Every press release ends with the same quiet paragraph, and it is the paragraph journalists read most suspiciously. The press release boilerplate — the short “About” text that closes the document — is your company’s standing self-description, written once and repeated verbatim across every announcement you make. Because it is repeated, it is treated as a claim of record: reporters lift it into their own copy, directories copy it, and readers who check nothing else in the release will check a surprising amount of it. This guide covers what a boilerplate is and what belongs in it, the credits rule that every claim inside it must pass, two worked fictional examples and one deliberately faulty one, and how to maintain the paragraph across years of releases without it quietly rotting.

The boilerplate sits in the closing sequence of the release, alongside the end mark, the notes to editors and the media contact — the full anatomy is covered in our guide to how to end a press release. This article is about the paragraph itself, and about the discipline that keeps it true.

What a Boilerplate Is

A boilerplate is the standardised description of a company that closes its press releases: one short paragraph, headed “About [Company]” or set as a closing block, identical from release to release until it is deliberately revised. Its job is compression. A reader who has never heard of the company should finish it knowing what the company is and does; a journalist filing under deadline should be able to lift a sentence from it without checking anything except the spelling. The anatomy is fixed and short:

• Identity. The company’s proper name — the legal or trading name it actually uses, in the form it uses it.
• What it does, in plain words. The product or service and who it is for, described as a customer would describe it — not in the vocabulary of the sales deck.
• Where it is. Where it is based and where it operates, at the precision that is true.
• Since when. The founding year — a small fact that does quiet credibility work and is trivially checkable, which is the point.
• Scale, only where true and checkable. Staff numbers, locations, customer counts — included only when they are real, current and stated the way they were counted. The next section explains why this item carries an asterisk.
• Where to find more. The website — the one link that belongs, pointing at the canonical record.

Length is a discipline, not a target: most sound boilerplates run to a single paragraph of roughly fifty to a hundred words — long enough for the six items, short enough that every word has been chosen. It is written once, by whoever owns the company’s public facts, and versioned like any other document of record: a current approved text, dated, with variants permitted for genuinely different audiences (an investor-facing version may lead with different facts than a consumer one) under one non-negotiable rule — variants may emphasise differently, but they may never contradict each other. Two of your own boilerplates disagreeing about when you were founded or what you sell is not a nuance; it is an error with your letterhead on it.

The Credits Rule

Here is the rule this genre lives or dies by, stated once and applied everywhere below: every credit, award, ranking and superlative inside a boilerplate must be true, current and checkable — or it comes out. The boilerplate is where companies are most tempted to decorate, precisely because it feels like furniture rather than copy. But it is the most-copied paragraph you publish. An invented or inflated claim in a release’s body may be read once; the same claim in the boilerplate is reprinted under your name for years, and it is the first thing a sceptical journalist, a competitor or a customer with a search engine will test. The checks are mechanical. An award named in a boilerplate must exist, must have been awarded to you, and should be dated — an honour from a decade ago, a discontinued scheme, or a pay-to-enter badge described as an industry honour each fails a different part of the same test. A ranking or a “leading”, “first” or “number one” claim needs a basis a stranger could verify — a defined market, a source, a date — or it is an adjective wearing a fact’s clothes, and it comes out. Outlet credits are the sharpest case: a boilerplate may say a company was covered by a publication only when that publication’s journalists actually covered it editorially. A press release carried on a publication’s site through distribution is your own text on their platform — syndication, not a feature — as our comparison of advertorial vs editorial sets out; printing it in the boilerplate as a media credit converts a purchase into a false credential, and it is the single most common boilerplate fraud in modern PR. Scale figures obey the same law: “serves ten thousand customers” is a claim with a counting method and an as-of date, and if you cannot state both, the honest version is smaller or absent. Finally, staleness: last decade’s award, the product line you closed, the founder who left — a boilerplate is audited against the present, and one rotten line discounts every true line beside it. Our guide to the fashion press release states the same rule for lookbook credits, because the principle is not sector-specific: credits are facts, and facts are checkable.

The corollary matters as much as the rule. A young company with no awards, no rankings and no coverage has not failed the boilerplate test — it has simply to write the short, true version: founded, based, makes, serves. Journalists do not discount brevity; they discount adjectives they cannot verify, which is a different thing entirely. The plain paragraph reads as confidence because, in a document built for checking, it is.

Two Fictional Examples

Example One: A Young Company, Plain on Purpose

Fictional example. The company below is invented, and every fact in its boilerplate is part of the illustration. Read it for what the paragraph deliberately does not contain.

About Fernholt Lighting Ltd — Fernholt Lighting Ltd designs and makes repairable lamps and light fittings at its workshop in Leeds. Founded in 2023, the company sells to homes and small businesses across the UK through its own website and two retail partners. Every product is designed so that its parts can be replaced rather than the lamp discarded. More at fernholtlighting.example.

Annotations: identity, place, founding year, customers, channel, one true and specific distinguishing fact (repairability), one link. No awards, because the company has won none; no “leading”, because it leads nothing yet; no customer count, because the honest number is small and the paragraph loses nothing by its absence. This is what a two-year-old company’s credibility actually looks like in print — and it is stronger than any decorated version, because a journalist can check all of it in a minute and find all of it true.

Example Two: An Established Company

Fictional example. This company is also invented; its longer history and wider operations are part of the fiction, included to show what an established boilerplate legitimately has to work with.

