Month: August 2026

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.