What Press Release Headlines Actually Look Like
The finding
On the largest service studied, 5.26% of press release headlines — 2,751 of them — are written entirely in capital letters. Meanwhile up to 39.6% contain a digit, up to 69.1% contain at least one all-caps word, and question marks appear in barely 1%.
The patterns
| Feature | Range across services |
|---|---|
| Contains a digit | 24.7% – 39.6% |
| Contains an all-caps word | 44.0% – 69.1% |
| Entirely uppercase | 0.2% – 5.26% |
| Contains a question mark | 0.3% – 1.0% |
| Contains an exclamation mark | 0.1% – 0.4% |
Smaller services in the corpus show no fully-uppercase headlines at all, which points to platform enforcement rather than house style.
What the patterns suggest
Numbers are the dominant device: on most services close to four in ten headlines carry one, and a number is the cheapest way to make an announcement specific. “Raises Funding” and “Raises $40M” do very different work.
Questions and exclamation marks have effectively vanished. Both read as marketing rather than news, and both are the first things a sceptical editor uses to sort a pitch into the ignore pile.
Capitals are the outlier. They persist despite being widely disliked, largely because ticker symbols and product names drag them in — and because on most services nothing stops them.
Why numbers do the work
Close to four in ten headlines carry a digit, and the reason is not that numbers are eye-catching. It is that a number is a commitment.
“Significant growth” can be defended after the fact at any value. “Growth of 41%” cannot. A journalist reading the second one knows immediately whether it clears the threshold for a story, and knows the sender expected to be held to it. That is why numbers survive editing when adjectives do not.
The same property explains why the vaguer devices have collapsed. Questions and exclamation marks add emphasis without adding information, and an editor sorting a feed is doing exactly one thing: looking for information. Anything that occupies space without supplying it is a reason to move on.
The practical rule is that if you cannot put a number in the headline, the news may not be ready. That is uncomfortable, and it is usually accurate.
What to do about it
- Put a number in the headline if you honestly have one.
- Never write in full capitals. It reads as shouting and marks the release as amateur.
- Avoid questions and exclamation marks. Almost nobody publishing at volume uses them.
- Limit capitals to proper nouns and tickers.
Why numbers do the work
Nearly four in ten headlines carry a digit, and the reason is not that numbers are eye-catching. It is that a number is a commitment.
“Significant growth” can be defended after the fact at any value. “Growth of 41%” cannot. A journalist reading the second one knows immediately whether it clears the threshold for a story, and knows the sender expected to be held to it. That is why numbers survive editing when adjectives do not.
The same property explains why the vaguer devices have collapsed. Questions and exclamation marks add emphasis without adding information, and an editor sorting a feed is doing exactly one thing: looking for information. Anything that occupies space without supplying it is a reason to move on.
The practical rule is that if you cannot put a number in the headline, the news may not be ready. That is uncomfortable, and it is usually accurate.
Methodology
These findings come from an analysis of 134,126 press releases studied between 7 May and 15 August 2026 across ten distribution services. Body text was available for 129,742 of them, and only services carrying more than 2,000 releases are reported.
Percentages are calculated within each service rather than across the whole corpus, so they are unaffected by how many releases each service contributed. Services are reported anonymously and the same letter refers to the same service throughout; the spread between them is the finding, not the ranking.
Some services display contact details in a masked form rather than plain text; masked details are counted as present. A publication date is not recorded for every release, so analyses that depend on dates or times state their own smaller sample size. Figures last verified 15 August 2026. You are welcome to cite these findings with attribution to PR Gun.
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