70% of News Articles in Google News Never Link to a Company Website

A company releases a new survey and a national outlet writes it up. The story names the company twice and quotes its CEO. The PR team celebrates, then checks the article for a link to the company's website and finds none. Readers who want the full survey have to search for it, and the company's website gets nothing from the coverage.

A link from a news article is one of the most valuable things a brand can earn. It sends readers straight to the source, and search engines treat links from trusted news sites as a strong signal of credibility. A mention without a link carries the brand's name, but not the traffic or the search benefit. Knowing how often reporters link out, and to what, tells a PR team what kind of page to prepare before it pitches.

70% of news articles in Google News never link to a company or commercial website, and 48.9% link to no outside website at all. When journalists do link, they most often point to other news outlets. The odds change by beat: tech reporters link to companies in about 45.5% of stories, pointing readers to code, launch posts and product pages, while finance reporters link to companies in 29% and to other financial publishers more often.

On September 23 and 24, 2026 we took the top 10 Google News results for 2,000 news searches and analysed 2,987 of the articles, from 749 outlets. For each article we collected every link in the story that points to another website, and sorted the destinations into news outlets, companies and other commercial sites, nonprofits and .org sites, government sites and universities. We also recorded each article's length, whether the outlet is national or local, and the story's topic. We tagged each story's topic and each linked website's type using our own lists of topic words and websites. 178 articles from 101 outlets were tech stories and 269 from 94 outlets were finance stories.

A link counts only when it sits in the story itself. Links in menus, footers, ads, social and app store buttons, privacy pages and links to an outlet's own sister sites are left out, because they appear on every page of the site rather than being chosen for the story. An article links out when at least one link to an outside website remains. A company website is any linked site run by a business, as opposed to a news outlet, a government body, a university or a nonprofit. Each share is a share of articles, so an article that links to three companies counts once.

The other 70% never do. Across Google News, a company named in a story is far more likely to get a mention than a link, and a link is what sends a reader on to the company itself.

For brands, that makes a link from the news a scarce prize. If coverage follows this pattern, a campaign that lands ten articles can expect about three of them to link to any company at all, and the rest send no readers to the brand's site.

48.9% of news articles link to no outside website at all. Another 19.7% link to exactly one. Only 3.9% of articles link to 10 or more outside websites, the heavily sourced investigations and explainers.

Articles that do link out do it sparingly. Among them, the median is 2 outside websites and the average is 3.6, pulled up by a small group of heavily linked pieces.

Other news outlets are the most common destination: 32.4% of articles link to at least one, just ahead of company and commercial websites at 30.2%. 15.3% of all articles link only to other news outlets, and among articles that link out at all, 30% cite nothing but other media. Official sources are rare: 7.1% of articles link to a government website and 2.3% to a university.

Linking to another outlet is how journalists credit a scoop or point to background reporting. For a brand, it means the first outlet to cover a story can collect the links from everyone who follows, while the brand behind the news does not.

Linking habits differ by beat. Tech news stories link to a company website about 45.5% of the time, 1.5 times the 30.2% average for all news, and 64% link to at least one outside website, against 51.1% of all articles. Finance news stories link out as often as the average article, 51.3%, but link to a company website in only 29% of stories, just under the all-news rate, even though finance stories are usually about companies and markets.

In tech, companies beat other outlets as a destination: 45.5% of tech stories link to a company, 35.4% to another outlet. In finance it runs the other way, 32% to another outlet and 29% to a company. And when a story does link to companies, a tech story cites 3.1 different company websites on average, against 2.3 for a finance story. Tech also leans on nonprofits and .org sites, in 16.3% of stories against 3.7% in finance, because open-source foundations, standards bodies and research groups publish much of the material tech reporters cite.

The most-linked company websites in tech news are github.com and ycombinator.com, the home of the Hacker News discussion forum, each linked from 7 tech stories, with openai.com in 5. Both leaders are where the raw material of tech news lives: the code itself and the first public reaction to it. A product launch, a software release or a security flaw has a primary source on a company website, and readers expect to be able to check it.

Finance coverage looks different. The most-linked websites in finance stories are financial publishers: The Motley Fool (fool.com), linked from 11 finance stories, Zacks (zacks.com) from 10 and Reuters from 8. Company websites such as S&P Global's spglobal.com appear further down, in 3 stories. A market report quotes share prices, analyst ratings and other outlets' coverage, and links to the publishers that produced them rather than to the company whose shares moved.

Where the stories run differs too. Yahoo published 80 of the 269 finance stories, nearly three in ten, and republishes stories from many financial publishers, so a story placed with one of them can reach Google News through Yahoo as well. Tech coverage is more scattered: 126 of the 178 tech stories came from international, trade and specialist sites rather than national newsrooms, led by Yahoo with 15 and thehackernews.com with 10.

Linking rises steadily with article length. 28.9% of articles under 300 words link to an outside website, against 72.1% of articles over 2,000 words. Links to companies follow the same pattern, rising from 19.6% of the shortest articles to 53.8% of the longest.

National outlets link out more often than local ones: 58.4% of national articles link to an outside website, against 40.4% of local articles. Habits also vary widely between individual outlets. Among large national outlets, the share of articles linking out ranges from 4% to 82%, so where a story runs matters as much as whether it runs.

Count mentions and links separately. With 70% of news articles linking to no company website, a campaign measured only on coverage will overstate what it did for the brand's website and search visibility.

Give journalists something to link to, and match it to the beat. Tech reporters link to the source: the repository, the changelog, the research write-up, the launch post, so every announcement needs its own page with a stable URL. Finance reporters already have market data and each other; what they lack is original numbers, so a consumer survey, a pricing index or an analysis of your own customer data, published on a page with a clear method, gives them a reason to link to you instead of another publisher.

Then target the outlets and formats that link. Long-form pieces and national outlets link out more often, trade and specialist sites carry most tech coverage, and financial publishers feed syndicated finance news. A digital pr agency that builds campaigns around linkable data and pitches the in-depth angle can turn more of your coverage into links.

Embed this research

Cite this study