We Ban a HARO Account Every 23 Minutes

HARO is still worth using in 2026, but the platform is taking a more active approach to spam, low-quality submissions, and accounts that violate its guidelines. According to HARO CEO Brett Farmiloe, HARO bans an account every 23 minutes, using community reporting, automated signals, and internal review to identify problematic activity. The goal is to preserve the simple journalist-source model that made HARO valuable while rebuilding the quality and trust that had declined over time.

HARO’s revival is about rebuilding trust

Help a Reporter Out, better known as HARO, has been part of the PR industry’s vocabulary for nearly two decades. The original model was remarkably simple: journalists submitted requests for sources, and experts or PR professionals responded when they could provide something genuinely useful.

That simplicity was also part of the problem.

As Farmiloe explains, HARO did not disappear because it was suddenly a failing concept. Rather, the platform experienced a gradual decline in quality and trust. The same low-friction system that made it easy for journalists to find sources also made it vulnerable to spam, fake profiles, mass pitching, and other forms of abuse.

Featured acquired and revived HARO in 2025, bringing the familiar brand and email-based journalist request model back to the PR industry. It also acquired Connectively and incorporated both brands into a broader vision for Featured as an AI co-pilot for public relations.

The challenge is not simply bringing HARO back. It is making the format work at scale without allowing the problems that contributed to its decline to return.

Farmiloe says one important part of that effort is enforcement: HARO bans an account every 23 minutes.

That enforcement is not based on a single automated rule. HARO uses community reports and other signals to identify accounts that may be violating its guidelines, with an internal team reviewing reports and determining whether an account should receive a warning, face a ban, or require no action.

For journalists, the objective is a cleaner source pool. For PR professionals and experts, it means the platform remains useful only when responses are relevant, authentic, and genuinely helpful.

How HARO screens pitches and accounts

Farmiloe describes the current HARO system as a combination of technology and human judgment.

Community reporting is one part of the process. Journalists can flag a response as unhelpful, sending that report to Featured’s internal team for review. The company also looks for broader patterns of behavior that can indicate accounts are not using the system according to its guidelines.

That distinction is important. Farmiloe says a single signal does not automatically result in a permanent ban.

Instead, signals are considered together. The company can warn a user, ban an account, or dismiss a report depending on the circumstances.

The result is a more active moderation model than the original HARO could provide.

And according to Farmiloe, that is necessary because some users have built entire operations around sending large volumes of responses to HARO opportunities.

The broader conversation is also changing because AI has made it easier than ever to produce those responses at scale. HARO says it screens pitches for AI-generated content, but Farmiloe emphasizes that AI detection is only one signal among several—not an automatic reason to permanently ban an account.

Is HARO still worth using in 2026?

For PR professionals, subject-matter experts, and brands that can provide genuinely relevant expertise, the answer from Farmiloe’s perspective is yes.

But HARO is not a volume-based media strategy.

The value comes from matching the right source to the right journalist request and providing an answer that is useful enough to make it into the story. That requires judgment and relevance—two things that cannot simply be replaced by sending more pitches.

That philosophy fits into Featured’s broader vision for PR technology.

Farmiloe sees the modern PR workflow as increasingly fragmented across journalist request platforms, podcasts, newsletters, social networks, media databases, and other sources of opportunity. Featured is designed to consolidate those opportunities and use AI to surface the ones that are most relevant.

HARO is one piece of that larger system.

The platform’s revival also reflects something less technological: journalists still need sources, and experts still need credible opportunities to share their knowledge.

The format works. The challenge is maintaining trust.

The full Comms Confidential transcript

The following is the full transcript of the conversation with Brett Farmiloe on Comms Confidential. It has been cleaned for readability, with timestamps and conversational filler removed where appropriate, while preserving the substance of the discussion.

You’ve founded four different companies. You’re an entrepreneur, you had an agency at one point, an SEO agency, I believe — Marketors. We’ll talk about that. You incorporated PR into it. Talk about what that was like, why you built that agency, and the PR part of it.

Yeah. Well, my background — I’m a financial auditor. That’s where I started my career and wasn’t sure that that was the path for me.

So I decided to hop in an RV with three friends and cruise around the country, interviewing people about their career paths. We did about 300 interviews across 38 states and 16,000 miles, and found out that people don’t have really a meaningful outlet to share their expertise and experience.

And that’s been at the core of the last couple decades for me in terms of the businesses that I’ve started and the adventures that I’ve been on.

With the digital marketing company, I actually didn’t really intend to start an agency. I was a freelancer. I had a few clients, and I got my website to rank on page one of Google for the term “digital marketing company.” And then actually started a digital marketing company.

We serviced more than 500 small business clients over the course of 10 years. And again, this theme that kept repeating is I would come across these business owners that were incredibly knowledgeable about their business, whether that’s eyelash extension supplies or equipment financing and all these different things, but they didn’t have anywhere to share that expertise.

And so we wanted to create opportunities for those folks to be able to answer questions and have their insights be used in meaningful ways.

That led me to essentially found Featured.com.

For the audience that’s maybe unaware, what is Featured? What are you guys doing? We’ll talk about the acquisitions in a bit, but I’ve heard of it as an AI co-pilot for PR. What do you think? What’s your vision for Featured?

Yeah. So originally — and this kind of goes into the historical context as well — originally it was a decentralized Quora, essentially a decentralized question-and-answer site.

The premise was, well, why is Quora outranking HR.com for a human resources-related question? It’s because HR.com doesn’t have the content.

So what if we just took the question and routed the answers to HR.com and all these other publishers and had that outrank a Q&A site?

And so that’s where it started. We operated like that pretty consistently for about four and a half years, where we were getting requests from publishers for content, journalists for sources.

And with the acquisition of Help a Reporter Out and of Connectively, and reviving those brands, we pivoted Featured to being a co-pilot for public relations.

Really, it was on a couple different problems that we consistently heard. One is there’s not enough opportunities, and two, there’s not enough time.

And so we wanted to centralize all of these different media opportunities across podcasts, journalists, journalist requests, bylined articles, awards, speaking opportunities — put that all into one different platform that makes it really easy to query in just a natural language and then gets all these opportunities back so that PR professionals can take action on it.

So we’re about a one month in.

One month in. So you’ve got a lot of runway to play with.

You’re talking about having all the queries being able to almost be a dedicated PR LLM, if you will. As a PR professional, why am I going to take that, put it in my pitch? What am I actually going to do with it where I can actually get the output that’s going to make me better on the day-to-day?

Yeah. So I think if you zoom into the day-to-day where a PR professional is spending their time, they’re spending their time subscribed to multiple different journalist request platforms, whether that’s Help a Reporter Out or others.

It’s scanning all these different Substacks and LinkedIn posts and monitoring journalists and trying to build relationships and doing all of these things in a fragmented way.

And so the thought and premise is, well, if you’re spending five hours just doing monitoring, why not have an LLM or AI do a lot of that monitoring, help you surface the stuff that you really need to take action on, so that you could focus your time on strategy, building relationships, having good judgment to take action on your strategies?

So I think that’s the opportunity. PR is such a fragmented space where you’re looking across so many different places. Why not just have one or two places that really help you with your efforts?

Gotcha. So it’s more about consolidating the surfaces we all have to go to, whether it’s Cision, Muck Rack, Sprinklr, Substack, podcasts, all of the things.

You name it, man. You pick a category. I need to pitch podcasts. Okay, great. This one little small sliver of PR, there’s like four or five or six different tools that do that one thing.

And so when I talk with PR professionals, they’re like, look, I’ve got like eight or nine subscriptions to stuff right now, and I’m using all these different tools, and none of them really talk to each other and none of them integrate with each other, and it makes my life super difficult for reporting purposes and all this stuff.

So that’s kind of the gap that we’re looking to fill. We just hear how frustrated PR practitioners are with their current workflows and tech stack, and we think that there’s an opportunity there.

You mentioned podcasts. We’re on a podcast, but you did something interesting where you built a database of more than three-quarters of a million — I think the number is around 815,000 active podcasts. I have never seen a podcast database before, to be honest. It’s one of those things like Substack where it feels a little bit like pitching into the wind without knowing where to go. How did you — that could have been a huge manual task, so I’m assuming it wasn’t manual — but how did you identify what was an active podcast? What was a red flag for a podcast that’s not worth pitching? How did you actually build that database out?

Yeah. So we took a look at 5 million podcasts and we whittled that down to 814,000 active podcasts, which were — I believe the definition was any episode within the last 60 days. It could have been 30 days, but that was essentially what “active” means.

And so, yeah, the thing that’s amazing about that — no matter what, this is the product that demos the best for us — is you can go in and type, “Find me a podcast about virtually anything,” and it’s going to come back with some different shows that you could potentially pitch yourself to be a guest on.

So, yeah, I think 814,000 is a really strong market and gives a lot of opportunity.

And then you zoom back from that with journalists. We’ve got about 75,000 journalists that have Help a Reporter Out profiles. And that’s going from 800,000 to 75,000 journalists.

And I think we’ve got about 7,000 or 8,000 bylined article publishers — publishers that accept op-eds and contributed content.

And I think that collectively this makes up for a really interesting set that PR professionals could take interest in.

Are you going to do the same thing that you did for podcasts with Substack and Beehiiv in the newsletter industry?

Like, this is what I’ve been working on this week. I put out a HARO, and my HARO was, “What is PR in 2026?” Because it’s not one thing anymore. It is so many different things.

And so I spent the entire week, probably like 40 customer interviews with PR practitioners, being like, “What’s working for you? What are you doing?”

And obviously one recurring theme that keeps coming up more and more often is the shape of the media that you’re seeing. Journalists get laid off from a publication and turn to Substack, and they’ve got an independent publication that now has subscribers.

So, yeah, a huge need for PR professionals is, well, how do I reach the right Substacks? How do I find the newsletters where there’s an engaged audience?

The job to be done within PR — that is just one of many — and it’s probably one of the most rising, most important tasks to be completed.

I couldn’t agree more.

I mean, I remember when Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher left All Things D and created Recode, and that was like the first moment of independent journalism, I think.

Now, granted, they had backers and they had a team, but they were banking on their names that they helped build All Things D under.

And I think now it’s just — you see Jeffrey Fowler from The Washington Post, Joanna Stern from The Wall Street Journal. It’s just taken a life of its own.

I think every journalist is an entrepreneur at this point.

Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve seen a lot of PR people go that route too. They want to go the consultant route. They build that out as a brand.

Meredith in the media has done a great job building her own business by interviewing journalists and giving that insight back to PR people.

Let’s talk about this. You brought HARO back in 2025. I remember when it started. Was it 2007-ish?

In a Facebook group in 2007.

Yes. And then you’ve also brought back Connectively in 2026. You bought Connectively. What are you seeing in these media brands that have kind of gone dormant? I’m not going to say they were dead, but they’ve gone dormant. And why are you bringing them back as part of Featured and part of this AI co-pilot?

Yeah. Well, I think that each one has a separate reason.

So, you start with Help a Reporter Out, founded in 2007 or 2008, and I don’t know if I’ve ever met a PR professional who hasn’t heard of HARO.

Plain and simple.

And since acquiring it, reviving it, I’ve had hundreds of calls with different PR practitioners talking about HARO. All of them have like the nostalgic story for it — that maybe they were getting started in their career, maybe they needed a win for a client that was on the ropes, and all this different stuff.

So when it was announced that it was discontinued and then rebranded to Connectively, and then Connectively was discontinued, it just felt like there was an opportunity there.

So anyways, we put a deal across and we revived HARO.

And one of the most interesting things that we actually saw was we were thinking about bringing the website back. It was the Friday afternoon at like 3:30, and we were going to announce the revival on Tuesday, and we wanted to make sure that the website actually could go live.

So we just hit publish as a test, and within two minutes we had like 15 subscribers.

The best signal you could get. And it was like, “Whoa, this is crazy.”

So anyways, HARO is a great brand. And I think that when you look at journalist request platforms, Peter Shankman, who started it, actually started another platform called Sources of Sources, SOS, and it was recognizing that this is the perfect format for a journalist request service to connect journalists with sources.

An email format is perfect. There’s no platform, there’s no friction, there’s no signup. It’s just a daily, three-times-a-day summary of all these different journalists who need sources.

You can reply back to the journalists directly if you could be helpful, and it’s like the perfect way to connect people.

So, in bringing it back, I’ve contributed stories and I’ve experienced this firsthand. I’ve talked with journalists that have done it, and it’s just incredible who you can get connected with.

Yeah. Look, you said everyone’s nostalgic for it, and I can attest to that just given the fact that I remember the Facebook group.

It was something we always checked. It was, I think, three times a day at the time when it started hitting email, and we’d all — I was working at an agency — we’d all compare notes and see like, okay, who do we have for this? Who do we have for that?

It didn’t just act as the inbound, but it actually created community within the agency setting or wherever you were.

It’s only been a little while that you’ve flipped it on and you said you got 15 subscribers right off the bat — great signal. Obviously, people wanted it. How did you get the journalists to come back and start putting in inquiries and whatnot?

Flipped on the light switch — HARO’s back. Really, it was just that simple.

People — because a lot, I would assume a lot of journalists in the 20 years since it started have kind of gone by the wayside, maybe moved on to different parts of their career.

Look, it’s an unmet need. You need sources for stories, and if you don’t get the source that you need every single time from a particular platform, you’re always open to alternatives.

And so when we said HARO’s back, great. Let me give it a try again.

And then earning those opportunities and delivering on that with results is what has made it have a comeback.

So I think that that’s significant.

And it hasn’t all been roses. It wasn’t like HARO was a thriving asset and it suddenly got shut down. It was a slow decay and it was a huge decline in quality and trust.

I mentioned the format of why it works. It’s also so simple that it’s so open to spam and it’s so open to profiles that aren’t real and all of this stuff that we have to face on the back end of inheriting and reviving this.

It’s not roses, but it’s the perfect format to actually execute.

And so for us behind the scenes, it means that we’ve got to build in a bunch of safeguards to maintain the quality and trust.

What are some of those safeguards, if you can share, or what are some of the hiccups you’ve run into since rolling the brand back out that you could talk about?

Yeah. So I guess some of the different stuff we check — AI. We do AI detection on every single pitch that goes to the HARO platform.

And we find that 21% of all pitches on HARO are 100% AI-generated.

And so we thought that AI detection would be a really strong signal. It is.

We see that 35% of journalists opt out of receiving AI pitches entirely. So when they submit a request for a source, there’s a little checkbox that says, “Don’t send me AI pitches.”

And that’s not checked by default. People check it 35% of the time, and we exclude and withhold those 100% AI-detected pitches.

So we use a company called Pangram for that. We feel it’s the strongest AI detection tool on the market.

