UNITED STATES - August 25, 2026 - Nearly three in ten press releases are distributed without any image, according to an analysis of 143,576 releases by press release distribution service PR Gun, and on most modern distribution networks that single omission excludes them from Google News.
Across the corpus, 29.8 percent of releases carried no image at all. Google News and most aggregators require an attached image, typically at least 400 by 300 pixels, for a release to be included in visual news feeds. An imageless release still gets published, but it is invisible in the surfaces where discovery actually happens.
The fix is inexpensive: even a company logo qualifies. Releases in the corpus that included any image met the inclusion threshold; there was no measurable bar for image quality, only presence.
The image gap sits alongside other formatting misses documented in the same dataset, including headlines too long for search display and missing boilerplates, cataloged in PR Gun's pricing and formatting guide. Services are compared on visual handling in the company's best press release service for SEO review, and image best practice is covered in its how to write a press release guide.
The study found the omission concentrates among exactly the issuers who can least afford it. Large companies attach product photography and executive headshots as a matter of routine; the imageless releases skew heavily toward small businesses and first-time issuers, the same organizations that most need the incremental discovery an aggregator feed provides. The result is a quiet penalty: the companies with the smallest audiences are the ones systematically excluded from the surfaces where new audiences form.
The requirement itself is modest. Aggregation platforms are not scoring photographic quality; they are checking for the presence of a correctly sized file. A clean logo on a solid background at 400 by 300 pixels satisfies the requirement identically to commissioned photography. The study's practical recommendation is to treat the image the way publishers treat the boilerplate: prepare one standing default image that meets the specification, attach it to every release by default, and replace it with something better only when something better exists.
Methodology: PR Gun collected and analyzed 143,576 press releases distributed through ten major newswires between September 2021 and August 2026; 138,901 carried full body text and were used for content analysis. Matching is case-insensitive and counts presence per release, not frequency.
About PR Gun
PR Gun is a press release distribution service that places customer news on AP News, Google News, and hundreds of regional and industry outlets, with packages starting at $49. The company publishes ongoing research on press release effectiveness drawn from its database of more than 140,000 distributed releases.
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