How to get a press release on USA Today

USA Today is named on our Headline package, quote-on-request on its own, and costs us $44.10 wholesale. The placement lands in a sponsor-story path, and the publisher's own robots.txt keeps those paths out of Google News by name — the clearest available statement of what the publisher thinks a paid placement there is worth. Watch the naming trap as well: the USA TODAY Network advertised in bulk tiers means Gannett's local and regional titles, not a page on usatoday.com.

Publishers rarely tell you what they think of the paid content they sell. USA Today does, in a file anyone can read. Its robots.txt, fetched again on 29 August 2026, contains this stanza:

User-agent: Googlebot-News — Disallow: /story/sponsor-story/

Followed by the same exclusion for /picture-gallery/sponsor-story/, /videos/sponsor-story/, /longform/sponsor-story/ and /interactives/sponsor-story/.

Googlebot-News is the crawler that feeds Google News and the news surfaces built on it. USA Today has instructed it, by name and by path, to stay out of the sponsor sections. The publisher deliberately keeps its paid content out of its own news index.

Nothing about that is improper — it is exactly the separation a serious newsroom should maintain. But it is decisive information for a buyer, because a "USA Today placement" is sold on the implication that you are landing in a national newspaper. You are landing in the part of it the newspaper has fenced off, and the fence is documented in the publisher's own configuration.

What paths exist, and what we did not read

The same file names the paid and contributed sections directly: /story/sponsor-story/, /contributor-content/ and /story/special/contributor-content/. Those are the path patterns a placement occupies.

We did not open any of them, and we will not describe a page we have not seen. USA Today gives anthropic-ai, Claude, Claude-Web, claudeweb and ClaudeBot a bare Disallow: / for the entire domain. Under the Robots Exclusion Protocol that is an instruction, not a hint. So: on-page disclaimer not measured, link attribute not measured. Every other outlet in our catalogue where we print a rel value, we read it off a live page; here we have nothing to read, and a blank is the honest entry.

There is a wrinkle in that file worth noticing, because it shows how deliberate this is. The ChatGPT-User and GPTBot groups also start with Disallow: / — but then add Allow: carve-outs for /contributor-content/, /story/special/contributor-content/, the shopping sections, and three individually named sponsor-story URLs. The Claude groups get no carve-outs at all. USA Today is not applying a blanket policy; it is granting per-agent, per-path, sometimes per-article access, and its paid sections are the ones it chose to open first. Draw your own conclusion about what that content is for.

The 402

USA Today is also the only outlet in this catalogue that answers our verifier with HTTP 402, Payment Required — a status almost nobody serves in the wild. Combined with the robots position, its automatic-verification rate is 0.00.

That is a permanent constraint, not a tooling gap, and it puts USA Today in the same bucket as AP News and MarketWatch: if you buy it here, a person opens the URL and reports what they saw. Nobody's crawler is going to do better, and checking it yourself means opening it in an ordinary browser, exactly as we do.

What it costs

USA Today is quote-on-request on its own. Our wholesale is $44.10 — the supplier's usatoday plan lists at $49, bought at $0.90 a credit, the tier of the reseller ladder we are on.

It is named on the Headline package, which is the only way to buy it off the page: nothing is sold individually here, so a standalone USA Today placement is a quote and a conversation. That is worth stating because of a naming trap: several distributors advertise the USA TODAY Network in their published tiers in bulk tiers — the local and regional titles Gannett operates — which is a different product from a page on usatoday.com. If a $67-per-release bundle claims USA Today, read which of the two it means.

Who should buy it

Buy it if the logo is the deliverable and you are honest with yourself about that. USA Today is one of the most widely recognised mastheads a small company can get its name onto at this end of the market, and the page is real.

Buy it if your audience is a person, not an index — a customer, a partner, an investor who will click once and move on. For that job the fence around the section is irrelevant.

Do not buy it for search visibility. The publisher excludes the section from Google News by name in a public file. Whatever else this placement does, it does not do that.

Do not buy it for the link. Not because we measured a bad one — because we could not measure one at all, and neither can anyone selling it to you.

Do not buy it if you need proof you can hand to a sceptic. Between the whole-domain block on our user agent and a 402 at the door, this is among the least confirmable placements in the catalogue, and we would rather you spent the money on an outlet that can actually be checked.

Do not confuse it with the USA TODAY Network on somebody else's invoice.