With that said, there’s false positives and false negatives, but at least it’s something as a signal in the middle.

We also ban a HARO account every 23 minutes.

And what I mean by that — this is more safeguards and signals within the system where we have community reporting. A journalist can essentially mark something as not helpful. That goes to our internal team.

We’ll take a look at it. We’ve got some different mechanisms to either warn the user or ban the user, depending on the severity of what the report is.

We also take a look at a lot of other different things that allow us to suss out users who aren’t using the system within our guidelines.

And there’s a lot of folks who have set up entire shops that are just bombarding HARO opportunities, and we’re able to suss those out pretty efficiently now.

You said 21% were just fully AI-generated. I don’t think I’ve ever developed a fully generated AI pitch.

You’re not that [laughter] — you’re not that lazy.

Just — I mean, I use Claude a lot. I use ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, all of them. But I just — maybe it’s growing up in the pre-AI era, you know. I remember when blogs weren’t even a thing.

But not even handwriting — just coming up with the angle on your own and not just plugging into a machine. You’re outsourcing your brainpower at that point.

We see that some of the best PR agencies in the world do it.

And so it’s not just — it’s not restricted to people that don’t know any better or who are lazy. Some of the best brands in the world will still get flagged, and it is what it is.

How do you manage that if it’s, let’s just say, one of the top PR agencies in the world that’s doing it? Are you actually going to ban that agency or that brand, and then they’re like, “Well, that’s a pretty powerful brand if it’s one of the Fortune 500-type things”?

I don’t think it matters. It doesn’t matter what the brand is or who the user is. It’s more so a signal.

It would be very irresponsible of us to say, “Oh, 100% AI, you’re banned.”

There’s no permanent bans in that situation. More so, it’s just a report for our team to take a look at because usually it’s one signal of many that allows us to take either a warning action, a ban action, or just ignore it.

Got it. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

You’ve said PR used to mean the front page of the newspaper, getting on the front page of The New York Times. We could talk about vanity placements. We’ve talked about that with past guests. Or page one of Google, since you’re an SEO guy too. But now with AI visibility and whatnot, how do you actually determine when a placement’s moving the needle versus it’s a vanity placement? How do you think about that?

Well, I think the way that PR professionals are defining it today is: Does the brand appear in an AI answer summary, and is AI recommending the brand when customers are prompting it with relevant product- and service-related queries?

So I think that is — the brand being mentioned in the summary or the brand being cited in the summary — is kind of the new way to measure whether or not something’s working.

And I think that you’re seeing all types of innovation in the space to figure out what, in fact, is a valuable outlet that’s worth pursuing.

I’m hearing stuff like, “All right, let’s go prioritize the mom-and-pop blog in Spain overnight because that one blog is super optimized for AI citations and machine relations,” and all this stuff that’s floating around.

And you’re seeing just a transformation of how PR professionals are approaching what PR is today.

And I think that AI summaries is a huge component of it.

Yeah. The whole AEO/GEO thing — we’ve had a lot of it’s been a topic. I’ll put it that way. It’s been a topic whether you’re the topic. It is the topic in 2026.

[laughter]

It really is.

And I think a lot of people just kind of — I don’t want to say overestimate, but they don’t think about it end to end.

I had a conversation with someone where it was like they’re not thinking about what they want to measure before they put the content out and then measure it and then use that to influence the next thing.

So they’re not thinking about the prompt that they actually want the piece of content to influence, or similar prompts.

So it might be that they’re just creating — they’re like, “We have a piece of news. Let’s write it like a generative engine format.”

And it’s like, okay, but is that actually going to move the needle for you?

You know, it’s a new industry, so people are still figuring it out.

But I do think that there is just a sense that this is the silver bullet for PR measurement, and that’s not necessarily true.

Yeah. And I think that it just fits within the framework of what PR is.

You go to the RPI framework and your research, planning, implementation, and the evaluation. This tactic and this strategy has a place in all of them.

You have to research which sites are ultimately going to get cited. You’ve got to incorporate that into your overall strategy. You’ve got to implement content that’s going to be within that AI summary, and you’ve got to evaluate whether or not it actually works or not and what the end result is.

So I think that there’s a lot to be developed within the industry.

Right now, it’s just a time of experimentation and fun, and let’s throw some budget at it and see what works.

And I think that you’re going to see some really good insights surface.

And for PR professionals who are listening, it’s basically like: try it with your own brand, try it with different clients that trust you to do some stuff, and listen to what PR people are talking about on LinkedIn about what is working and try that out as well.

Are you doing anything with GEO, AEO, whatever you want to call it, within Featured and the platform?

Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of brands connected to Featured, but no. Yeah, we have a GEO audit tool within Featured that, from what we’ve heard from users, is pretty fancy and cool.

You can basically just say, “Here’s my website. Here’s a prompt that I want to rank for. Now go do an audit across Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini and see if our brand’s being mentioned.”

And if it is or isn’t, there’s going to be some action items that Featured recommends to say, “Hey, if you do want visibility for this, you need to reach out to this editor at this publication with this direct pitch,” and try to take some action on that.

So I think it’s a great way to — in this space that is kind of cloudy and being developed — you’ve got to have just a clear action item, and that’s what the tool aims to do.

And I assume that pitch you want a human to edit before sending?

Yeah. [laughter] You have to look at it.

Okay. It doesn’t just automatically send.

You can’t automate it all.

Got it.

You guys just launched an MCP server too for select platforms. Talk us through what that actually entails and the thought process behind bringing that to Claude and Cursor and others, and why not some other platforms?

Yeah. So MCP server is just a fancy term for integrated with Claude and Cursor and your favorite AI tool.

And the realization is that today’s business day for a PR professional doesn’t start where it used to. It starts on Claude, and you should be able to do all of your work within Claude.

So why try to get people to go to Featured.com when they already have their work set up and don’t disrupt that? Just bring it into their workspace.

And so that’s essentially what it does.

It allows you to find journalist requests, for example. So rather than going to HARO and going to your inbox and checking that and going to three other different journalist request platforms, just ask Claude to look at Featured.

Say, “Hey, go find me journalist requests.”

And if you’re integrated with Featured, it’s going to group in everything that it’s found across all the different platforms and put that into one workspace.

That’s interesting. I mean, it’s always so fascinating that we’re migrating from, I would say, you went from Windows back in the day to Google Chromebooks and the cloud-based platforms to now basically an AI-based platform that is the work we’re doing.

Even though having this conversation with someone else the other day, I use Claude Cowork, and I don’t think I found a good use case for it [laughter], as wild as that sounds.

But yet we’re increasingly doing work in Claude, ChatGPT, etc.

I think that’s a really good callback where, you know, to put it in perspective, when the browser came out, probably the replacement on that is you used to have to download something to your computer.

And then it’s like, all of a sudden, now you don’t have to download it. Now you could just go to a web browser and type in www and get what you need.

That’s kind of the transformation that we’re living through.

You don’t have to go to www. You now have it all in your favorite AI tool.

Yeah, I agree.

For Featured, there’s a workflow feature that comes with the paid plan, but obviously there’s access across the board for the free plans. What’s the benefit of the workflow and all those pieces?

Are you effectively building a platform that’s competing with the likes of HoneyJar and other PR platforms that seem to be coming out nowadays?

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, Featured, your co-pilot for PR, and workflows is the most powerful component of what Featured is.

And I say this because workflows are your always-on assistant that can be applied to your standard job to be done in PR: monitoring journalist requests, looking and finding podcasts, doing the daily monitoring-type activities that require hours that you would typically miss 75% of the time.

So if I’m looking at what a PR agency does today, they’re typically deploying a single person on monitoring journalist requests, and they’re spending five hours of their entire day looking at journalist requests and figuring out if it’s something worth acting on.

What do they do the other 19 hours of the day?

They just miss.

So, like, an always-on automation allows you to filter all of that stuff.

Now free up the time that you used to spend five hours monitoring, and now you could spend that time actually strategizing and acting and building the relationship with the journalist.

It’s a perfect world for where PR needs to operate.

Yeah. No, I think that makes a lot of sense.

As part of that, is there an automation to ping teammates about getting extra inputs — for example, to respond to a pitch or an inbound request or something like that?

It integrates with Slack. It integrates with email. We’ve got an Asana integration that’s going to be coming out.

So, yeah, it’s bringing the work into workflows in the most easy way possible.

Wow, that’s pretty impressive.

Because I feel like PR tech — everyone talks about ad tech, martech, but PR tech has been lacking for several years now.

It’s always been fractured into — to the point you made earlier about a fractured industry — it’s always been, you know, “Oh, it’s here in Cision, it’s here in Muck Rack, it’s here in Teams and SharePoint and Google Drive,” but it’s not been in one place where you can go and be like, “That’s where we’re going to do all of our work.”

Yeah. That’s why we’re here.

I mean, look, I was sitting here looking at, oh, there’s an AI for finance and Javier, there’s an AI for legal and Harvey.

Where’s the AI for PR?

And you looked at some of the different companies, all of them are still in beta. You have to request access.

We’re like, you know what? Let’s go for it. Let’s be the AI for PR platform.

How many clients do you guys have? Who’s testing it? Who’s using it? Would love to hear success stories.

Yeah. So, Connectively just surpassed 100,000 users.

And HARO has a lot more subscribers than that.

We’re connecting a journalist or publisher with the source via HARO or Connectively, I think, every — was it every 21 seconds? Something like that.

That’s wow.

Yeah. So it’s like, with all the three different brands, it is one of the ways that PR is being — so that’s exciting.

And I think that we’re just getting started with it because, like I said, PR isn’t one thing in 2026.

It is like 26-plus different things, and we’ve got coverage in some of those different areas, but there’s a lot more that needs to be built.

In past conversations, you’ve actually made the case for crisis comms and investor relations to be the next MCP, but those are pretty high-stakes areas. I don’t know a lot of people who are willing to outsource or bring or integrate AI or MCPs or the different technologies into crisis comms, for example. I know Adam Pratt from IBM, who was on the podcast recently, actually talked about how he uses it. What are you hearing that makes you believe that crisis and investor relations are the next frontiers in this area?

I think it’s part of it.

You just have to look at what PR does, and obviously those two areas are definitely a part of it.

Where I’ve seen every successful applied AI company do what they have done is they need to identify the jobs to be done.

Once those jobs are identified, they bring in the experts — the people who are the ultimate experts in crisis communications — and they do evals of outputs, are able to take those insights and take those frameworks and essentially have a level up or two or three levels up from what the baseline is that’s readily available in models.

I think that’s the special part of the tech: you’re able to combine the tech with AI and the experts and apply that on a single job to be done.

And whether that’s investor relations, crisis comms, we’re nowhere near it today. I don’t think that there is anything that is close to it at this point.

That’s definitely where we’re going.

And the blueprint is that you’ve got to be able to take these models that are readily improving, you’ve got to be able to bring in the experts, and then you’re ultimately able to craft a tool that’s usable for PR pros.

Got it.

Yeah. I have a feeling that we’re not around the corner from a crisis comms or investor relations piece.

Maybe a little more investor relations, depending on how you control the data and control the flow of materials, but crisis is just such a nuanced, heavy area that I have a feeling that you’re right on that one.

Brett, where can people reach you? Where can they see and hear more about Featured and the work you’re doing there? Where can they stay in touch?

Yeah. There’s three different brands: Featured.com, HARO at Help a Reporter Out, and Connectively at Connectively.us.

And I’m on LinkedIn if you want to connect.

And the thing that I’ll call out: I try to do 20 customer interviews every single week. This week I did 40 and almost died. [laughter]

But I’m always open to feedback. So if anyone wants to connect, I’m happy to do so.

Great. Brett, thanks for joining the pod.

Thanks, everyone, for listening. We’ll catch you again next time.

What 100M+ HARO Emails Tell Us About Getting Featured in the Media

After analyzing more than 2 million pitches and 100 million emails sent through HARO (Help a Reporter Out) over the past year, HARO’s 2026 data shows that getting featured in the media depends on relevance, not volume. Human-written pitches are roughly three times more likely to get featured than AI-generated ones, 21% of all pitches are entirely AI-generated, and 35% of journalists actively filter AI content out. The sources who consistently earn coverage aren’t the ones sending the most pitches, they’re the ones giving journalists exactly what they asked for.

The data at a glance

  • 2 million+ pitches processed by HARO in the past year
  • 100 million+ emails sent connecting journalists and sources
  • 21% of pitches are flagged as entirely AI-generated
  • 35% of journalists filter out AI-generated responses
  • 3x — human-written pitches are about three times more likely to get featured than AI-written ones
  • 32% of journalist requests are rejected during HARO’s approval process
  • 1 user banned roughly every 23 minutes, primarily for spam and terms-of-service violations

1. More pitches means more competition, not more opportunity

A journalist posting a single query can receive dozens of responses. Some are highly relevant. Others technically answer the question but add little insight. Many ignore the instructions entirely.

Being first to respond isn’t enough on its own. The strongest pitches are the ones that make a journalist think, “This person can help me write my story” — and that starts with reading the entire request before responding. If a journalist asks for a specific type of expert, a particular format, or answers to several distinct questions, the winning pitch delivers exactly that.

2. 21% of pitches are entirely AI-generated — and journalists are filtering them out

AI has made it faster to produce a media pitch, but speed comes with a tradeoff. HARO uses AI-detection technology from Pangram to flag pitches, and 21% of submissions are identified as entirely AI-generated. Meanwhile, 35% of journalists have chosen to filter out AI-flagged responses when posting a request.

This doesn’t mean AI has no place in a pitching workflow. It means AI should support expertise, not replace it. A practical rule of thumb: use AI to work faster, not to pretend you know something you don’t. A pitch built on real experience, data, or a genuine point of view consistently outperforms a generic response generated from the journalist’s own query.

3. Human-written pitches get featured about 3x more often than AI-written ones

Human-written pitches are roughly three times more likely to get featured than AI-written pitches. Journalists aren’t grading for polished paragraphs — they’re looking for information they can actually use in a story, and that’s where fully human teams tend to have the edge.

The sources who stand out bring something specific to the table: firsthand experience, original data, a strong point of view, or expertise that maps directly to the story at hand. They also do three things consistently well — they provide credible, verifiable information; they respond to what the journalist actually asked, not a loosely related version of it; and they make the journalist’s job easier by handing over something ready to use.

That last point is the throughline across all of HARO’s data. A pitch doesn’t win because it sounds impressive — it wins because it saves the journalist time. The clearer and more usable a response is, the less editing it needs, and the more likely it is to make the final story.

4. Relevance beats volume

Responding to every request that contains a keyword match usually wastes time on pitches that were never a real fit. A more effective approach is to be selective. Before responding, ask:

  • Do I genuinely have expertise in this topic?
  • Can I give a specific answer rather than a generic opinion?
  • Do my credentials match what the journalist is looking for?
  • Can I answer every part of the request?
  • Can I offer something the journalist can’t easily find elsewhere?

