What to ask a press release distributor before you pay

Ask these in four groups and in this order: who actually fulfils the order, what the meter charges, what evidence you get back, and what happens when something goes wrong. The order matters because the first group can void the purchase and the last group is the one nobody volunteers. Every question below is answerable by any legitimate vendor in a sentence, and a vendor who needs a call to answer one has told you something.

Group one: who is actually behind this

1. Which network fulfils this order? A large share of this market resells the same few wires — PRWeb is Cision's own self-serve brand, eReleases sells "custom national PR Newswire distribution", PRUnderground names the "PRNewswire/Cision network" on its $419.99 tier. Reselling is the ordinary structure of the industry, including for us. What is not ordinary is refusing to name the upstream. A vendor who will not tell you whose rails you are buying cannot be compared to anyone.

2. Is my category accepted, and where is that published? This is the question that decides whether the purchase can survive at all. 24-7PressRelease states in writing that submissions failing its high-risk financial review "may be delayed, rejected, or permanently blocked from our platform" and that "Refunds will not be issued in such cases." Ask for the URL of the policy. If the network publishes none — Business Wire, GlobeNewswire and ACCESS Newswire publish no content policy at all — get the answer in an email and keep it.

3. Are the named outlets in the tier I am buying, or the one above it? Logo strips are usually shown for the whole ladder. Ask which specific tier carries each name you care about.

4. Are those outlets included, or possible? "Included", "guaranteed" and "may be picked up by" wear the same logo on a pricing page. A wire distributes; downstream sites republish at their own discretion. Any vendor giving you an unconditional yes here is describing something they do not control.

5. What does the outlet count actually count? Counts that triple for a small price rise are counting near-identical local affiliate republications — IssueWire's claimed count rises from 225+ to 700+ between a $21 tier and a $65 one. What a "500+ outlets" number is measuring is worth reading before you compare two of them.

Group two: the meter

6. What is the word limit, and the overage rate? On the 2024 PR Newswire card, US1 National includes 400 words at $1,020 and charges $325 for each additional 100. A 900-word release is $2,645 before anything else. Count the words in your actual draft, including headline, boilerplate and any forward-looking statement.

7. Is a logo or image extra? $595 for a logo and $490 per image, video or audio item on the same card. ACCESS Newswire and Newswire.com publish unlimited words and images instead. On a long release, that difference outweighs the base price.

8. Is there a membership or platform fee? The Cision card charges $305 a year before a single release goes out.

9. Does the price include the specific outlet I am buying this for? EIN Presswire's own FAQ says plainly that Yahoo Finance requires PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire or Business Wire. A cheap tier is not a discounted version of an expensive one; it is a different footprint, and the honest vendors say so.

Group three: the evidence

This is the group that separates otherwise identical quotes, and almost no vendor publishes answers to it.

10. For each row in the report, who opened that URL? There are only three honest answers: we did, a person did, or the network told us. A vendor who cannot separate those three has not checked anything. A distribution report confirms a release was transmitted to a list; it is not evidence that a page exists — the difference in full.

11. Which of the outlets you sell cannot be checked automatically, and what do you do about those? A good answer names them. Ours: AP News disallows /press-release/* in robots.txt for every crawler, MarketWatch serves a blanket Disallow: / under a Dow Jones notice against automated collection, Street Insider returns 403 to every scripted request, and Benzinga rate-limits after the first one. Roughly 46% of the placements a buyer takes by name can be confirmed by an automated check; the rest need a person. Any vendor claiming every placement is machine-verified is either not selling those outlets or has not tried.

12. Will the report tell me the link status per URL? Five outcomes occur and all five are common: a plain followed link, nofollow, rel="sponsored", a redirect through the wire's tracker, or no link at all. Google's documentation is explicit that links carrying those attributes will generally not be followed, so they pass no ranking credit. A vendor quoting link status from a rate card rather than the live page is quoting an assumption — our own catalogue had three of seven inspectable values wrong, all of them overstating what the buyer received. If you would rather check yourself, it takes about ten minutes a URL.

13. Do you re-check, and for how long? Pages are removed at the publisher's discretion. We have observed entire archive sections returning 410 Gone, and a competitor's public case study still cites a MarketWatch URL that no longer resolves. Ask what happens at 30 days and at a year.

Group four: when it goes wrong

14. What is refunded, and on what trigger — in writing? Split it into three cases and get an answer to each: the release could not be submitted at all; the network rejected a named line; no outlet chose to publish. Most vendors are silent on all three, and at least one states that a failed compliance review is not refundable.

The third case deserves an honest answer rather than a generous one. Nobody controls whether a downstream site republishes, so a vendor promising a refund on non-publication is promising against an event they can neither cause nor disprove.

Our own answers, including the ones that are no

• Who fulfils it: we are a reseller. We buy distribution from wire partners and mark it up.
• Are all named outlets machine-verifiable: no. Three of the nine names in our flagship package cannot be confirmed by an automated request, for the reasons in question 11. A person opens those, and the row says so.
• Is publication guaranteed: no. Submission is guaranteed; publication is the outlet's decision.
• Refunds: if we could not submit it — a declined category, an editorial review that finds it unsubmittable, a network refusal — the refund is full, every time. If the network rejected a specific named line, that line is refunded. If it was distributed and no outlet chose to run it, that is a line in your report, not a refund.
• Link status: read off the live page, never copied from a rate card. Where we have not read it, our catalogue says "not checked" rather than guessing.
• Re-checks: none. The report is a snapshot taken at delivery and says so, rather than implying a link is permanent.
• Editorial review: free, before anything is submitted, so a category problem surfaces while it is still cheap.

The sample report shows the format before you spend anything, and the package page prices a package against your sector. If you want the operational version of this — everything to check about the release itself rather than the vendor — that is the distribution checklist.

Take these fourteen questions somewhere else first. A list that only produces good answers on its author's own site is an advert, and you would be right to discount it.