How to get a press release on MarketWatch

MarketWatch is not sold on its own here. It carries no à-la-carte price and arrives only inside a package — it is one of the three names both Launch at $599 and Headline at $899 carry. Before you buy it for the logo, know that it is also the placement nobody can verify for you by machine — and that the one confirmed dead link in our whole sweep was a MarketWatch URL still being cited as proof in a published case study.

Most outlets that block crawlers do it as a preference. MarketWatch does it as a licence term. Its robots.txt, read again on 29 August 2026, opens with a notice before it gets to any directive:

Collection of content and other data on https://www.marketwatch.com/ through automated means is prohibited unless you have express written permission from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Then User-agent: * gets Disallow: /, and roughly sixty named search-engine crawlers are allowlisted back in. Google and Bing are in. Nothing else is.

That distinction matters commercially, not just technically. A robots directive is a request a polite crawler honours; this is a stated prohibition from the rights holder, pointing at Dow Jones's terms of use and a copyright contact address. The Robots Exclusion Protocol would make the Disallow line binding on its own; the notice above it makes the question a licensing one. No better crawler resolves it, no user-agent string gets around it, and any vendor who claims to verify your MarketWatch placement automatically is telling you they ignored it.

Our own automatic-verification rate on marketwatch.com is 0.00, and unlike a bot-shield case it will stay there.

The dead link

While tracing a competitor's published case studies, we opened every placement URL they cited. One was dead. It was the MarketWatch one:

marketwatch.com/press-release/genviral-releases-openclaw-skill…-aa2c5591

It returns "Page Not Found" — checked twice, once with a script and once in an ordinary browser, because on this domain a script's answer alone would not settle it. The release itself was real; a dozen other placements from the same distribution were still live six months later. The MarketWatch copy was gone, and the case study still linked to it as proof.

That is the whole argument for re-checking rather than filing, demonstrated on the outlet where checking is hardest. It is also a caution about our own reports: any list of URLs rots, ours included, unless somebody sweeps it again.

What the page is, when it exists

A path-segregated press hub — marketwatch.com/press-release/{slug}-{hash} — carrying wire copy under the wire's name, not a journalist's. We cannot quote MarketWatch's on-page disclaimer, because reading it would mean fetching a page Dow Jones has prohibited us from fetching, and inventing one would be worse. So: not measured, and we will say that rather than describe a page we have not seen.

Nor can we report a link attribute. The rest of this catalogue carries a measured rel value where we read one off a live page; for MarketWatch the honest entry is a blank. If a vendor tells you MarketWatch links are dofollow, ask how they know. On the evidence of every comparable outlet we could read, nofollow is the default — but a reasonable inference is not a measurement, and this site does not print the two in the same typeface.

Where it sits in what we sell

MarketWatch carries no à-la-carte price here. It arrives inside a package, and it is on both of ours: Launch names three outlets at $599, and Headline names six at $899. MarketWatch is one of them either way — the package page lists every name before you pay. Nothing about this placement differs between the two tiers, so if this outlet is the reason you are buying, the cheaper one carries it.

Both tiers put it on the same network, alongside Yahoo Finance and Business Insider, and Launch describes that network as 300+ outlets — which is the number the purchase actually supports, and worth holding on to given how outlet counts are usually built.

Of Headline's six names, four can never be machine-verified: MarketWatch, for the licensing reason above; USA Today, which blocks our agent across its whole domain and answers a verification request with HTTP 402; AP News, which disallows its press-release path to every crawler; and Street Insider, which returns 403 to every scripted request. Launch names three, and this outlet is the only one of them we cannot check — so the expensive tier is still the one that verifies worst, half its named outlets against a third of the cheaper tier's. One outlet that used to sit on this list is on no package of ours now: Benzinga, which answered so inconsistently that no result on it was reproducible. We would rather publish that than let the verification promise carry weight it cannot hold.

Who should buy it

Buy it if you want the logo and you accept the terms above: a real page on a Dow Jones property, a citation you can point at, and a link status neither we nor anyone else can report to you from a measurement.

Do not buy it if verification is the reason you are here. This is the clearest case in the catalogue where our own promise narrows. We will open your MarketWatch URL by hand and tell you what a person saw on the day they looked. We will not run a machine check on a domain whose owner has prohibited it, and we will not pretend the resulting confidence is the same.

Do not buy it for permanence. The one confirmed removal in a thirty-plus-page sweep was on this outlet. That is a single data point and we will not inflate it into a rate — but it is the only removal we found, and it happened here.

Do not buy it separately at all. You cannot: it is a package name, because the wire tier that carries it is a package-sized purchase. Anyone offering MarketWatch as a cheap standalone line item is selling you a route they have not shown you.