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
- Stop sending anything you didn’t write yourself. A third of journalists filter it out unread.
- Cut your response volume and raise the quality. Three real answers beat thirty templated ones.
- Read the query twice and follow the format instructions exactly.
- Spend fifteen minutes finding which sites get cited in AI answers for your category. Add the small ones to your list.
- 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.