What these pages are
Most large newspaper groups sell some form of paid content. USA Today's site has several kinds, which its own robots.txt file distinguishes by address: sponsored stories under /story/sponsor-story/, branded stories under /branded-story/, contributor content under /contributor-content/, and press releases under /press-release/story/, followed by a number and the release headline. The same /press-release/ structure exists on Gannett's local papers, from The Tennessean to the Kitsap Sun.
These pages are not written or edited by the newsroom. They are placed by distribution services, and some services now market them as a destination. One release in our sample, published at usatoday.com/press-release/ itself, announced that a distributor called TS Newswire was introducing “customised press release placements on Yahoo Finance, USA Today, AP News, Barchart, StreetInsider and Business Insider”; another from the same vendor offered “budget-flexible press release packages” for home improvement and construction firms. We saw these headlines and addresses in search listings; we did not read the releases.
We did not load any usatoday.com page in this study. The site refused our automated requests, and its robots.txt asks AI agents not to crawl it, so we kept to what search services show. That means we cannot say how the pages label themselves to a reader who opens one.
What we measured
On the evening of 5 October 2026 we ran 20 searches of Bing News's RSS feed restricted to usatoday.com/press-release, each with a different common word (“announces”, “launches”, “reviews”, “crypto”, “home” and so on), and collected every result whose address was a USA Today press-release page. That gave 209 pages, 188 of them published between 28 September and 5 October. This is a sample, not a census: Bing returns a limited number of results per search, and its choice of which to show is its own.
For each of the 188 we searched Google News's US English RSS feed for the headline in quotation marks, read up to ten results, and resolved every result attributed to a usatoday.com address to the page it pointed to. We recorded whether the release's own page appeared, under what source name, and at what position. We then did the same for results attributed to other Gannett sites.
Exact-headline searches of Google News, 5 October 2026; pages published 28 September to 5 October 2026
Source: Media Morpheus Research. Sample of usatoday.com/press-release/ pages found through Bing News; each headline searched in Google News's US English RSS feed and the USA Today result resolved to its address.
The listing is the feed's title and source name. We did not check the Google News app or website layout, which may differ.
Story numbers rose almost steadily with publication time, from 44,799 on 28 September to 46,971 on 5 October. If the section numbers every page in sequence, that is roughly 2,200 releases in under eight days, close to 300 a day. Numbers may be skipped, so treat that as an upper bound on what the numbering implies, not a count.
How Google News lists them
Of the 188 headlines, 142 returned at least one Google News result. Most results were copies of the same release elsewhere: openPR, Stock Titan, Yahoo Finance, The Manila Times, Digital Journal and Newswire.com appeared most often, which is the usual footprint of a distributed release. In 48 cases the USA Today page itself was listed, and in every one of those 48 it was listed first, under the source name “USA Today”, the same name Google News gives the paper's reporting.
Supplement announcements were over-represented among those that surfaced: ten of the 19 “[Product] Reviews:” headlines appeared, compared with 38 of the other 169. A reader searching a supplement's name in Google News may therefore see, as the top result, an item that appears to be USA Today on that product.
The local papers follow the same pattern. Results in our searches that resolved to /press-release/ pages appeared under “The Tennessean”, “The Des Moines Register”, “Kitsap Sun”, “Detroit Free Press”, “Bergen Record” and “Democrat and Chronicle”, including a Southern Maine restoration company's checklist under the Kitsap Sun's name and a Nashville HVAC firm's expansion under the Bergen Record's.
Google News's content policy says it does not allow “content that conceals or misrepresents sponsored content as independent, editorial content”, and that sponsorship “should be clearly disclosed to readers”. Whether a press-release page meets that standard depends on how the page presents itself, which we could not see. What we can say is that the Google News listing does not carry the disclosure. Our earlier guide on what Google News requires of sponsored content sets out the policy in full.
What USA Today tells crawlers
USA Today's robots.txt shows the publisher treats its kinds of paid content differently. It tells Googlebot-News, Google's news crawler, not to crawl /story/sponsor-story/ and related sponsored paths. It has no such rule for /press-release/. So sponsored stories are kept out of Google News by the publisher's own instruction, while press releases are not.
The same file blocks a long list of AI crawlers, including OpenAI's GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, from the whole site except /branded-story/, /contributor-content/ and three named sponsored articles. Press releases are not on that allowed list, so those AI crawlers are asked to stay away from them. How AI systems treat press releases more generally is covered in whether ChatGPT reads press releases.
What it is and is not worth
What follows is our reading.
