New Study of 138,901 Press Releases Finds 90% of Headlines Are Too Long for Google
UNITED STATES – August 25, 2026 – Nine out of ten press releases carry a headline too long to display in full in search results, according to a new analysis of 138,901 press releases published between September 2021 and August 2026.
The study, conducted by press release distribution service PR Gun, measured every headline in the corpus. The average ran 96 characters, roughly 14 words. Search engines truncate displayed titles at approximately 60 characters, and 90.2 percent of the analyzed headlines exceeded that limit. In practice, the reader deciding whether to click sees barely the first ten words.
The headline is the one line everyone reads, and it is frequently the line companies write last. Releases in the study that kept headlines under 60 characters preserved their full message in search listings, news aggregators, and email subject previews.
The problem compounds: the average release body in the corpus runs 851 words (median 701), so a truncated headline is often the only part of an 850-word document a journalist ever reads. The full dataset breakdown, including word counts and formatting benchmarks, is published in PR Gun’s press release distribution pricing guide.
PR Gun recommends holding headlines to 60 characters, leading with the concrete fact, and reserving the company name for the subheadline unless the brand itself is the news. A comparison of how major distribution options handle headline display appears in the company’s guide to the best press release distribution services, and headline handling for search is covered in its review of the best press release services for SEO.
The data also shows how the overrun happens. Headlines balloon when companies try to make one line do three jobs: name the company, describe the product, and claim a superlative. The corpus is full of 130-character constructions that begin with a full legal company name and end with a trailing clause about market leadership, and by the time the actual news appears, the display window has closed. Releases from repeat issuers show the same pattern release after release, suggesting the length problem is a template problem rather than a one-time judgment call.
There is also a measurable gap between industries. Technology and financial-services releases in the corpus run the longest headlines, routinely crossing 110 characters, while consumer and entertainment releases come closest to the 60-character window. The practical test the study suggests is simple: read only the first 60 characters of the draft headline aloud. If a stranger cannot tell what happened, the headline fails where it will actually be seen, regardless of how complete it reads in full.
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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