never existed returned HTTP 200 and 556 KB of a real, unrelated article about a smartwatch launch. Nothing in the response says the page does not exist.

So read the page, not the status code:

• Does the headline match the headline you submitted?
• Is the publication date within a day or two of your distribution date?
• Is your company name in the headline or the body — not only in the address bar?

That last one is the trap, and it is the one that catches software. Press-release URLs almost always carry the company name in the slug, and many sites write the requested URL back into the page as a canonical tag, an og:url property and a JSON state blob. Search the page for your company name and you may be finding the name you just typed into the address bar. Use your browser's find function, then look at where each hit landed. Hits in the headline, the opening paragraph or the media contact block are real. Hits in a navigation menu, a ticker rail or a related-stories module are page furniture.

This matters most when your company name is a short or common word. We ran confirmed-live placement pages against decoy company names: 14 of 36 tests matched. "Apple", "Market" and "Insider" were each found on pages that had nothing to do with them, picked up from navigation and related-article modules. Invented, distinctive names never produced a false match on any page. If your company is called Market Financial or Insider Media, a name search on its own tells you nothing.

3. Read the link attribute yourself

Right-click the link to your site and choose Inspect, or press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) to view the page source and search for your domain. You are looking for the rel attribute on the anchor tag. Google documents what each value means in Qualify your outbound links to Google, which is the authority worth reading rather than any vendor's summary of it — including ours. The longer version of this vocabulary is a piece of its own.

Two live examples. Barchart carried rel="nofollow noopener" on every client link in the releases we opened. TechBullion carried rel="follow external noopener" on a business release and rel="sponsored noopener follow external" on a crypto release from the same period. The word "follow" appears in both. Only one of them passes anything, so read the whole attribute rather than the first token.

4. Check whether there is a link at all

On OpenPR the article body contained zero anchor tags. The client's website appeared in the media contact block as plain, unclickable text, and the site asks the publisher to link to OpenPR from their own homepage instead. On one Digital Journal release the only outbound links ran through a pr.report redirect carrying nofollow; on another there were no external anchors whatsoever.

This is why a single dofollow flag per outlet is not really a fact about the outlet. TechBullion gives one answer for business releases and another for crypto. The honest unit is one release on one page on one day, which is exactly what you are looking at — and the reason the wire, not the outlet, tends to decide your link.

5. Read the label

Scroll to the top and the bottom of the page and find out what the publisher calls this. The label is not decoration: the FTC's Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses covers exactly this format — "content that bears a similarity to the news, feature articles, product reviews, entertainment, and other material that surrounds it online" — and states that an ad is deceptive "if it promotes the benefits and attributes of goods and services, but is not readily identifiable to consumers as an ad".

• Street Insider prints: "Paid press release content from GetNews. The StreetInsider.com news staff was not involved in its creation."
• Barchart runs a "Press Release" chip, gives the byline to the wire rather than a journalist, and ends the piece with a line naming the distributing wire.
• CoinMarketCap labels the piece "(CMC Labs: Partnership)" and carries a third-party content disclaimer.
• TechBullion carried none of this. Zero occurrences of "disclaimer", "sponsored", "advertisement" or "not responsible" anywhere on the page, published under a human byline.

An absent label is the outlet's editorial choice. It is not a better placement, and it is worth knowing which kind you have before you send the link to an investor.

6. Check again in a month

Placements move. TechBullion changed a published slug after delivery, so the originally indexed URL now redirects. An MSN URL still sitting in the search index rendered "This story is unavailable" when opened. Digital Journal returned 410 Gone for entire press-release sections belonging to low-cost reseller wires, while its ACCESS Newswire and GlobeNewswire sections returned 200.

Three status codes are worth telling apart, and RFC 9110 defines all three. 404 means not found. 410 means the publisher deliberately removed it and is asking search engines to drop it. 403 means you were blocked, which is not a statement about the page at all. Nobody should report a 403 to you as a missing placement. Google's own guide to how status codes affect its crawlers is worth reading alongside, because it also explains why a page can vanish from search without the URL ever breaking.

How to catch us getting it wrong

Run these three against our own reports. A sample one is published, so the rows are visible before you have any of your own.

1. Take any row we mark as live and confirmed by machine, and open it. If the page does not carry your release, that is a soft 404 in our report, and we want the URL.
2. If your company name is a short or common word, check where the name appears on each confirmed page. A hit only in the navigation is not a confirmation, and our matcher can be fooled by it.
3. Check who we say confirmed each row. AP News disallows its press-release path to all crawlers in robots.txt. MarketWatch disallows everything and carries a Dow Jones notice against automated collection. Street Insider blocks automated clients at the firewall. No crawler of ours reads those pages. If a row on one of those three is ever labelled machine-checked, the label is wrong — a person opened it, or nobody did, and the report has to say which.

Send us the URL and what you saw. A correction from a customer costs us a row in a report. Keeping a flattering number costs more.

The ten-minute version

1. Open the URL in a browser.
2. Match the headline and the date against what you submitted.
3. Find your company name, and check it appears somewhere other than the URL and the navigation.
4. View source, find your domain, read the whole rel attribute.
5. Confirm there is an anchor tag at all.
6. Read the disclosure label, if there is one.
7. Diary it for a month's time, and note whether the URL still resolves.