Month: August 2026

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.