About Castellan Tools plc — Castellan Tools plc has made hand tools in Sheffield since 1968. The company employs toolmakers, engineers and support staff across two sites in South Yorkshire and sells through trade counters and distributors in the UK and Ireland. Its catalogue covers joinery, metalwork and masonry tools, each sold with spare parts and a repair service. More at castellantools.example.

Annotations: fifty-odd years of operation does the credibility work that adjectives try to do — a founding year that old is itself the claim, and it is checkable in one search. Scale is given in verifiable shapes (two named-region sites, two named markets) rather than a headcount that would need a date and a definition. And note again what is absent: an established company could plausibly list honours, and this one lists none — because within the fiction it is claiming none. If the real company behind a paragraph like this had won a real, named, current award, one line stating it plainly, with its year, would belong. Nothing else would change.

A Bad Boilerplate, Annotated

Fictional counterexample. The paragraph below is invented and deliberately faulty, written for this guide. Each fault is marked in brackets where it occurs; none of it is model content, and any resemblance to real boilerplates currently in circulation is, regrettably, structural.

About Brightpath Solutions — Brightpath Solutions is a world-leading innovator [unverifiable superlative: leading what, measured how?] in business software, featured in top national newspapers [its releases were distributed to those papers’ websites; no journalist has covered it — a purchase restated as a credit] and recognised as an award-winning provider [no award is named, because none exists]. Founded in 2019 [the company was founded in 2022; the date survives from an old template], Brightpath serves over 50,000 customers worldwide [a figure nobody can source, count or date] with cutting-edge, game-changing solutions [two adjectives, zero information].

Five faults, and notice their common feature: each is a small claim that felt like decoration when it was typed and reads as a finding when it is checked. A boilerplate is not audited by its author’s intentions; it is audited by its reader’s search engine. The fix for every bracket is the same — evidence or deletion — and in four of the five cases deletion is the honest edit, because the true versions (a young software company, founded in 2022, selling to its first customers) were never the embarrassment the decoration pretended to solve.

Writing and Maintaining Yours

Write from a fact sheet, not from the last release. Before drafting, assemble the verified items: legal name, founding date, locations, the plain-words description of what the company does, and any scale figures with their source and as-of date attached. Draft the paragraph from that sheet and nothing else; then read it as a hostile checker, one claim at a time, and cut anything the sheet cannot support. Give the result an owner and a version date, and store it in exactly one place from which every release, pitch and profile draws. Variants for different audiences are legitimate and often wise — an investor version may carry the corporate facts, a trade version the product facts — provided the shared facts are identical in all of them. Then maintain it on triggers, not on anniversaries: a boilerplate is reviewed whenever a fact in it changes — a relocation, a rebrand, a product line closing, a claim reaching its expiry — and swept briefly at least whenever the company’s own About page changes, because the two are read against each other. That points to the last discipline, consistency across channels: the boilerplate, the website’s About page and the one-line descriptor used in directories and speaker bios are three lengths of one description — the line for listings, the paragraph for releases, the page for the full record. Each has its job, none may contradict another, and the audit is cheap: read the three side by side once in a while and reconcile them in the direction of the truest one.

One operational warning, because distribution multiplies whatever it carries: a distribution service distributes your release — including its boilerplate — as supplied. A service such as IMCWire carries the client’s text onto its channels; it does not and cannot fact-check your company description into truth, so the accuracy of the paragraph remains the client’s responsibility in full. A sound boilerplate distributed widely is an asset compounded; a decorated one distributed widely is the same false claim photocopied across the record, where it will be found. Version control is not bureaucracy here — it is the difference between correcting one document and correcting the internet’s copy of you.

FAQs

How long should a boilerplate be?

One paragraph — in practice, roughly fifty to a hundred words covers the anatomy with room for one distinguishing fact. If yours needs a second paragraph, it is probably doing the About page’s job; if it cannot cover identity, activity, place and date in a paragraph, the problem is the company’s description of itself, and the boilerplate has done you the favour of exposing it.

Can I list awards from years ago?

Only real ones, named and dated — and ask, before including one, what it proves now. A significant, verifiable honour with its year attached is a fact and may stay while it remains meaningful. An unnamed “award-winning”, a minor badge from a decade ago, or an award for a product you no longer sell fails the credits rule’s tests of true, current and checkable, and each one discounts the accurate lines printed beside it.

Should the boilerplate be identical on every release?

Substantially, yes — that sameness is the point of the form. Every release carrying the current approved version is what makes the paragraph a standing description rather than a fresh claim each time. Audience variants are acceptable, drift is not: the moment two of your releases describe the company differently, at least one of them is wrong in public, and the reader who notices will assume it is the worse one.

Does a boilerplate help with SEO?

No — and writing it as if it might is how boilerplates get ruined. As our guide to press releases and SEO establishes, distributed releases are not a ranking tool and their links pass no ranking value. The boilerplate’s audience is human: journalists who lift it and readers who check it. Keyword-stuffing the one paragraph professionals copy verbatim corrupts your most-repeated text for a benefit that does not exist.

The boilerplate is the smallest consequential paragraph in public relations: a hundred words at most, repeated everywhere, believed provisionally and checked eventually. Write it from a fact sheet, hold every credit in it to the standard of evidence, keep it current, and let its plainness do what decoration promises to. A company whose shortest description survives checking has said something about itself that no adjective could.