If the answer is yes across the board, respond. If not, skip it. Ten highly relevant pitches consistently outperform a hundred generic ones.

5. Quality control runs in both directions

HARO doesn’t just filter sources, it filters requests too. Approximately 32% of journalist requests are rejected during HARO’s approval process, after review of the journalist, publication, and request for quality and legitimacy. The platform also bans a user roughly every 23 minutes, primarily for spam and terms-of-service violations.

This two-way filtering reflects what makes a journalist-source platform function at all: journalists need confidence that sources are real, qualified, and helpful, and sources need confidence that the opportunities they’re responding to are legitimate. Quality control isn’t a nice-to-have here — it’s the mechanism that keeps the system usable.

6. The best pitch isn’t necessarily the fastest one

There’s a common assumption that winning a HARO opportunity is purely a race to respond first. Speed matters when a journalist is on a tight deadline, but being first is worthless if the response isn’t useful. The better goal is to be the first great response. That means having credentials ready and areas of expertise clear before a relevant opportunity even appears.

When responding, get to the point: lead with the most relevant credential, answer the journalist’s questions directly, and provide a quote they can use as-is. Skip unnecessary background. The mindset that works isn’t “write a sales pitch” it’s “help someone finish their story.”

The takeaway

Across more than 2 million pitches and 100 million emails, the underlying lesson hasn’t changed even as the volume and use of AI have grown. Before you submit, make sure your pitch is HARO approved:

  • Helpful
  • Authentic
  • Relevant
  • On time

AI can help find opportunities and organize a pitching workflow, but it can’t replace the one thing that makes a source valuable in the first place — having something worth saying. The sources who consistently get featured aren’t the ones sending the most pitches. They’re the ones giving journalists the best reason to choose theirs.

Which Publications Does AI Search Actually Cite? What 405 GEO Audits Reveal About Where to Pitch

PR teams have traditionally used publication reputation, audience size and SEO authority to decide which outlets belong on a media list. Those signals still matter, but AI search introduces another question: 

Which publications is AI already using to answer questions about your industry?

An analysis of 405 completed GEO audits conducted through Featured between June 2 and August 21, 2026, found 22,881 AI citations across 11,499 distinct domains, according to the Featured AI Citation Report, June–August 2026. The findings reveal a much broader and more fragmented source landscape than traditional media lists might suggest.

For PR teams, that creates an opportunity to use AI citation data as another signal when deciding where to focus outreach.

AI Search Draws From a Broad Range of Sources

Traditional SEO metrics can tell PR teams a lot about a publication’s conventional search authority, but they don’t fully describe the sources AI search uses to answer category questions.

Across the 22,881 citations in Featured’s GEO Audit dataset, 34.5% went to domains with a Domain Authority below 40.

Looking at the websites themselves rather than citation volume, the pattern is even broader. 53.9% of the 11,499 distinct domains cited had a Domain Authority below 40, and the median cited domain had a Domain Authority of just 37.

At the same time, high-authority domains remain important. 31.2% of all citations went to domains with a Domain Authority of 80 or higher.

The takeaway isn’t that PR teams should stop pursuing high-authority publications. It’s that Domain Authority alone doesn’t tell you which sources AI search may use for a particular question.

A niche publication with modest SEO metrics could be cited repeatedly for questions in a specific category, while a much larger publication may not appear at all.

There May Not Be a Single AI Media List

The citation data also reveals how fragmented AI search can be.

The 22,881 citations were spread across 11,499 different domains. 76% of those domains were cited exactly once.

That makes it difficult to create a universal list of publications that every brand should pursue for AI visibility. The sources that matter can vary based on the questions being asked, the industry and the specific category.

For PR teams, that means the traditional approach of building a media list based primarily on publication size, reputation or SEO metrics may miss opportunities.

Instead, teams can start with the questions their customers are asking AI and work backward from the sources appearing in those answers.

Most Brands Are Still Invisible in AI Search

The audit data also shows why this matters.

Across 405 completed audits covering 378 brands in 344 industries, 78.5% of brands were not mentioned in any of the buying questions tested for their category. Across the 1,983 buying questions tested, an audited brand was mentioned in just 6.7% of questions.

Brands’ own websites were even less visible. 92.6% of brands never had their own website cited in an AI-generated answer about their category, and just 2.0% of the buying questions produced a citation to the brand’s own site.

The low mention rate was consistent across the four AI models tested. Brands were mentioned in 5.7% of questions on Perplexity, 4.5% on ChatGPT, 4.4% on Claude and 2.8% on Gemini.

For brands, the takeaway is clear: most are still largely absent from AI-generated answers about their categories, and their own websites rarely appear as sources.

AI Cites Editorial Coverage More Than Brand-Owned Content

The audit data also points to a potential gap between what brands publish themselves and what AI search uses to answer questions about them.

Of the 10,176 citations classified by source type, editorial coverage accounted for 64.5%, while brand-owned content accounted for just 1.7%.

Competitor sources accounted for 22.6% of classified sources.

That means competitor content appeared in the classified citation set more than 13 times as often as brand-owned content.

The finding doesn’t mean brands should stop investing in their own content. Instead, it suggests that earning third-party coverage may be an important part of how brands expand their presence in the sources AI search draws from.

For PR teams, that creates a practical opportunity: identify the publications already appearing in AI answers, then determine which of those outlets are realistic targets for coverage. The publications surfaced by the audit can then be pursued through journalist requests on HARO and Featured.

Find the Publications AI Is Already Citing

The challenge is figuring out which sources matter for a particular brand.

PR teams can start by identifying the questions customers are likely to ask AI search engines. From there, they can examine which brands and sources appear in the answers and look for publications that repeatedly influence relevant prompts.

This is where AI visibility research can become a practical PR tool.

Featured’s GEO Audit shows teams where their brand appears in AI search, where competitors appear instead, and which publications, websites and articles AI cites. It then ranks the publications to pitch based on citation frequency, giving teams a prioritized list of media targets. From the audit, users can draft a pitch with the Draft Pitch button or find active media requests from that publication, all within Featured.

Instead of starting with a traditional media list and guessing which outlets might influence AI visibility, PR teams can use the sources AI is already citing as a data point for deciding where to focus outreach.

Featured’s GEO Audit can also surface a different type of visibility gap: an AI search engine may cite a brand’s own website without actually mentioning the brand in its answer. In that situation, the opportunity may be to strengthen or promote existing content rather than pursue entirely new coverage.

The result is a more targeted approach to AI visibility: identify where a brand is missing, understand which sources are influencing the answers, and prioritize the publications that may be worth pursuing.

AI Visibility Gives PR Teams a New Media Signal

The 405 GEO audits don’t suggest that traditional authority is irrelevant. High-authority websites remain a major part of the AI citation landscape. But they do show that the landscape is broader than a conventional SEO-based media list might suggest.

More than half of the distinct domains cited had a Domain Authority below 40. Three-quarters of cited domains appeared only once. And nearly four out of five brands audited were not mentioned in a single buying question in their category.

For PR teams, that creates a new signal for media targeting. The question isn’t only:

“How authoritative is this publication?”

It’s also:

“Is AI already using this publication to answer questions about my industry?”

That signal can help PR teams identify relevant outlets they might otherwise overlook and prioritize outreach around the sources shaping the AI answers their customers see.

30x More Creators Than Journalists: The Opportunity for PR Professionals

There are six PR professionals for every working journalist, creating an increasingly crowded pitching environment where multiple brands, agencies, and communications teams may be competing for the attention of the same reporters.

Traditional media relations have always involved competition for limited attention. But the media landscape is changing, and PR professionals now have access to a much larger pool of potential media partners.

The PR Pitching Problem

Traditional media relations are built around scarcity. There are only so many journalists covering technology, healthcare, finance, beauty, travel, business, and other industries.

On average, a journalist receives 42 pitches for every HARO query, making it easy for even a strong story to get lost in the volume.

Creators introduce a different model. There is a much larger pool of potential media partners to tap into, with creators who have already built audiences around specific industries, interests, and customer segments.

Rather than asking only, “Which journalist should I pitch?” PR professionals can also ask, “Which creators already have the audience I want to reach?”

There Are 30x More Creators Than Journalists

The creator economy has dramatically expanded the number of people producing and distributing content. IAB’s 2025 Measuring the Digital Economy study estimates 1.5 million full-time-equivalent digital creator jobs in 2024, compared with roughly 49,300 news analysts, reporters, and journalists. That’s roughly 30 full-time-equivalent creator jobs for every journalist.

Creators on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms are effectively building their own media channels. They have audiences, niches, editorial perspectives, and established relationships with people who actively choose to consume their content.

And many creators aren’t operating as large media businesses. According to NeoReach’s 2025 Creator Earnings Report, nearly 57% of surveyed full-time creators earn below the U.S. living-wage benchmark of $44,000 from content alone. The report surveyed more than 3,000 creators representing 1.1 billion combined followers.

That creates an opportunity for brands. Creators need content, ideas, expertise, products, and partnerships that help them consistently produce content their audiences want to see.

For PR professionals, creators can become another way to put a brand, product, expert, or story in front of the right audience.

Expand Your Media Outreach

Imagine a PR professional representing a new financial product.

The traditional approach might be to identify journalists covering personal finance, fintech, or investing and send them a pitch. That remains an important part of media relations, but it doesn’t have to be the only approach.

There may also be dozens or hundreds of creators making content for exactly the audience the company wants to reach.

A personal finance creator could explain the product. A fintech creator could demonstrate how it works. A career creator could discuss how it helps people manage their finances. A small-business creator could show how it applies to entrepreneurs.

The goal isn’t to replace traditional PR. It’s to expand the definition of media outreach.

Instead of only asking who might write about a story, PR professionals can also consider who can authentically incorporate that story into content their audience already wants.

Finding the Right Creator Is the New Challenge

Having more potential media partners creates a different problem: how do you find the right ones?

Searching manually across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn can quickly become as time-consuming as traditional media research. The goal isn’t to find the creator with the biggest following. It’s to find creators whose content, audience, and niche align with the brand.

That challenge is becoming increasingly important as creator marketing scales. IAB’s 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report found that 32% of respondents cited identifying the right creators to partner with as their biggest challenge.

New creator discovery tools are making that process more similar to media-list building, but with a more conversational approach.

For example, Featured’s Find Creators is a chat-based search experience that lets users describe the creator they’re looking for in natural language.

A PR professional might search: “Find me finance creators on TikTok with more than 25,000 followers who are based in California and average at least 10,000 views per video.”

The tool can use criteria such as platform, follower count, average views, location, language, posting activity, and industry or niche to surface relevant creators from Featured’s database of 380 million creators. Users can combine these criteria in a single natural-language search or search for specific creators by handle.

Once a creator is identified, information such as engagement rate, audience insights, average likes and comments, previous collaborations, and contact information can help determine whether that creator is worth approaching.

The advantage isn’t simply having more creators. It’s being able to search that larger pool and quickly find the people who are actually relevant to a brand and its audience.

PR Professionals Should Start Optimizing for Social

The traditional PR playbook isn’t going away. Journalists still play an important role in shaping public conversations, establishing credibility, and producing news.

But PR professionals now have another distribution channel to consider: social media.

Creators are building audiences around specific industries, interests, communities, and customer segments. That gives PR strategies two parallel paths:

Pitch journalists for earned media.

Pitch creators for social distribution.

The goal isn’t to choose one over the other. It’s to build a media strategy that reaches audiences through both.

Find the Creators Already Reaching Your Customers

The next evolution of PR may not be about sending more pitches. It may be about finding more of the right people to pitch.

Creators have become an enormous, decentralized network of niche media channels, reaching audiences interested in everything from finance and healthcare to beauty, technology, travel, business, and beyond.

For PR professionals and brands, the opportunity is straightforward:

Find the creators who already have your customers’ attention, and give them a reason to create something worth sharing.

The traditional media landscape has a scarcity problem. The creator economy offers abundance.

The PR professionals who learn how to work with both may have a significant advantage in getting their brands and clients in front of the audiences that matter most.

Why Your AI-Written Pitch Might Never Reach a Journalist

About 21% of pitches submitted through HARO are flagged as fully AI-generated, and roughly a third of journalists have chosen not to receive them. Here’s what that means if you’re the one writing the pitch.

Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, says about 21% of pitches submitted through HARO score as fully AI-generated, and roughly 35% of journalists have opted out of receiving them. If you answer queries yourself, a templated AI reply may never reach a human. Writing it yourself has become a competitive advantage.

Farmiloe made the point on Let’s Talk PR & More with host Sherry Goldman, president of Goldman Communications Group. Most of the coverage of that conversation will focus on what it means for agencies. The more useful question, if you’re a founder or a marketer answering queries between other jobs, is narrower: does any of this change what I should do on Tuesday morning?

It does. Here’s the part that applies to you.

What does a 21% AI-generated rate actually mean for your pitch?

Every pitch submitted through HARO, Connectively and Featured runs through AI detection. The output is a percentage score, colour-coded, visible to the journalist.

“And that AI detection essentially says, hey, was this human written or was it written by AI? And if it’s 100% score, which we see about 21% of the time, then we essentially can flag that for a journalist to look into further.” — Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured

Journalists also get a one-click option to filter out anything scoring 100% AI-generated before they read it. About 35% have switched it on — and Farmiloe thinks that understates the real level of objection, because nobody is nudged into it:

“I’d say it’s even higher. Like I said, the submission form has that box unchecked by default.” — Brett Farmiloe

The practical consequence for you is specific and slightly brutal. If you paste a query into a chatbot and send what comes back, roughly a third of the journalists you’re trying to reach never see it. Not see it and pass over it. Never see it. Your expertise, your credentials, the fact that you’re the right source — none of it gets evaluated, because the reply was filtered before a person looked at it.

That’s not a moral argument about AI. It’s a deliverability problem.

Do journalists still want to hear from small businesses?

Yes — and this is the encouraging half. Farmiloe described two distinct camps, and the second one may not care how your first reply was drafted:

“And then you’ve got the journalists who actually optimize for getting connected with the best source for their story, and they don’t care if that initial response was AI generated as long as they get connected with someone that they could speak with.” — Brett Farmiloe

So the filter isn’t a rule. It’s a distribution of preferences, and about a third of it is a hard no. Which means the safe play — writing it yourself — costs you nothing with the permissive camp and everything with the strict one.

What journalists are short on isn’t sources. It’s time. Farmiloe relayed one line from a journalist that he called blunt:

“I don’t want to hear from you until I want to hear from you.” — a journalist, quoted by Brett Farmiloe

A query is that journalist telling you, specifically, that right now they do want to hear from you. That’s the whole value of the channel. It’s the rare moment when the usual dynamic is inverted, and it’s worth twenty real minutes.

