The press release boilerplate: billable, permanent, and usually wrong

The boilerplate is the most-copied and least-examined paragraph in corporate communications. It gets written once, pasted into every release for years, and nobody re-reads it. Three facts about it are worth knowing before you paste it again.

It is billable, every time

On a metered wire the boilerplate consumes your word allowance like any other text. PR Newswire's 2024 domestic card includes 400 words on US1 National and charges $325 per additional 100. A 120-word boilerplate is therefore about $390 of overage on every release that runs long — and most releases run long precisely because of the boilerplate and the quote. On a capped tier like ours nothing is billed for it; it is simply close to a third of the words you bought.

Across twelve releases a year, a 120-word "about us" that could have been 55 words is roughly $2,300 of billable text saying the same thing twelve times. On the World Financial Markets circuit, at $1,535 per 100 words, one such paragraph is over $1,800 on a single release.

Mid-market wires meter differently — ACCESS Newswire and Newswire.com both publish unlimited words on their paid tiers — which is a real reason to compare on the meter rather than the logo. We priced every line of the card separately.

Its link probably does nothing you think it does

The boilerplate is where the company URL sits, and for a large share of buyers it is the actual reason the release was purchased.

Almost every syndicated press link is nofollow or rel="sponsored". Google's own documentation says sponsored marks "advertisements or paid placements" and that such links "will generally not be followed". That is not a defect in the product; it is the correct labelling of a paid placement, and every major wire's downstream partners apply it as a matter of policy.

The measured picture in our own catalogue is more varied than a blanket rule, and worse in places:

So the boilerplate URL may be a followed link, a nofollowed link, a redirect, plain text, or absent — and it varies by outlet within the same distribution. Why this is normal, and how to check what you actually got, are both ten-minute reads.

The practical consequence: write the URL so it works as plain text. acme.com reads correctly when unlinked. A long tracked URL with campaign parameters does not, and on the outlets that print rather than link it, it is unusable.

It is permanent in the places you least want it to be

Syndicated copies are not editable. If your boilerplate says "founded in 2019, headquartered in Austin, with 40 employees", all three facts are frozen onto every domain that republished it, dated, and searchable. Press-release hub pages are pruned at the publisher's discretion — we have seen entire archive paths return 410 Gone — so the copies that survive are chosen by publishers, not by you.

The three items that go stale fastest, and should almost never appear:

• Headcount. Changes constantly; ages badly in both directions.
• Funding total to date. Superseded by the next round, and awkward if there is not one.
• Customer counts and named customers. Customers churn, and a named logo that has left is a conversation you do not want.

What ages well: what the company does, in a sentence a stranger understands; the year founded; the headquarters city; the URL. That is a 40 to 60 word paragraph, and it is both cheaper and more durable than the 130-word version.

What belongs after the boilerplate

Two blocks, in this order.

Media contact. A name, a role, an email address and — if you want calls — a phone number. Not a generic press@, which most reporters read as a queue rather than a person. Several networks reject releases without a contact block; it is one of the commonest structural rejection reasons, alongside missing datelines.

Forward-looking statements, if you are a public company. This is where the safe-harbour language goes, and it is written by your counsel rather than by your communications team. Note that it is also billable text: a 150-word cautionary block is roughly $490 of overage on the US1 National circuit, and materially more on the financial circuits. That is not an argument for omitting it; it is an argument for knowing the number when you compare wire quotes on word allowance.

For a company whose release is a Regulation FD disclosure, the boilerplate is also part of the document the timestamp attaches to. 17 CFR 243.100 requires public disclosure simultaneous with an intentional selective disclosure and prompt disclosure after an unintentional one, which is a reason to keep the whole document — boilerplate included — approved and current rather than assembled under time pressure.

A short checklist

1. Count the words. Anything over 60 is costing you money on every release.
2. Remove headcount, funding totals and customer names.
3. Make the URL readable as plain text.
4. Check that the company description would make sense to someone who has never heard of you — the syndicated copy has no surrounding context.
5. Re-read it annually, or the day the address changes, whichever is first.
6. Confirm the media contact is a person who will answer.

The other two elements worth their own treatment are the headline and the quote.

We do not promise that any of this produces rankings, coverage or publication anywhere. It produces a shorter, cheaper, more durable document — which is the entire claim.