US startups publish 53% more updates than international peers

Evidence from 2,000 tech companies over a 100-day window

At Distill, we track everything companies publish, as well as everything written about them in the media. Across company websites, press pages, blogs, newsletters, RSS feeds, and LinkedIn, Distill gives a complete picture of how organizations communicate and what stories they tell.

We recently ran an internal analysis to explore a long-standing question in the startup ecosystem: Why do US startups tend to attract more attention than their international counterparts?

One potential factor, we hypothesized, might be how often companies communicate publicly about their progress.

Methodology

We analyzed updates from 2,000 technology companies – 1,000 based in the US and 1,000 based outside the US.

The companies were selected randomly from Distill’s database of tracked organizations to ensure an unbiased sample representative of typical small and mid-sized startups. We focused on companies with between 10 and 500 employees, excluding both very early-stage startups (which often have little to announce or limited resources for communication) and large, established companies with very different PR operations.

For each company, we collected all updates published over the last 100 days from their own communication channels, including:

• Press releases
• News or “updates” sections on company websites (e.g., /news, /blog, /updates, /press)
• RSS feeds
• Medium posts
• Substack newsletters
• LinkedIn company posts

Mentions in third-party media outlets were not included – only updates published directly by the companies themselves.

All updates were deduplicated across sources, so if a company shared the same announcement on both LinkedIn and its website, it was counted only once.

Results

Across the 100-day observation window:

Observation window: Aug 5 – Nov 12, 2025. Sample: 1,000 US and 1,000 non-US technology companies. Counts include only company-authored updates on company websites, press pages, RSS, Medium, Substack, and LinkedIn; third-party media mentions are excluded. All updates were deduplicated across channels.

In other words, the typical US tech company publishes a new update roughly every three days, whereas the typical non-US company does so about every four to five days.

What this tells us

The data reveals a clear difference in how actively companies communicate with the world.

While disparities in visibility between US and non-US startups are often attributed to factors like funding, media ecosystems, or market size, communication frequency itself appears to play a significant role.

Frequent updates accomplish several things simultaneously:

1. Visibility: Each update increases the surface area for discovery among customers, investors, and the media.
2. Momentum: A steady cadence of announcements signals progress and consistency.
3. Narrative control: Companies that communicate often are more likely to define how their story is told externally.

US startups, in other words, are not just doing more – they’re talking more about what they do.

Outside the US, many companies move at a similar pace but stay comparatively silent. That difference compounds over time, shaping perception, inbound interest, and media coverage – and ultimately influencing how their success is perceived.

How Distill helps

Distill makes it easy to track what’s happening across your market and competitors so you can always have the full picture of how the companies around you communicate and evolve.

With Distill, you can:

• Monitor every meaningful update in your industry
• Benchmark your company’s communication cadence
• Identify what topics your peers post about and adapt your storytelling

If you want to understand how your company compares, or stay on top of every competitor’s announcements in real time, try Distill for free and get every company update in one place.