What should you actually write?

Farmiloe’s framework is the HARO name read as instructions: 

be Helpful, 

be Authentic, 

be Relevant,

be On time. 

Translated into things you can check before hitting send:

Helpful. Answer the question that was asked, not the one you wish had been asked. If the query is about hiring and you sell software, your answer is about hiring.

Authentic. In Farmiloe’s words, “use the humanity that you have instead of the AI generation tools at your disposal.” The specific thing that happened at your company last quarter is not something a model can generate, and it’s the only reason a journalist would pick you over the other forty replies.

Relevant. “Look at the instructions that a journalist has put out there and follow those instructions to a T.” If they asked for two sentences, send two sentences. If they asked for a title and a company, include both.

On time. “Know that a journalist is on deadline. The quicker and faster that you could help them do their job, the better.”

There’s an obvious tension between on time and write it yourself, and it resolves in one direction: answer fewer queries, properly. Farmiloe’s read on why so much AI-generated volume exists is that people are playing the wrong game.

“I think that the misconception that a lot of PR pros sometimes have when they approach a platform like HARO is that it’s a numbers game.” — Brett Farmiloe

Three genuine answers a week from someone who is actually the right source will outperform thirty templated ones. That is good news if you’re a founder without a PR budget, because it means the constraint is judgment rather than headcount.

Does it still count if you get covered somewhere small?

This is the shift most likely to change how you spend your time, and it favours smaller players.

The reason earned media is having a resurgence is that AI systems draw on it when they assemble answers. Farmiloe put the change in target this way:

“The front page used to be the newspaper and then it was a search engine result page and now it’s a AI answer summary.” — Brett Farmiloe

Which reopens a question most people had settled. If what you want is to be the company named when someone asks an AI assistant for the best option in your category, the size of the publication matters less than whether that publication gets cited.

“The TechCrunch journalist that she once pitched, it might just be as valuable to approach the mom and pop blog that’s based out of Spain.” — Brett Farmiloe

The test Farmiloe proposed isn’t domain authority. It’s citation: “Does the mom and pop blog in Spain actually get cited in AI search engines?”

You can check this yourself in about fifteen minutes. Ask an AI assistant the questions your buyers would ask — “best X for Y” in your category — and note which sites get named. Some will be publications you assumed were out of reach. Several will be niche outlets you’d previously have dismissed as too small to bother with.

That list is your target list. And the wins accumulate rather than arriving all at once:

“But what really makes your business is a continuation of all of these earned media hits that now accumulate into the big win.” — Brett Farmiloe

If you’ve been holding out for one prestige placement to change things, that’s the expectation worth updating.

What happens after you get quoted?

Most people treat the published story as the end. Farmiloe’s argument is that the journalist’s job isn’t over at publication, and neither is yours.

He’s been asking journalists how many sources of income they have. The answer is rarely one:

“The common answer that I get holds two hands up, eight fingers.” — Brett Farmiloe

Multiple publications, a Substack they’re growing, paid consulting. The person who quoted you is running a small business, often measured on whether the piece travelled rather than on column inches.

“It is a starting point, not a finish line anymore when the story actually gets published.” — Brett Farmiloe

So share the piece from your own account with a real comment about why the argument is right. Send it to your newsletter list. If they have a Substack, subscribe to it. This takes ten minutes and it is the single cheapest way to stop being a stranger the next time that journalist needs a source — which is how you end up on the short list instead of in the queue.

If you run an agency or a comms team

Two things from the conversation aimed at you specifically.

First, the client conversation has changed. Farmiloe says the problem clients now bring is “how do I appear in AI?” — and most agencies don’t yet have a case study to answer it with. His suggestion: “you need to become the case study.” Run the experiment on your own firm, where you control the site and the reporting, then take the results to clients.

Second, do the research step. Farmiloe cited the RPIE framework behind APR accreditation — research, planning, implementation, evaluation — and named the failure mode: “I think too often we just jump to implementation.” For query response, research means reading what the journalist has recently published before you answer.

What to change this week

  1. Stop sending anything you didn’t write yourself. A third of journalists filter it out unread.
  2. Cut your response volume and raise the quality. Three real answers beat thirty templated ones.
  3. Read the query twice and follow the format instructions exactly.
  4. Spend fifteen minutes finding which sites get cited in AI answers for your category. Add the small ones to your list.
  5. When a story runs, share it and support the journalist who wrote it.

The takeaway

“Focusing on quality relationships with journalists, focusing on replying back to queries that are relevant to clients, I think those are the PR professionals that are winning in today’s environment.” — Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured

The tools got cheap. Judgment didn’t. That’s the opening.

Brett Farmiloe is the founder and CEO of Featured, which owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively. He spoke with Sherry Goldman, president of Goldman Communications Group, on Let’s Talk PR & More. Listen to the full conversation here.

Why Media Monitoring Matters Even If You’re Not a PR Pro

If you’ve ever spent time trying to earn media coverage, you probably know the feeling: You finally land the mention, interview, link, podcast appearance, or feature you’ve been chasing—and then move on to the next thing.

But what happens after the coverage goes live?

For a small business owner, it might be a mention you didn’t know existed. For a founder, it could be an opportunity to turn one interview into several more. For a PR professional, it’s a way to understand whether a campaign is actually gaining traction. And for a marketing team, competitor coverage can reveal topics, publications, and narratives worth paying attention to.

That’s where media monitoring comes in.

Featured, the AI co-pilot for PR and the company behind HARO, recently launched a Media Monitoring capability designed to make that process easier. But the bigger takeaway for anyone involved in PR, marketing, communications, or business development is this:

Getting media coverage is only half the job. Knowing what’s being said—and what happens next—can be just as valuable.

Why should you care about media monitoring?

The obvious answer is that you want to know when your company is mentioned.

The more useful answer is that media coverage is data.

Every article, interview, quote, backlink, podcast, and competitor mention can tell you something about how your business is being perceived, what journalists are interested in, which topics are gaining traction, and where opportunities may exist.

Here are a few practical ways that information can be useful, depending on what you do.

If you own or run a small business: Find the coverage you might otherwise miss

Not every media mention arrives in your inbox.

A journalist might mention your company in an article without notifying you. A local publication might link to your website. A customer story might include your business. Or your founder might be quoted in a piece that gets picked up by other publications.

If you’re not actively monitoring for those mentions, you may never see them.

That matters because a media mention can become an asset.

You can share it with customers, add it to your website’s press page, reference it in sales conversations, include it in investor materials, or use it as social content.

The first step, however, is knowing that the coverage exists.

If you’re a PR professional: Don’t stop tracking when the placement lands

For PR teams, monitoring coverage is less about vanity and more about measurement.

You may want to know:

  • How much coverage did a campaign generate?
  • Which publications picked it up?
  • What messages or talking points appeared in the resulting coverage?
  • Was the coverage positive, neutral, or negative?
  • Did additional publications link to or reference the original story?
  • Which competitors are getting attention that your client isn’t?

That last question can be particularly useful.

If a competitor is repeatedly being quoted in stories about a particular topic, that’s a signal. It may indicate that journalists associate the competitor with that subject—or that there is an opportunity for your client to establish its own expertise.

If you’re a founder or entrepreneur: Turn one media win into more opportunities

A media placement shouldn’t necessarily be treated as a one-and-done event.

Suppose you’re quoted in an article about artificial intelligence, hiring, cybersecurity, consumer behavior, or your particular industry.

That coverage can give you clues about what the media is currently interested in. It can also provide social proof when responding to future journalist requests.

More importantly, monitoring can help you identify momentum.

If several publications begin discussing the same topic, that may be a signal to pitch your expertise while the subject is still receiving attention.

The question changes from:

“Did I get coverage?”

to:

“What can I do with the coverage I just got?”

That’s a much more useful question.

Competitor monitoring may be even more valuable

Brand monitoring gets most of the attention, but keeping an eye on competitors can provide a different kind of intelligence.

Imagine discovering that your competitor has recently been featured in five publications for a topic you’ve been working on for months.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you should copy their strategy.

It does give you information.

You can investigate:

  • Which publications are covering them?
  • What topics are generating coverage?
  • Which journalists are writing about those topics?
  • What expertise are they being quoted for?
  • Are there publications covering the competitor but not your company?
  • Are there emerging story angles where your business has a stronger perspective?

In other words, competitor monitoring can help turn “Why are they getting coverage?” into a more actionable question: “What can we learn from where and why they’re getting coverage?”

The timing of monitoring matters

There’s also a practical reason to monitor coverage quickly: fresh coverage creates opportunities.

If your company is mentioned in an article today, you might have an opportunity to:

  • Share it while the story is still circulating
  • Thank the journalist
  • Engage with the publication
  • Repurpose the coverage for social media
  • Add the mention to your website
  • Use the new credibility in sales or business development
  • Identify journalists covering related stories
  • Look for follow-up opportunities

A month later, many of those opportunities may be harder to act on.

This is why automated monitoring can be more useful than occasionally searching your company name on Google.

Featured’s new Media Monitoring capability allows users to create automated workflows that check for coverage hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly and send the results through email or Slack.

The underlying principle is simple: don’t make someone remember to check.

What should you actually monitor?

You don’t necessarily need to monitor everything.

A useful monitoring strategy could include several categories:

Your brand:
Track your company name, product names, executives, and other terms closely associated with your business.

Your competitors:
See which competitors are getting coverage, where they’re appearing, and what topics they’re being associated with.

Your industry:
Monitoring important industry terms can help you identify emerging conversations before they become mainstream.

Your executives and subject-matter experts:
A founder or executive may receive coverage independently of the company. Those mentions can be valuable for both reputation and personal brand building.

The right setup will depend on the size and goals of your organization. A solo founder may only need a handful of searches. An agency managing multiple clients may need a much broader monitoring system.

Media monitoring isn’t just about finding good news

One of the less glamorous, but important parts of monitoring is finding negative or potentially problematic coverage early.

Media monitoring can help teams identify whether coverage is positive, neutral, or negative, giving them a faster way to understand how their brand is being represented.

That’s particularly important for businesses that operate in highly visible or highly regulated industries.

You don’t want your first awareness of a negative story to be when a customer, investor, employee, or journalist sends it to you.

Early awareness doesn’t automatically solve the problem. But it gives you something valuable: time to decide what to do.

How this fits into a broader PR strategy

It’s tempting to think of PR as a funnel:

Find opportunity → Pitch → Get coverage → Done.

In reality, there’s another loop after the coverage:

Monitor → Analyze → Amplify → Learn → Find the next opportunity.

That feedback loop can make earned media more strategic.

For example, if monitoring shows that your company consistently gets coverage when discussing a particular subject, that could become an area to build more thought leadership around.

If competitor monitoring shows that several competitors are receiving coverage around a topic where your company has strong expertise, that could inform future pitches.

And if coverage consistently uses language that doesn’t reflect how you want the company positioned, that’s useful information, too.

The bigger lesson for HARO users

Whether you’re a PR agency managing 20 clients, a founder trying to build credibility, a marketer looking for competitive intelligence, or a small-business owner trying to make the most of your first media mention, the principle is the same:

Don’t treat earned media as the finish line. Treat it as a source of information.

The most valuable media strategy isn’t simply about getting more mentions.

It’s about understanding:

Who is talking about you? Where are they talking about you? What are they saying? Who else are they talking about? And what can you do with that information?

That’s ultimately what media monitoring makes possible.

Featured’s new Media Monitoring capability brings those questions into its platform, allowing users to search recent media coverage through its chat and, for paid users, automate recurring monitoring through email or Slack.

For anyone already investing time in earning media, that can turn coverage from something you occasionally celebrate into something you continuously learn from.

Journalist Request Platforms and SEO in 2026: What Actually Works Now

Featured founder and CEO Brett Farmiloe joined Majestic’s SEO in 2026 podcast to explain how journalist request platforms work, why “less is more” beats volume outreach, and what marketers should measure now that AI visibility has replaced rankings as the goal. Full conversation and transcript below.

Journalist request platforms connect reporters on deadline with expert sources. Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, says the winning approach in 2026 is “less is more” — fewer, higher-quality pitches. Featured, HARO, and Connectively run AI-detection scoring on every pitch so journalists can filter out fully AI-generated responses.

What is a journalist request platform?

A journalist request platform is a marketplace where reporters post what they need for a story and expert sources respond. Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, describes the mechanic on Majestic’s SEO in 2026:

“Journalists need sources for stories and, oftentimes, when they don’t have the Rolodex to satisfy a particular story, they’ll turn to a journalist request platform with a particular request.”

The exchange is two-sided. The journalist clears a deadline; the source gets attribution.

“Journalists can then connect with the source, they can interview them, they can take a quote directly, they can put it in their story — and oftentimes there’s attribution back to the source, which is beneficial for both the journalist (because they can push their story across deadline), and then the source ultimately gets cited.”

How are HARO, Connectively, and Featured different?

Featured operates all three brands. Farmiloe separates them by format:

  • HARO (Help a Reporter Out) — an email service running since 2008. Three times a day it sends a digest of incoming journalist requests. Farmiloe calls it “the most popular journalist request source that’s been around for decades.”
  • Connectively — “essentially HARO in a platform,” at connectively.us, with filtering and search rather than a digest.
  • Featured — “a co-pilot for public relations.” Beyond journalist requests, Featured surfaces byline article opportunities, journalists to pitch, podcasts to pitch, speaking opportunities, and award submissions.

That last category matters more than it sounds. Asked whether this is only about traditional press, Farmiloe was direct:

“It’s everything from speaking opportunities to award submissions to anything that really falls under the PR or SEO umbrella.”

How do SEO teams use journalist request platforms for links?

Farmiloe says the most common Featured and Connectively user is “an SEO agency or an in-house marketing team looking to do SEO themselves.” The workflow he describes is a filtering problem, not a writing problem:

“If you’re on one of our paid subscriptions, then you can filter by domain authority and whether or not there is a dofollow or nofollow link associated with that opportunity. You could essentially say, ‘What are my highest value dofollow opportunities?’ and find the opportunities that make the most sense for you or your clients.”

The response itself is short. Farmiloe’s spec: “responding in four to eight sentences, and trying to be very helpful to the other person on the opportunity.”

Is AI ruining journalist request platforms?

This is the question that put HARO in Featured’s hands in the first place.

“The reason why HARO ended up in our ownership in the first place was a decline of quality and trust within the system, and a lot of that was targeted through the adoption of artificial intelligence.”