It is distribution, not coverage. A page at usatoday.com/press-release/ is the company's own text, placed for a fee. Describing it as “featured in USA Today”, on a website, in a pitch deck or in an award or visa application, misstates what it is, and anyone who checks the address will see that. The difference between a wire release, a contributed post and earned coverage is set out in our explainer on the three.
The Google News label can mislead the people a company most wants to impress. An investor, journalist or buyer who searches a company's name and sees “USA Today” at the top may assume the paper reported on it. A company that benefits from that confusion takes a reputational risk when it is noticed. Editors, in particular, know the difference.
It may still have a use. A release placed on a high-traffic domain can be found by people searching for the company, and it can appear in Google News under the paper's name. That is worth something for announcements a company needs on the record. Whether such pages last is another question: in where a wire release actually ends up we found that every Morningstar copy of a PR Newswire release older than about 90 days was gone, while the wire's own page survived.
For anyone assessing a company: open the link and read the address. /press-release/, /sponsor-story/ and /branded-story/ are not the newsroom.
Methodology and limitations
On 5 October 2026 we collected usatoday.com/press-release/ pages from 20 Bing News RSS searches and kept the 188 published between 28 September and 5 October 2026. For each, we searched the Google News US English RSS feed for the quoted headline (truncated to about 90 characters), read up to ten results and resolved the addresses of results attributed to usatoday.com, and later to six other Gannett sites, through Google News's own redirect service. Both sets of searches ran on the evening of 5 October 2026, US Eastern time (03:10 to 03:20 UTC on 6 October). We read USA Today's robots.txt and Google News's content policy the same day. We did not load usatoday.com or Gannett press-release pages: the server refused automated requests and its robots.txt disallows AI agents, so we cannot report how the pages present themselves to readers, who distributed each release, or what was paid. The TS Newswire headlines were read in search listings only. Google News RSS results may differ from the Google News app and website, and from what users in other countries or signed-in users see. A headline search is a favourable test for the release; a search for a company name may rank it differently. The sample comes from Bing's index and is not random. Story-number arithmetic assumes sequential numbering, which we could not verify. Nothing here is a claim that any company, distributor or publisher has broken a rule.
Conclusion
USA Today and Gannett's local papers host paid press releases under their own domains, and in the one week we sampled the USA Today section alone may have carried more than two thousand. Google News listed about a quarter of the 188 we checked, each under the newspaper's name and at the top of the results, with nothing in the listing to distinguish it from journalism. USA Today itself keeps its sponsored stories out of Google News but has no such instruction for press releases. For a company, a /press-release/ placement is paid distribution with some search value; it is not coverage by USA Today, and calling it that invites exactly the scrutiny it cannot survive. For anyone reading a company's press list, the address is the tell.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a press release on usatoday.com the same as being covered by USA Today?
No. Pages at usatoday.com/press-release/ carry company-supplied releases placed through distribution services. They are not written or edited by USA Today journalists.
How can I tell if a USA Today link is a press release?
Look at the address. Press releases sit under /press-release/story/, sponsored content under /story/sponsor-story/ and branded content under /branded-story/. Newsroom stories use other paths. Google News listings do not show this distinction.
Does Google News show press releases from USA Today?
Some. In our sample of 188 USA Today press-release pages from late September and early October 2026, Google News listed 48 when we searched their headlines, all under the source name “USA Today” and all as the first result.
Do Gannett's local papers publish press releases too?
Yes. We found /press-release/ pages on The Tennessean, The Des Moines Register, the Kitsap Sun, the Detroit Free Press, the Bergen Record and the Democrat and Chronicle, listed in Google News under those papers' names, often for companies outside their area.
Can I say my company was featured in USA Today if my release ran there?
We would not. It describes paid distribution as editorial coverage, and anyone who opens the link can see the /press-release/ address. Say the release was published or distributed instead.
How many press releases does USA Today publish?
USA Today does not say. Story numbers in our sample rose by about 2,200 between 28 September and 5 October 2026, which would mean roughly 300 a day if every number is a published page; we could not confirm that.
Sources
- live read Media Morpheus Research, Bing News RSS searches for usatoday.com/press-release pages (209 found, 188 published 28 September–5 October 2026) and Google News RSS headline searches for each, run on the evening of 5 October 2026 (US Eastern time).
- live read USA Today, robots.txt, read 5 October 2026.
- platform documentation Google, Google News policies, section “Ads & sponsored content”. Read 5 October 2026.
- blocked source TS Newswire release headlines at usatoday.com/press-release/story/45415 and /45481, 30 September 2026, seen in Bing News listings only; pages not loaded.