Featured’s response was to make AI authorship visible rather than to ban it outright:

“One of them is AI detection on every single pitch. We’ll run a quality score on every pitch that goes through our platform — whether that’s HARO, whether that’s Connectively — and we’ll allow journalists to see those scores. If it’s 100% AI-generated, the journalists will see that. They’ve got a one-click filter (if it is 100% AI-generated) to just opt out of those pitches entirely.”

The design decision is worth noting: the filter belongs to the journalist, not the platform.

What are the best practices for pitching journalists in 2026?

Farmiloe uses the HARO name as a mnemonic — Helpful, Authentic, Relevant, On time.

  • Helpful — “showing that you’ve got something of value to offer the journalist. They’re trying to write a story. If you can be helpful in writing that story, that’s a win.”
  • Authentic — “not using 100% AI-generation to respond to these journalists.”
  • Relevant — journalists “will, in a very detailed fashion, list out the instructions on a submission. Sometimes they want an exact subject line.” Follow them, and make sure your credentials are real.
  • On time — and here Farmiloe corrects a common assumption: “It’s not necessarily being the first in line, but it’s being at the top of the line with the best credentials and the most helpful response.”

Speed is not the moat. Fit is.

What do journalists actually look for in a pitch?

It depends on the story, and Farmiloe splits it into two modes:

“Sometimes it’s a more general article that relies on experience, so oftentimes storytelling in your pitch is very important. Then, other times it is all about the credentials. They need someone who specialises in a specific area of health and needs to be licensed in a particular geography and has to have the experience, so leading with credentials and why you’re qualified is important in that scenario.”

His instruction for telling them apart: “reverse engineer what that journalist is actually looking for” from the instructions they wrote.

What outreach works in 2026?

“Less is more in 2026, in terms of being an outreach specialist. What we’ve seen is that AI has made it incredibly easy to reach out to more people, and it’s made it more noisy and less effective as a result.”

The winners on Featured’s platforms, Farmiloe says, are “the folks who aren’t sending out a higher volume of pitches, but they’re sending out a higher quality of pitch.” AI belongs in the research step, not the send step: “You could use AI to do extensive research and not have to spend hours listening to certain podcast episodes to figure out what the latest thing is that the host is talking about.”

How should you research a podcast or a journalist before pitching?

This was the sharpest idea in the conversation. Most pitch research stops at matching topics. Farmiloe argues for going one level deeper — pitch the gap, not the overlap:

“I think it’s actually one step deeper: to figure out the overall trend and trajectory that the show is heading. Then, how do you fit into this gap of coverage that hasn’t been covered yet, that’s still in connection with that line of what the topic is?”

He calls this outreach forecasting, and it applies to both channels:

“That’s where I think it gets really interesting: the forecasting of outreach — and that applies to podcasts, and it applies to journalists. You could see a journalist covering a specific beat and then try to fill in the gaps of what the next story is that that person’s writing, so they have a complete narrative.”

How do you measure digital PR success in 2026?

Domain authority still filters opportunities, but Farmiloe says the scoreboard has moved:

“In 2026, the metrics are changing. AI visibility scores are one thing that we’re seeing more and more innovators measure against. It’s not just an increase in how authoritative their domain is, and it’s not just an increase in overall search engine result pages and keyword increases. It’s really around: Is my brand visible in AI and LLMs?”

His phrase for where attention has gone: “the new front page of the internet.”

How do you justify PR to executives?

By what happens after the placement, not the placement itself.

“When you land a media placement, and you’re on a great brand like Fast Company or Inc., how are you taking that placement to your sales team and helping those sales efforts become quantified? In terms of reaching out to prospects and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve been featured on Inc. Here’s an article. Here’s our CEO talking about a particular thing that we’ve been talking about in our sales conversations.'”

The primary metric stays visibility. The secondary ones — sales conversations, executive social presence — are what carry the budget conversation.

How often should you check journalist request platforms?

“It’s almost like working out. It’s something that we’ve seen a lot of our customers calendar 15 minutes every single day to, just to see what the latest is from these journalist request platforms and then decide to act on certain ones that are relevant.”

The cost of a miss is asymmetric: “If you miss an opportunity that is perfect to talk about what you do in a high-value publication, that’s a pretty big miss.” Farmiloe’s recommendation for the time cost is a monitoring service that ingests opportunities and alerts on matches.

Is this an SEO job or a PR job?

“I think everything’s blended these days. The job titles that we see subscribe range from PR Manager to Digital PR Specialist to Outreach Manager to just a do-it-yourself Founder.”

And the reason he thinks that’s a good outcome:

“The thing that I really like about where we’re at in 2026 is that PR is accessible. It’s accessible by people who have knowledge to share, and that’s a really good thing and a net positive for the world.”

The takeaway

“The key takeaway is that you have knowledge to share, and that knowledge is highly valued by journalists and publications. Find a way to share that knowledge, and if you share your knowledge in a meaningful way, it will benefit your business.”

Watch or listen

Majestic’s SEO in 2026 series is hosted by David Bain.

Full transcript

If an SEO is listening to this, and they haven’t heard of or actually used a journalist request platform, what is one and what does it do?

Brett Farmiloe: Journalists need sources for stories and, oftentimes, when they don’t have the Rolodex to satisfy a particular story, they’ll turn to a journalist request platform with a particular request.

Say they need to get connected with a very specific source on deadline. They’ll put that request out on a platform, and then sources can analyse those requests and reply to the ones that make the most sense.

Journalists can then connect with the source, they can interview them, they can take a quote directly, they can put it in their story – and oftentimes there’s attribution back to the source, which is beneficial for both the journalist (because they can push their story across deadline), and then the source ultimately gets cited.

You’re the founder of Featured and you’ve relatively recently purchased Help a Reporter Out (HARO) as well. What do those two different platforms do?

Brett Farmiloe: Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a journalist request service that’s been around since 2008. Three times a day, we will email a summary of journalist requests that we’ve received, and this is the most popular journalist request source that’s been around for decades. Most folks in PR and SEO know of HARO.

We also run Connectively, and Connectively is a journalist request platform that’s essentially HARO in a platform.

Then, we also run Featured, and Featured is a co-pilot for public relations. You get connected with (beyond journalist requests) byline article opportunities, journalists to pitch, podcasts to pitch, and a variety of other different media forms.

You talk about different media forms there as well, like podcasts to pitch. So, it’s not just traditional press we’re talking about here?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, it’s everything from speaking opportunities to award submissions to anything that really falls under the PR or SEO umbrella.

How would an SEO who’s looking for content on a particular subject on their own website use this? Is that a good use case for it?

Brett Farmiloe: Absolutely. The most popular customer/user that we see is typically an SEO agency or an in-house marketing team looking to do SEO themselves.

If you, for example, go to Connectively.us, you’re going to see hundreds of different open opportunities, and if you’re on one of our paid subscriptions, then you can filter by domain authority and whether or not there is a dofollow or nofollow link associated with that opportunity.

You could essentially say, “What are my highest value dofollow opportunities?” and find the opportunities that make the most sense for you or your clients. You’re basically identifying the opportunity and then responding in four to eight sentences, and trying to be very helpful to the other person on the opportunity, at the opposite end.

Is there a challenge with AI in these platforms — AI replacing people, or creating fake authorities in a particular subject?

Brett Farmiloe: It’s a great question. The reason why HARO ended up in our ownership in the first place was a decline of quality and trust within the system, and a lot of that was targeted through the adoption of artificial intelligence.

When we acquired HARO and brought it back, that was at the core of our mission: How do we maintain and restore the quality and trust behind it so that these connections between journalists and sources are authentic?

In regard to AI, there are a variety of different things that we’ve done. One of them is AI detection on every single pitch. We’ll run a quality score on every pitch that goes through our platform – whether that’s HARO, whether that’s Connectively – and we’ll allow journalists to see those scores. If it’s 100% AI-generated, the journalists will see that. They’ve got a one-click filter (if it is 100% AI-generated) to just opt out of those pitches entirely. That’s one way that we help make the connection authentic.

Then, in regard to identity and things like that, there’s a long list of stuff that we’ve done to make sure that these are authentic, real people responding to real, authentic pitches from journalists – on both sides.

Is the best way to take advantage of platforms like this to jump in immediately, to ensure that you’re one of the first people to pitch?

Brett Farmiloe: I think the best practices for using journalist request platforms actually follow the HARO acronym (I’ll introduce something cheesy, but I think that it works). HARO: be Helpful, be Authentic, be Relevant and be On time.

Being helpful is essentially showing that you’ve got something of value to offer the journalist. They’re trying to write a story. If you can be helpful in writing that story, that’s a win. Being authentic is just not using 100% AI-generation to respond to these journalists.

Being relevant is that journalists will, in a very detailed fashion, list out the instructions on a submission. Sometimes they want an exact subject line. Other times they want something specific in their pitch that will help them do their job. It’s about following those instructions and being relevant, as well as making sure that you actually have their credentials. That’s super important.

Then, being on time: understanding that these journalism publications oftentimes are working on deadline. It’s not necessarily being the first in line, but it’s being at the top of the line with the best credentials and the most helpful response.

Is there anything else that journalists tend to look for, in terms of experience in a particular sector?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I think it always goes back to the actual query and the actual story that they’re writing. Sometimes it’s a more general article that relies on experience, so oftentimes storytelling in your pitch is very important.

Then, other times it is all about the credentials. They need someone who specialises in a specific area of health and needs to be licensed in a particular geography and has to have the experience, so leading with credentials and why you’re qualified is important in that scenario.

Again, it just goes back to the particular instructions that a journalist has listed, and then trying to reverse engineer what that journalist is actually looking for.

What’s some generally great practice that works now, in 2026, in terms of outreach?

Brett Farmiloe: Less is more in 2026, in terms of being an outreach specialist. What we’ve seen is that AI has made it incredibly easy to reach out to more people, and it’s made it more noisy and less effective as a result.

The outreach that I’m seeing winning on our platforms is the folks who aren’t sending out a higher volume of pitches, but they’re sending out a higher quality of pitch. What that means is you could use AI to do extensive research and not have to spend hours listening to certain podcast episodes to figure out what the latest thing is that the host is talking about. You could use AI to summarise that and better inform your pitch.

When it comes to outreach, less is more in 2026. It just has to be very targeted to the right person at the right time.

On using AI to analyse a recent episode before pitching a host

Host: That’s a great tip: use AI to analyse a recent episode. You can get a transcript of it relatively easily, perhaps show notes as well, and pick out one particular element that’s been in an episode that you can say has resonated with you.

I get pitched loads of times (as a podcast host), “I’d love to be on your show,” and then they rattle on about what they’ve done or what they’d like to talk about without actually knowing what’s relevant for the show.

If you can say something specific like, “I love this element of your show, I’d like to talk about something similar, which is this,” then it makes it much more likely that I’m going to be replying to them and engaging with them and probably having them on as a guest.

Brett Farmiloe: Totally. When you’re doing the outreach, it’s: How do you help that podcast host do their job more effectively?

If you’re doing AI analysis to figure out what the trends that this host is talking about are, and not necessarily just saying, “Hey, because you’ve talked about this and we can also talk about this, we’re a good fit for the show.” I think it’s actually one step deeper: to figure out the overall trend and trajectory that the show is heading. Then, how do you fit into this gap of coverage that hasn’t been covered yet, that’s still in connection with that line of what the topic is?

That’s where I think it gets really interesting: the forecasting of outreach – and that applies to podcasts, and it applies to journalists. You could see a journalist covering a specific beat and then try to fill in the gaps of what the next story is that that person’s writing, so they have a complete narrative.

What are some other metrics you’d encourage people to look at, to measure whether this has been a success?

Brett Farmiloe: That’s a really good question.

In 2026, the metrics are changing. AI visibility scores are one thing that we’re seeing more and more innovators measure against. It’s not just an increase in how authoritative their domain is, and it’s not just an increase in overall search engine result pages and keyword increases. It’s really around: Is my brand visible in AI and LLMs?

There are a variety of different platforms that are emerging that help quantify that, but more and more we’re seeing marketers start to shift their metrics towards the new front page of the internet.

Is difficulty measuring success making it harder to persuade decision makers to give this form of marketing a serious go?

Brett Farmiloe: It’s not just the metrics that you could take executives back to for journalist request platforms in particular; it’s also what you do with it.

When you land a media placement, and you’re on a great brand like Fast Company or Inc., how are you taking that placement to your sales team and helping those sales efforts become quantified? In terms of reaching out to prospects and saying, “Hey, we’ve been featured on Inc. Here’s an article. Here’s our CEO talking about a particular thing that we’ve been talking about in our sales conversations.”

With anything, there’s a primary focus, and the primary focus of using a journalist request platform is better visibility online. But then there are all these secondary elements to say: Is this helping with my sales conversations? Is this allowing our executive team to now go out on social media and share more information that’s relevant and helpful for their followers?

With anything, 2026 is a really confusing time, and it’s not so much a black-and-white scenario. How do you start to fill in some of those blanks with the initiatives that you’re doing?

Do you sit down once a quarter and determine your strategy, or does this have to be done reactively?

Brett Farmiloe: It’s almost like working out. It’s something that we’ve seen a lot of our customers calendar 15 minutes every single day to, just to see what the latest is from these journalist request platforms and then decide to act on certain ones that are relevant. I would say that journalist request platforms in particular are more of a regular cadence and a regular activity that you practice to make sure that you never miss an opportunity.

If you miss an opportunity that is perfect to talk about what you do in a high-value publication, that’s a pretty big miss. Most of our customers use our platforms every single day because it’s such a high-value-added activity.

That said, it does take a lot of time, which is why I think that using a monitoring service to ingest all the different opportunities and be alerted is a really smart way to save time and get those placements.

Is this an SEO role or a digital PR role, or a blend?

Brett Farmiloe: I think everything’s blended these days. The job titles that we see subscribe range from PR Manager to Digital PR Specialist to Outreach Manager to just a do-it-yourself Founder.

It’s pretty interesting. The thing that I really like about where we’re at in 2026 is that PR is accessible. It’s accessible by people who have knowledge to share, and that’s a really good thing and a net positive for the world.

What’s the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

Brett Farmiloe: The key takeaway is that you have knowledge to share, and that knowledge is highly valued by journalists and publications.

Find a way to share that knowledge, and if you share your knowledge in a meaningful way, it will benefit your business.

About the people and platforms in this conversation

Brett Farmiloe is the founder and CEO of Featured, the AI co-pilot for PR. He contributes to Inc. and Fast Company, and previously founded and sold the digital marketing agency Markitors.

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) has connected journalists with expert sources since 2008. Three daily emails, journalist profiles, and AI-detection scoring on every pitch. Sign up free →

Connectively is HARO in a platform — search and filter open requests from journalists and publishers, including by domain authority and dofollow status. connectively.us

Featured goes beyond journalist requests: byline opportunities, journalists to pitch, speaking slots, awards, and a directory of 814,000+ active podcasts to pitch. featured.com

This transcript is republished from Brett’s appearance on Majestic’s SEO in 2026 series. Lightly edited for readability; questions condensed. Original wording preserved throughout.

What is PR in 2026?

Devon Blaine has been doing PR for 51 years. In that time, change has always been a constant. Changes in how and where people want to be featured. Changes in technology and communications. 

The thing that hasn’t changed? “PR has always been about delivering a timely and honest message in an interesting way,” said Blaine. 

This article explores what PR is in 2026. It’s no longer one thing. It’s many things, all still centered on Blaine’s definition of PR, but with different spokes that turn the wheel. 

To capture what PR actually is, we interviewed PR practitioners about what they do for the clients they represent and the brands they work for. 

In 2026, public relations is the discipline of earning trust and credibility for a brand everywhere its story gets told – in the press, on platforms, in person, and inside AI answer engines. The job now spans 38+ distinct practices, from op-eds and newsjacking to prompt research and answer-summary optimization, according to the PR practitioners interviewed for this article.

This is PR in 2026. 

What is PR? The expanded mandate

I. The expanded mandate

The roles and responsibilities of PR have expanded to shaping C-suite strategy, editing what publishers can’t, communicating to employees, and defining entire categories.

PR is storytelling + distribution

PR is storytelling, with professionals like Brandi Herrman, owner and chief strategist of Brandi Herrman Communications, operating as a producer and director. 

“People think they know what the headline for their story should be, but in my experience, they never know the headline,” said Herrman. “I ask that clients trust me that I know what the headline is. Sometimes they believe you, sometimes they don’t. I’ve never gotten anyone to believe me until I show them.” 

Beyond story identification, PR professionals find themselves telling and distributing the story. According to Herrman, the story is usually told on an owned platform like a website. Then, the story is stripped down to be posted on various social media channels with an optimized format — whether that’s vertical or horizontal shots, a reel, or carousel. 

Why is the story important? For reputation management. 

“Each story is a nickel in the piggy bank,” said Herrman. “For when a crisis comms scenario hits and you need to break the bank and get yourself out of it.” 

PR is the editor, x3

David D’Arcangelo, CEO of Massachusetts-based Arc Angel Communications, remembers when newsrooms operated with a full staff and multiple different departments. 

“The model I learned in college was that you have a publisher who wants a story. The story goes to an editor, then to another editor, and then to the reporter, who was double-checking everything,” said D’Arcangelo. “Now, that model has just been decimated.” 

Publishers are keeping pace with content production by relying on PR to be the strategist, writer, and editor. Specifically, D’Arcangelo is finding himself doing more editing for tone and voice, fact-checking, and making sure the story fits with the publication’s strategy. 

In other words, PR is filling the gaps in publications. 

Being in the room

In various positions that Laura Krueger has held, communications has typically been an afterthought in C-suite planning discussions. The door opens to PR after the crisis happens, instead of comms pros being in the room from the beginning. 

“The whole mindset is shifting, especially with how quickly things move in today’s day and age,” said Krueger, the director of marketing, communications, and public relations at Community Economic Development Fund (CEDF). “When PR is in the room, they can give counsel on how to avoid a reputational nightmare. There’s so many layers to so many different issues in a large national organization, and communications can’t be brought in after the fact.” 

Several PR professionals, including Krueger, shared that they are more involved in C-suite and board-level conversations. Whether that’s to weigh in on AI visibility initiatives or to get in front of a narrative, one thing is clear: PR is earning a seat at the table. 

Internal communications

In 2020, the workplace changed. Many employees went fully remote. In 2026, while the return to the workplace has taken hold, the reality is that more employees work remotely today than they did seven years ago.

Internal communications to employees mattered in 2019, and it matters more today in 2026. According to Mark Grossman, a solo PR practitioner and an adjunct professor of communications at Nassau Community College and Suffolk County Community College on Long Island, internal communications is the job PR professionals are taking on.

“A lot of organizations want external communications because they want to be in the press,” said Grossman. “But internal communications reaches a base made up of people who are going to be your deputies talking about your brand, your policies, positions, and the mission of the organization.”

The call to action is to value both internal and external communications. Apply the playbook of pitching journalists to communicating with employees. Catch their attention as you would with a press release. Communicate as needed to build and develop relationships. And view employees and stakeholders as some of your most valuable messengers, because those are the people who care the most about the words a PR professional drafts.

Category creation

The Devon Group has been the agency of record for the HR Tech Conference since its inception 29 years ago. In that time, the categories of companies in the expo hall have changed. A few years ago, Kate Achille, the firm’s CEO, noticed the People Analytics category ballooning as well-funded Series A, B, and C companies competed for prospective client attention. Then, over the last few years, she’s witnessed the People Analytics category get segmented into smaller categories, ranging from Workplace Intelligence to People Intelligence. 

According to Achille, the demand for category creation from clients has had a resurgence over the last year due to the noise in the market from all AI, all the time.

“Categorization is tricky right now, because AI has just flattened everything and is not distinguishing anything,” said Achille. “The challenge is standing out just enough to get press and attention, while also not alienating your buyer at the same time with the creation of a new category.”

PR is meant to support the story a company tells. Category creation is opening the door to differentiate on narrative, while remaining true to a company’s core. 

What is PR? The reshaped press landscape

II. The reshaped press landscape

Earned coverage is scattered across a longer tail of outlets. The entry points includes a mix of op-eds submissions, independent Substack publications, and source-request platforms like HARO.

Long-form content is cool again

Posting carousels made in Canva was fun for a minute. But after years of short-form, surface-level social media content, Kathryn Gisi, PR and communications manager at Covalent Logic, believes the pendulum is swinging back toward depth. 

“Context is cool again,” shared Gisi, who cites long-form content like 60-minute YouTube videos and multi-shot Apple Music interviews as examples of the resurgence. “Collectively, we’re seeing consumers seek out content that requires our attention span and context.” 

Reddit, which is traditionally thought of as short form, is another example of longer, text-based content. Starting a thread or an AMA (with Reddit moderator collaboration and approval) can allow consumers to go in-depth on a topic that could not be effectively conveyed through something like an image shared on social media.

Op-eds and contributed content

Dustin Siggins says that while the number of publications that accept op-eds and contributed content has shrunk, op-eds are still a very useful tactic in the PR toolkit because of third-party validity. And, he says, because PR agencies have shifted toward modern PR with Substacks, AEO (answer engine optimization), and influencers, the number of opportunities is significant despite the closures of many media outlets.

“You don’t want to be the horseshoe maker in the era of the car, but you do want to be the horseshoe maker at the Kentucky Derby,” said Siggins, founder of Proven Media Solutions. “Many agencies are focused on services that are op-ed tangential, while we’re very proud of op-eds.”

Siggins said one of his company’s best uses of op-eds is to find an outside author on top of an executive or founder telling the story. How it works: Proven Media Solutions finds people in its network with a story to share, gets the story out of the source, writes the op-ed using the interview as the baseline, and gets the source’s approval on the story. Then, the op-ed is pitched to local outlets that accept contributed content.

The firm’s op-ed work has landed placements in USA Today, The Tennessean, and others. For Siggins, the success, and overall trends in the local media landscape, indicate that third-party voices will become more influential in the years to come.

Independent publications + Substacks

Not long ago, getting a feature article on TechCrunch resulted in instant success because the news was seen and talked about by everyone. 

Now, according to Ayelet Noff, founder and CEO of the PR firm SlicedBrand, PR is operating on a different model. It’s no longer the big splash on the big publication. It’s about being on long-tail publications that are targeted toward a niche audience.

“There are so many distribution channels and independent publications,” said Noff, who cited industry layoffs as one of the reasons driving the shift behind a fragmented media landscape. “Lots of journalists have created their own newsletters and Substacks. Each one of these channels has less traffic, but is more targeted.”

If there are more publications with smaller audiences, PR in 2026 means consistently appearing across long-tail publications. To identify the independent publications, Noff recommends developing relationships with journalists (especially when they’re just starting out) by following their moves on LinkedIn, X, and layoff news; seeing what gets cited in LLMs (a great way to discover publications); and using journalist databases as a backstop to fill in any coverage gaps. 

Thought leadership in industry trade publications

Amy Kenigsberg has been focusing on thought leadership content since the very beginning of her agency, K2 Global Communications. She has strongly urged her clients that publishing thought leadership content in industry trade publications is one of the best ways to get in front of their ideal customers. 

With AI, that focus has strengthened further. Clients get a double “bang for their buck” with thought leadership content, as it reaches potential clients in the trades and then gets ingested into the LLMs, where it can reach even more prospects.

“One of the areas of thought leadership that consistently can generate coverage is data,” said Kenigsberg, whose firm frequently works with early-stage startups. “Companies do not understand the gold mine of data they’re sitting on. We recommend looking at ways to aggregate data to create industry reports, which can then be used for PR.”

Most clients get stuck on the data. Beyond topic identification, there’s often a real technical lift required to get data. However, as thought leadership with data continues to perform well in both industry trade publications and LLMs, PR professionals may find that “data science” becomes a more common role and responsibility. 

Amy Kenigsberg what is PR

Monitoring and responding to HARO queries

Bill Nye and his agency have been using HARO since it started in 2008. He’s landed calls with producers at The Food Network, gotten placements for clients in authoritative Tier 1 publications, and has made HARO a spoke in his agency’s process. 

The process is simple: a company has news. The news gets sent via a press release and promoted on earned channels. HARO serves as the backstop, keeping the momentum going with relevant earned media placements — additional citations that give LLMs the extra credibility boost they need to display the content in answer summaries. 

“HARO is part of our process for creating authority in the new, zero-click AI economy,” said Nye, vice president and general manager at New Jersey-based Today’s Media Agency. “We use HARO to find and pitch reporters who are looking for specific subject matter expertise. These placements are a foundational part of how we are teaching the LLMs about our clients.” 

Nye advises that if you’re going to use HARO, then dedicate resources to actually using it. A team member monitors every HARO email every day. When there’s a match, the team member sends the relevant query to staff, who can take action by drafting a response to the journalist. 

The result? Earned media placements, which Nye says “moves the needle.” 

What is PR? Platform native PR

III. Platform-native PR

PR now builds presence directly on the platforms where audiences already spend their time: Reddit, LinkedIn, and social.

Reddit

Reddit went from the 68th most searched site to the 5th in the last few years. PR is now incorporating Reddit into its thought leadership efforts and is seeing AI citations and subsequent media mentions as a result. 

Melissa Dunn, head of integrated communications at Pipitone, a Pittsburgh-based integrated marketing agency, shares that the authenticity of the Reddit platform is driving its growth.

“Take a topic like gout, which is the most common form of inflammatory arthritis,” said Dunn. “If you do a Google search for gout and Reddit, everything that’s been archived is popping up in the top search results from Reddit efforts we did.”

Dunn credits the success to authentically answering the questions that people have. People want answers in real time, and Reddit happens to be the most authentic platform that answers the questions people are asking. Show up authentically as a brand, and the platform holds promise for PR efforts.

Reddit AMAs

Reddit has been reported to be one of the websites most cited by LLMs. If Reddit is where machine and human attention rests, PR has turned to Reddit AMAs as a way to insert clients into the conversation as part of a shared media strategy. 

Jennifer Schenberg, CEO and chief storyteller of PenVine, recently incorporated a Reddit AMA into a client’s shared media strategy to help promote an upcoming book about hate. Her client, an author and renowned forensic psychologist, fits the profile of someone well-suited for a Reddit AMA: candid, knowledgeable, great writer, and unafraid to speak their mind. 

“Reddit is a unique community that thrives on peer-to-peer conversations, where the power is truly with the people, not the brands,” said Schenberg. “Hosting a Reddit AMA within a passionate subcommunity can deliver memorable – and memeable – experiences and a deep community connection.”

Reddit AMA best practices include heavy research into the community to pick up on inside jokes, evaluate active members, and get an overall sense of commentary before questions start to pour in. Given that the Reddit AMA will likely be cited by AI, PR needs to be sure an AMA will be beneficial instead of backfiring, which could create AI-cited content riddled with unanswered questions. 

Executive LinkedIn strategies

PR is about building trust and credibility with a target audience. LinkedIn is the platform executives and brands are turning to in order to establish and build that trust and credibility. 

Don F. McLean, founder of McLean Media and author of the book The In Crowd, helps executives and founders execute LinkedIn strategies. He says that LinkedIn helped one of his soft-spoken clients from the Midwest land a $2M business deal from a LinkedIn contact she hadn’t spoken to in 10 years. 

“LinkedIn is a catalyst that provides a platform to showcase the great things your company is doing,” said McLean. “Everything done from a PR, awards, and speaking standpoint can all flow through LinkedIn to earn the trust of existing contacts.”

As attention and media have become fragmented, LinkedIn is the platform both PR and executives are investing in to demonstrate thought leadership.  

PR + social

Public relations has always been about news. The difference in 2026 is that people increasingly get their news from social media. 

That’s why PR leaders like Lisha Dunlap are shifting their organization’s focus to creating and sharing news on social media streams.

“Social is a new form of news for people,” said Dunlap, PR marketing director at Phoenix-based GateWay Community College. “We look for ways that one piece of news can be used multiple ways and optimized for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to reach our audience.”

Dunlap notes that followers won’t see the same content simply reposted across platforms. Each story might be the same, but the story is optimized for each channel with messaging, image, and format. 

IV. Riding the moment

Attention in 2026 is borrowed as often as it is built. PR earns attention by attaching brands to the news cycle, cultural trends, manufactured moments, and celebrity gravity.

Newsjacking

Terry Akins gets up around 4:30 a.m. every morning. Typically, her wake-up routine is followed by a question: “What’s gonna be the topic of the day?”


“I try to get as much information in my ears early on in the day, and take a look at what everyone else is saying to find the topics of the day,” said Akins, founder of Terry Akins PR, a boutique public relations agency based in the Los Angeles area. “I ask myself, ‘What’s the right angle? How will I make my news interesting?’ Otherwise I’m going to be boring like half the Substacks that I read.”  

Public relations hasn’t changed at its core. The mission is still to inform, clarify, and influence. Whether PR is announcing a new product, introducing a CEO, managing a crisis, or spotlighting a breakthrough technology, PR in 2026 is still about shaping understanding through information and strategic visibility.

One of the best ways to insert your story into the conversation is identifying what the conversation is, and where it’s happening.

Trendjacking

Amanda Benedetto is a solo practitioner and founder of a PR firm that bears her initials: ABPR. Benedetto starts her days monitoring what’s happening in the world by visiting various social streams that are customized to topics she enjoys the most. She then thinks about how each moment or trend can apply to her clients. 

One item Benedetto recently noticed? Hailey Bieber mentioned a client competitor in a TIME article, which started a broader media conversation about her client’s product category.

“When there is a media conversation happening, other publications pick it up,” said Benedetto. “That’s how I decipher whether something is worth trendjacking. Was TIME just interested in this? Or will Vogue, Marie Claire, and others pick up on this and will my client have an opportunity to be part of the larger conversation?”

When there’s a match, Benedetto reaches out to people who have the influence of today: journalists at publications, independent Substacks, niche communities, and event meetup groups. She pitches them on what’s trending today, and offers them a source and angle to inform the conversation for their publication.  

PR stunts and social media moments

PR professionals don’t need to be reminded that attention, especially with journalists, is hard to come by. How does PR actually help capture attention? 

For Cathy J. Hood, founder of Pristine Initiative, the answer is in capturing and marketing social media moments. 

“Content is everything, especially when it comes to capturing, creating, and communicating a PR moment,” said Hood. “How many press releases does a journalist receive every day? How many pitches are accompanied by a human moment?” 

PR professionals like Hood are delivering PR stunt videos — more softly defined as moments — and distributing them to local news outlets, blogs, and social media accounts as an alternative way to earn coverage.

The end result? Some unexpected acts of heroism and real-life moments ultimately outperform conventional news stories, and capture the attention of a target audience.  

Celebrity endorsements

Celebrity still sells. 

The change? There are more celebrities, and more publications and accounts that amplify them, from self-run to fan-managed. Many publications with commerce content sections and social media accounts engage only in a pay-to-play, affiliate-based model. But there’s still room for organic moments that can be amplified — and some moments are bigger than others. The reality is that a moment needs to go beyond one hit. 

“It starts with celebrity, but it doesn’t die with the celebrity,” said Yael Fraynd, president at YaYa Publicity, a fashion PR agency based in New York. “When a celebrity wears something, my job is to make sure that we take it to all of the editorial and digital press to make sure that everyone knows about it.”

In other words, it’s what you do with the moment. Can the moment be marketed with editorial and digital PR so that it reaches an audience? 

What's is PR? Working with creators

V. The creator channel

Creators now function as media outlets. PR treats them them like journalists, where they commission editorial-style work and seed products for authentic coverage.

Research & analysis on influencers

AI has made the inbox a noisier place for members of the media, whether that’s a journalist, influencer, or creator. While some camps have gone all-in on automations with AI-powered workflows and drafting, others have made it a point to slow down and put research and analysis at the forefront of their workflow to stand out in the inbox. 

Jewel Savoy started her role a year ago. Very quickly, she noticed that if she were going to get a response, she had to prioritize thoroughly researching a media member and understanding their objective before even drafting outreach. 

“Audience analysis has been the key tactic that’s been really, really fruitful for me,” said Savoy, a digital PR strategist at tiptop Search & Marketing. “Once I shifted to thinking about them as individuals, and not just the business side, I started to get a lot more replies. People can relate to that language a lot more easily.”

For PR practitioners, research and analysis of a media list is a critical first step to any strategy implementation. Understand the objective. Mirror the tone and voice that a media member displays in their content. And craft your pitch according to what a media member wouldn’t mind seeing land in their inbox.  

Commissioning influencers for editorial-style content

Lisa Sass, integrated communications manager at Phoenix-based Proof Publicity, says that the days of posting “aspirational content” on social media are gone. Instead, she says that social media viewers today want authentic content and real-life experiences, which is why PR professionals are now briefing influencers like assignment editors.

“We’re asking influencers to build a guide, like providing a roundup of the best rooftop bars or producing a how-to tutorial, and not just a vibe,” said Sass. “It’s the content you used to see in Phoenix Magazine. But now, it’s on social media from influencers.”

Sass notes that the strategy of commissioning influencers requires some education, where PR provides talking points like you would with a journalist. However, she cautions that education has to be shared carefully so that the content created by the influencer doesn’t seem paid or fake.

Lisa Sass what is PR

YouTube collaborations with creators

A.J. Ricci, publicist at New Jersey-based Social Wise Communications, connects clients and YouTube creators to collaborate on aligned messages. Ricci spends time consuming media, identifying creators in the space who produce quality content, and reaching out to them to see if they’d be interested in a non-paid collaboration with his client. 

“You really have to dive past content they’ve made and into what their credentials are,” said Ricci, when asked about best practices for YouTube creator collaborations. “Are they speaking about real issues that really matter to people? Are they doing it in a way that’s responsible, in terms of fact checking before putting material out there? It’s on PR to find the creators who are good and are doing good work.” 

While many YouTube creators only offer paid collaborations to get a client’s message out, it’s the job of publicists to find the earned opportunities that lead to a mutual win for both the creator and the client. When well executed, the outcome is an authentic message that reaches a broad audience. 

Product seeding, placement + distribution

PR is about getting your product in the hands of customers. Especially books. 

Alex Strathdee, founder of Shelf Life, a San Diego-based book marketing firm, has worked on 1,000+ nonfiction books and spent over $10M on campaigns to get books into the wild. From monitoring the HARO Gift Guide section to running Goodreads Giveaways to sending cold InMails and emails to influencers and microcommunities, Strathdee aims to get 10,000 books into the hands of readers to effectively market a book. 

“A book is only ever going to take off if a real person opens it and starts reading it,” said Strathdee. “Effective PR is finding the cheapest way for your target audience to see and experience the product.”

Product seeding isn’t just reserved for books. The strategy can be applied to most consumer products or B2B subscriptions, and it’s a strategy that PR finds itself doing more and more. The key, according to Strathdee, is executing cost-effectively while reaching the exact right audience. 

VI. Winning the AI answer

An AI-generated answer is now a brand’s most important search result. PR has built an entire discipline around “machine relations” to influence what the machines summarize.

Controlling the narrative for brand reputation

AI surfaces information about brands, whether they like it or not. Oftentimes, the information isn’t accurate, may be out of date, or in some cases, just isn’t what a brand wants surfacing about itself. 

Ann Rimkus, executive vice president of strategy at POINT, a mid-size PR agency in Dallas, says that brand reputation work is now a focal point for clients. Whether it’s a Reddit thread that’s out of date or a story that just can’t be buried, there’s a strong push to help control the narrative and message that’s cited by AI. 

“We’re seeing progressively more people turn to agents to get information on a search,” said Rimkus. “Agents are often pulling information that may not be current, or may not be correct. That’s why brands are now in a situation where they need to control the narrative.” 

Controlling the narrative starts with an audit to figure out what’s being surfaced about a brand. Then, it’s figuring out what the narrative should be, and deciding which channels a message needs to be distributed on. Finally, it’s pushing out those messages in content forms like a press release, long-form blog content, and podcasts to make sure there’s a consistency around the brand. 

Prompt research

What’s getting searched in AI models? What’s getting cited? Answers to those questions start with “prompt research,” a task that is at the intersection of AI in PR. 

Whitney Hart is the chief strategy officer at Avenue Z, a marketing and communications agency, where she leads strategy around AI search visibility, brand positioning, reputation, and communications. Hart and her team have treated AI models as a new form of ICP (ideal customer profile), doing research on prompts on various platforms ranging from Profound to Peec, where her team is looking at fan-out queries and determining what content might get cited based on existing results. 

“When you type a prompt into ChatGPT, the AI is then going and searching twenty other things before it comes back and gives you an answer,” said Hart. “We’re looking at those secondary research topics, and how it relates to what the original prompt set should be. We find that for most clients, anywhere between 30% and 45% of prompt answers come from editorial and earned media.” 

Earned media, it seems, is a very important tactic for influencing what the LLMs say about you and your brand. While prompt research can help guide efforts, Hart is quick to point out that the space is evolving and changes day to day. 

Whitney Hart what is PR

Reverse engineering answer summaries

The one consistency in AI answer summaries? 

Inconsistency. 

What appears and gets cited in an answer summary for one AI model like Perplexity may differ from what appears in Gemini or ChatGPT. What gets reported in one AI visibility tool like Profound may go missed in a platform like Peec or Scrunch. 

The same goes for a PR practitioner doing their own research. What a PR practitioner searches on their computer may differ from what a client sees, based on factors like location, user preferences, and recent model rollouts or updates. 

That’s why PR practitioners like Jennifer Harrison of Pando Public Relations are investing time in reverse engineering answer summaries. Harrison is accumulating data from queries across various sources, so that more raw data better informs her implementation. 

“I just wrapped up a report with 13,000 data points against 30 queries,” shared Harrison. “Now I have exact marching orders for the terms I need to be mapped, and which outlets to go after.”

PR is doing raw data analysis to know where the gaps are in its AI visibility strategy — and to generate a custom plan on where to execute. 

Research and development on what works

What if you found out that YouTube views don’t factor into being cited by LLMs? Or that getting a placement on a small travel blog out of Spain would be more valuable than a placement on National Geographic, Mashable, and CNN — combined? 

Andy Pray has been in the R&D lab more often than not as he’s gone to market with his new public relations agency, Wild Signal, an AI-native studio built at the intersection of GEO and earned media. Wild Signal asks LLMs hundreds of questions, thousands of times, then studies what comes back: everything from the sources they trust, the stories they repeat, the partners with authority, and the gaps no one has claimed yet.

“If you want, you could pitch 500 outlets. Or, you could run the data and focus your efforts on pitching the 10 biggest authorities for your target questions,” said Pray. “I guarantee those 10 authorities are not what the typical media list looks like. The list will likely have three hidden gems, four sleepers, and three kingpins. Our data shows that getting two or three placements of those 10 targets is as good as getting 10 placements of the next 30.” 

Data allows PR professionals to work smarter and more efficiently, so that creativity can be unlocked and applied to campaigns. That’s why PR is now doing R&D.

While many view PR as all things that have to do with words, most practitioners are assuming more of a data-centric and quantitative role in order to better guide their outreach. 

Andy Pray Wild Signal

Optimizing content for AI answers

Pilar Lewis just wrapped up a 16-month case study of her own internal PR efforts that tracked 166 media placements. She found that 84% landed in outlets with measurable AI visibility in LLMs, a metric tracked by Muck Rack. 

Her secret to optimizing content? Breaking it down into citable elements for machines and readers alike. 

“AI visibility wasn’t a metric I was thinking about in PR reporting two years ago,” said Lewis, senior public relations associate at Marketri, a B2B marketing consultancy. “Now it’s something I’m building into every campaign brief.”

Lewis is quick to point out that optimization is evolving, where what works today may not work tomorrow. However, PR practitioners can experiment with optimization today by publishing question-and-answer content and revising pages to have clear headings with structured content that follows. 

The earned-to-owned ecosystem

PR’s job hasn’t changed: earn trust and credibility for brands. The way the job gets done has changed. No longer is earning a placement in a media outlet the finish line that gets celebrated. Today, the placement is just the starting point. 

“Earned media is now the raw material for what we do next,” said Lianna Serko, director of strategic communications at American University’s Kogod School of Business. “One earned placement fuels our owned ecosystem.”

Serko’s owned ecosystem is circular and extensive, all designed to optimize for AI. The system takes something like a media hit and creates owned content structured for AI discoverability with schema and citations. Same goes for a podcast appearance with a subsequent conversation transcript — everything is fuel that can feed an ecosystem of credibility. 

It’s now PR’s job to make sure the organization and its stakeholders appear in AI summaries. Leaders like Serko are finding success in developing a circular system with structured pillars that hold up the ecosystem.

Lianna Serko American University Kogod School of Business

The press room

According to Shari Ajayi, vice president of public relations at Saatva, a restorative luxury sleep company, the press room is no longer a place to dump press releases. It’s now the source of truth for a brand, and the way to communicate with AI and journalists.

“The press room is helping power our citations and mentions, and it’s impacting how people see Saatva in the age of AI search,” said Ajayi. “Publicists now interface more with the consumer because their content is now being served direct to the consumer in a way that we had never imagined.”

Ajayi added that a good press room not only has content, but also thought leadership profiles that are structured for citations. Saatva has 20 thought leaders with profiles, ranging from the CEO down to an in-house expert in supply chain management. Journalists want unique sources for stories, and a profile page enables brands like Saatva to showcase those earned media mentions — as well as extend the life of those mentions. 

PR professionals always knew a press room was built for media to understand a brand and its products. But now, the press room is a place that exists to serve bots that can boost stories, brands, and revenue. 

Shari Ajayi Public Relations Saatva

Creating media resumes

Podcast views don’t matter. It’s what you do with the podcast placement that does. 

That’s the argument that Mickey Mikkelson, owner of Creative Edge Publicity, has placed at the forefront of his author PR agency. Rather than market books, his focus is on building the media resumes of the authors he works with.

“When NBC looks at the website of one of our authors, I want them to see that they’ve been interviewed in all these places and have interview experience,” said Mikkelson. “Some podcasts will have 12 views. But my mantra is that reach doesn’t matter, because we’re going to be taking that podcast appearance and sharing across our social media circles. It’s about building the media resumes of our clients.” 

The CTA? Whether you’re a business executive or aspiring author, building your media resume online can inform both readers and AI on who you are, what you’ve done, and where you’ve appeared — in order to amplify your impact. 

What is PR? Proving the work.

VII. Proving the work

Measurement has shifted from counting clips to proving business value. AI visibility is taking center stage on the reports PR carries into the boardroom, while placements and reach still matter.

The media tracker

The old saying goes, “What gets measured, gets done.”

PR professionals are tracking and measuring everything from the number of pitches and placements to journalist follow-ups and introductions. For Janae Bowens, founder of Social Inspiration, LLC, this meant building her own media tracker in Claude. 

“PR folks need to know that they’re on the right track, especially for someone like myself who’s never worked for myself before,” said Bowens. “I need those wins to build confidence and keep pitching clients and myself to prospective clients.” 

Bowens tracks media placements and media outreach to stay organized and on top of follow-ups. She has 62 entries so far, and keeps the tracker updated with daily progress and natural language prompts to help keep her and her business moving. 

Part personal progress. Part client reporting. Part motivation. Some PR work in 2026 is necessary admin work. 

Metrics + reporting

Many people who aren’t familiar with public relations may have a similar starting point:

“We want to get featured in The Wall Street Journal or TechCrunch.” 

Expectation setting has long been a part of PR, as has communicating the value of a placement outside of a Tier 1 publication. That’s why it’s often necessary to have a defined metric system that helps quantify the value of a placement. 

“We developed a proprietary system called PRISM that is based on seven weighted elements of coverage,” said Amy Roberts, vice president of communications at Sōvyn (formerly KNB Communications). “PRISM measures the true value of every placement. This tangible score allows our clients to better understand the impact of each placement rather than relying on traditional vanity metrics.”

As one Reddit user recently quipped in /r/publicrelations, 40% of a job in public relations is proving that the job was done. Metrics and reporting systems allow PR professionals to move from “Did you do your job?” to “What did the job do?”

Data analytics across multiple platforms

Reporting has always been required of PR. Now, with stronger data and fewer vanity metrics available, the expectation of PR is to produce “board-ready reports.” To get that data, PR professionals are now diving into dashboards across Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of social media platforms like LinkedIn.

“Reporting has always existed as a long, laborious process,” said Mike Emerton, founder of Bridgeview Marketing, an integrated tech PR and marketing firm based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “The answers reside in many separate data silos. Now through the help of AI, you can extract information and correlate it to the questions clients ask.” 

The questions PR is being asked by clients and boards of directors alike range from “What’s the value of a media placement today?” to “How is the company showing up in AI answer summaries?” According to Emerton, it’s now the responsibility of PR professionals to set up data collection across multiple platforms and leverage the analysis and metrics available to help executives understand the value of PR. 

What is the human layer of PR?

VIII. The human layer

Human judgment, making phone calls, having an in-person presence, developing genuine relationships with journalists. PR’s differentiator is everything AI can’t do.

Human judgment

PR is faced with tough strategy questions every day. What creators to work with? Where are competitors getting traction? Where’s the opportunity? 

According to Paul Wilkie, founder of Golden State PR, a micro PR agency for consumer technology and audio companies, PR shines when it comes to providing “human judgment on strategy.” 

“PR really does come down to just having great judgment about the audiences that you’re going for and making informed decisions about how to reach them,” said Wilkie. “It’s finding the best voices to say the message, to the people you think are most interested.”

As the options to reach audiences have expanded and become fragmented, Wilkie argues that human judgment has become more important. With limited time, resources, and effort, PR professionals need to frequently make judgments about channels and content. 

Social media, or traditional written editorial? Video, or audio-only podcasts? Creators on Instagram, or TikTok? Offer the exclusive? 

LLM as a judge? Negative. PR is the best judge for this type of work. 

Picking up the phone and calling

The inbox has gotten out of control. Journalists change their email addresses and have multiple emails — the one they use publicly, the one they use for work, and the one they give out privately to their most trusted contacts. 

AI slop seems to clog the inbox to the point where email can feel unusable. Smart PR professionals are shifting communications to a multi-channel approach, sliding into Instagram DMs or sending a LinkedIn InMail.

Or, if you’re Sarah Russo, picking up the phone. Even if it’s just to leave a message.

“We have some team members who have been doing this for a decade, and they’ve never had to pick up the phone. It just hasn’t been a thing,” said Russo, the founder and CEO of Page One Media, a literary public relations firm. “But the reality with pitch bots is that you are one of thousands of emails today. It’s time to pick up the phone again.” 

PR professionals who have been in the industry for a while remember making phone calls. Now, it’s time to relearn those skills and get back to dialing in order to stand out and make progress. 

Returning to in-person, real-life events

Samantha Flynn senses that fatigue is setting in. AI fatigue. Influencer fatigue. People are craving something real, in real life. 

PR has long hosted, planned, and produced events for clients. Flynn, founder of Chicago-based Junipr Public Relations, is seeing an influx of demand from clients to be a part of events. Especially local events aligned with community. 

“PR in 2026 is meeting people where they’re at,” said Flynn. “All of a sudden people want to be connecting in real life. We’re finding that local events are amazing for brands to connect with their target audience.” 

Flynn shares that brands don’t always have to create and host an event. Sometimes brands can be a part of an event, and ride an existing wave on the path to building your “event DNA.” Just make sure to capture the event data, whether that’s a QR code, newsletter signup, or another way to continue the conversation beyond a bottle opener giveaway. 

Building relationships with journalists

Hasn’t public relations always been about building relationships with journalists? 

Well, yes. But now relationship building is more important than ever.

Why? As media gets fragmented, journalists who were typically at The Washington Post are now running their own Substack or writing for multiple other publications. Or, journalists who typically cover a specific beat are now assigned to write a story off their beat because there’s no one else at the publication who can take on the assignment. 

Stella Waddington, media relations director at Walker Sands, says that building relationships with journalists is where her agency has gone all in during this time of change. 

“Relationship building with reporters is not just a nice-to-have,” said Waddington. “Today, if you don’t have a solid relationship building strategy in place, then media relations won’t work.” 

How does PR build relationships? It’s about meeting a journalist where they’re at, and treating people like people. When a journalist posts on Substack or LinkedIn, appears on a podcast, attends an event, publishes a new article, puts out a HARO query — it’s about being there and ready to engage. 

Relationship building has gotten noisier and harder to do. But it’s what separates PR agencies as the space splits between relationship builders and full-on automators. 

Integrating + connecting it all

If the world is more fragmented than ever, PR is also about stitching it all together. It’s about getting executives, marketing, IT, and other departments aligned on a core message that’s been pressure-tested. It’s about ensuring that distribution takes into account the many fragmented possibilities of outreach and puts them together into a collaborative puzzle. 

Tim Gibbon, founder of Elemental and former Omnicom executive who worked with the likes of Disney, stressed the importance of PR serving as a connector — linking world news to brands, brands to a message, and the message to creators. 

“I always look at PR from an integrated point of view,” said Gibbon. “It all only really works when all the things are working together.” 

From internal to external, to offline and online, from start to finish, PR is there for it all in 2026.  

Frequently asked questions

How has AI changed public relations?

AI has changed both where PR works and how it is measured. Answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity now shape brand perception, so PR teams run prompt research, optimize content for citations, and track AI visibility alongside traditional placements. At the same time, AI-generated pitching has flooded journalist inboxes — making human relationships and judgment more valuable, not less.

What is GEO in public relations?

GEO (generative engine optimization) is the practice of making content more likely to be cited in AI-generated answers. In PR, that means earning coverage in outlets that LLMs trust, structuring owned content with clear headings, schema, and question-and-answer formats, and building the citation trail answer engines use to establish credibility. It overlaps with AEO (answer engine optimization); both target visibility in AI answers rather than traditional search rankings.

Is earned media still worth it in 2026?

Yes — arguably more than before, because earned media now does double duty. A placement reaches the outlet’s human audience and simultaneously becomes a citation that influences what AI models say about a brand. One 16-month study cited in this article found that 84% of media placements landed in outlets with measurable AI visibility in LLMs.

What skills do PR professionals need in 2026?

The modern PR skill set pairs data fluency — prompt research, analytics, and AI-visibility measurement — with the durable human skills machines can’t replicate: news judgment, storytelling, relationship building, and the willingness to pick up the phone. Practitioners increasingly describe the job as quantitative and strategic rather than purely word-driven.

How do you measure PR success in 2026?

Vanity metrics have given way to business-value reporting. PR teams track placements, share of voice, AI visibility in answer engines, and referral traffic across dashboards like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, then translate the results into board-ready reports that answer what a media placement is actually worth.

What isn’t PR in 2026?

What is PR in 2026? What isn’t PR in 2026?

As we’ve seen through the lenses of many different PR professionals, public relations isn’t just one thing. It’s everything, in an industry that’s evolving with every AI model update. 

If all the short-term advancements and changes feel overwhelming to a PR practitioner, perhaps there’s something to learn from longevity. 

Devon Blaine, who has owned and operated The Blaine Group, a Beverly Hills-based full-service communications agency, for 51 years, put it this way: “The job is to distill a message that’s newsworthy. There’s almost always a way to tell a story that works for most people. It just takes creativity,” she said, before adding this spin to her own story: 

“I really love what I do, almost all the time.” 

Best PR Tool for Startups in 2026

For most startups, PR has always been one of those things that feels important but hard to operationalize. Founders know they need visibility. They know earned media can drive credibility, inbound leads, and investor attention. But in practice, PR often gets pushed aside because it feels slow, expensive, and unpredictable.

That’s starting to change.

In 2026, the best PR tool for startups is no longer a media database or a spreadsheet of journalist contacts. It’s not even traditional HARO-style platforms that once dominated the category. Instead, startups are moving toward AI-powered systems that actively help them identify opportunities, craft pitches, and land placements faster than manual workflows ever allowed.

This shift is redefining what PR software actually is.

The Problem With Traditional Startup PR

Historically, startups have had three options when it comes to PR.

They could hire an agency, which is often too expensive for early-stage companies. They could try to do it themselves using media databases and outreach tools, which requires time and expertise most founders don’t have. Or they could rely on platforms like HARO-style services, where they respond to journalist queries in a reactive way and hope something lands.

All three approaches share the same weakness: they depend heavily on manual effort.

Founders end up spending hours scanning opportunities, trying to guess what makes a good pitch, and competing with hundreds of nearly identical responses. Even when they do everything right, results are inconsistent. One week might bring a mention in a small blog; the next month might bring nothing at all.

For startups trying to grow quickly, that unpredictability is a serious problem.

Why the Definition of “PR Tool” Is Changing

What’s changed recently is not just tooling, but expectations.

Startups today operate in a faster, more competitive media environment. Journalists receive more pitches than ever. Attention spans are shorter. And relevance matters more than volume.

That means the old model—where PR tools simply provided access to journalist lists or query boards—is no longer enough.

The new expectation is simple: a PR tool should actively help you get featured.

This is where AI has started to reshape the category entirely. Instead of just surfacing opportunities, modern platforms now help startups decide what to pitch, how to frame their expertise, and how to increase the likelihood of being quoted.

In other words, PR tools are becoming PR copilots.

What Makes the Best PR Tool for Startups Today

When evaluating the best PR tool for startups in 2026, the difference between “useful software” and “growth infrastructure” comes down to one thing: how much execution it replaces.

Startups don’t need more dashboards. They need outcomes.

The most effective tools now share a few key capabilities, even if they don’t advertise them in the same way. They help founders move from opportunity discovery to actual media placements with minimal friction. They reduce the time between seeing a journalist request and sending a high-quality response. And most importantly, they use AI to improve the quality of pitching itself, not just the speed.

This is where the category begins to diverge sharply from traditional PR software.

Featured.com and the Shift to AI PR Copilots

One of the platforms leading this shift is Featured.com, which approaches PR less like a directory and more like an AI assistant for earned media.

Instead of requiring startups to manually search for journalist opportunities and write responses from scratch, it helps match relevant expert insights with active media requests. The system then supports the creation of pitch responses, effectively reducing the gap between opportunity and execution.

More recently, Featured has expanded beyond opportunity matching with Workflows, a feature designed to automate repeatable PR and content marketing processes.

Rather than treating every media opportunity as a one-off task, startups can build structured workflows that help manage activities such as content creation, expert contributions, response generation, review cycles, and publishing coordination.

This allows teams to turn successful PR processes into repeatable systems instead of rebuilding them each time. Workflows are increasingly becoming a way for lean startup teams to scale visibility without adding headcount.

What makes this approach notable is that it doesn’t treat PR as a static workflow. It treats it as a continuous loop: identify opportunities, generate strong responses, automate repetitive execution steps, refine based on outcomes, and repeat.

For startups, especially those without dedicated communications teams, this model removes much of the guesswork that traditionally comes with earned media.

Why AI Works So Well for Startup PR

The reason AI has become so influential in PR isn’t just automation. It’s contextualization.

Most startup founders already know their story. What they struggle with is translating that story into something that fits what journalists are actively looking for. AI bridges that gap by aligning internal expertise with external demand in real time.

Instead of asking founders to constantly interpret what a journalist “might want,” AI tools can surface relevant opportunities and suggest how to position a response in a way that fits the publication’s intent.

This fundamentally changes the workflow. PR becomes less about chasing coverage and more about responding strategically to demand that already exists.

What the Best PR Stack Looks Like for Startups

In practice, startups are increasingly moving toward a simplified PR stack. Rather than juggling multiple tools for outreach, tracking, content creation, approvals, and media lists, they’re consolidating around platforms that combine discovery, execution, and automation.

In this new model, AI PR tools sit at the center. They handle opportunity matching, pitch creation, response optimization, and workflow automation. Instead of relying on spreadsheets and manual coordination, teams can build repeatable processes that move opportunities from discovery to publication with fewer bottlenecks. Modern workflow systems help ensure that content gets reviewed, approved, and distributed efficiently while keeping founders focused on growth.

This consolidation is part of why AI-first platforms like Featured.com are gaining traction among early-stage teams. They reduce both the tooling overhead and the strategic uncertainty that has traditionally made PR difficult to scale. 

By combining AI-powered pitching with workflow automation, they move closer to functioning as a complete earned media operating system rather than a standalone PR tool.

Final Thoughts

Calling something the “best PR tool for startups” used to mean choosing between media databases, outreach platforms, or HARO-style services. But that framing is quickly becoming outdated.

The real shift happening in 2026 is that PR tools are no longer just systems for managing outreach, they’re becoming systems for generating outcomes.

Startups don’t need more places to look for journalists. They need better ways to get quoted by them.

And that’s why AI-powered platforms like Featured.com are increasingly being viewed not just as tools, but as PR infrastructure for modern startups trying to build visibility at speed.

Connectively is Back, and HARO Isn’t Going Anywhere

If you’ve been following along on the HARO journey, you know we don’t take this community lightly. When Featured acquired HARO a year ago, we made a promise: bring it back and make it better than before. That promise stands.

So when we say we’re bringing back Connectively, we want to be upfront about what that name means, and what it doesn’t. We know what Connectively once represented.

When Cision shut down HARO and rebranded it as Connectively, it felt like the end of something that many PR professionals and journalists had come to rely on. We get it. That history is real, and we’re not asking you to forget it.

But here’s what’s also real: Featured now owns both brands. And just like we revived HARO, we think Connectively deserves a second life.

HARO isn’t going anywhere. It will continue to be the free, three-times-a-day newsletter you’ve counted on. We’re still growing it, still improving it, and still deeply committed to the community that makes it work. 

So what is Connectively?

Think of it as HARO’s sister brand. The platform-based experience for people who want more than a newsletter. If you’ve ever wished HARO came with filtering, response tracking, a clean UI, or a way to manage opportunities in one place, that’s exactly what Connectively is built for.

It’s also the home for what was previously the Featured app. Every media opportunity, profile, subscription, and workflow has now moved under a brand that has real history in this space and a clear path forward of its own.

On June 2nd, Featured relaunches as the first AI co-pilot for PR. With this, we’re creating a single interface built to surface opportunities across journalist requests, podcasts, bylines, speaking engagements, awards, and more. It’s a bigger vision, and it needed a clean runway.

Connectively gives the existing community exactly that, while HARO keeps doing what it’s always done best.

Whether you reach for HARO, Connectively, or Featured, the core value is the same. Everyone’s an expert at something, and earned media should be within reach.

We’re excited for this next chapter. We think you will be, too.