{ "count": 9, "items": [ { "type": "media-mention", "title": "Journalists Hate AI-Generated PR: Pangram's Case Study on a Year of AI Detection Across Featured, HARO and Connectively", "description": "Pangram's case study on a year of AI detection across Featured, HARO and Connectively: 1.39M pitches, 21% fully AI-generated, 35% of journalists opt out.", "summary": "Pangram Labs published a case study on September 23, 2026 covering a year of AI detection across Featured, HARO and Connectively. Pangram scored 1,394,740 pitches to 42,392 journalist requests between June 2025 and July 2026: about 21% were flagged as fully AI-generated, 35% of journalists opted out of receiving them, and human-written pitches were selected about three times as often as fully AI-generated ones.", "published": "2026-09-23T18:44:00.000Z", "url": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/media-mentions/pangram-case-study-journalists-hate-ai-generated-pr", "markdownUrl": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/media-mentions/pangram-case-study-journalists-hate-ai-generated-pr.md", "sourceUrl": "https://featured.com/press/media-mention/pangram-case-study-journalists-hate-ai-generated-pr", "highlights": [ "Pangram Labs published its first year of results from AI detection on Featured's platforms on September 23, 2026. Featured integrated Pangram after acquiring and reviving HARO in 2025, so that every pitch submitted across Featured, HARO and Connectively is scored for AI authorship.", "The case study explains why fully AI-generated pitches exist. HARO offers sources earned exposure at no cost, so a person or company trying to maximize coverage can point an automated AI service at journalist requests and respond to as many as possible. Pangram notes that on competing platforms this sometimes works, citing a Press Gazette investigation into a supposed art therapist whose fully AI-generated quotes appeared more than 30 times in publications including Vice, Forbes and Glamour.", "On Featured's platforms, the case study finds, the strategy does not pay off. 35% of journalists have opted out of receiving pitches flagged as fully AI-generated even though the option is off by default, and journalists select roughly 1 in 10 fully AI-generated pitches for publication compared with about 1 in 3 human-written pitches. Banned accounts were about 3.6x more likely than active accounts to have submitted a fully AI-generated pitch.", "Featured supplied Pangram aggregate data on 1,394,740 pitches submitted in response to 42,392 journalist requests between June 2025 and July 2026. Mixed and AI-assisted classifications were excluded from the comparison.", "About Pangram Pangram Labs is an AI text detection company based in Brooklyn, New York, founded in 2023 by Max Spero and Bradley Emi and used by universities, schools, publishers and enterprises. Featured has used Pangram to score every pitch submitted across Featured, HARO and Connectively since April 2025; the case study covers pitches scored between June 2025 and July 2026.", "Case study: https://www.pangram.com/blog/featured-case-study", "Max Spero's LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/maxspero_if-youre-trying-to-increase-brand-awareness-share-7508556779945988096-FRun/", "Brett Farmiloe's LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brettfarmiloe_when-we-bought-haro-and-decided-to-revive-share-7508282746801348608-IsGb/", "Related on featured.com : HARO Statistics (2026), https://featured.com/press/research/haro-statistics", "Related on featured.com : Comms Confidential podcast page, https://featured.com/press/podcast/comms-confidential-brett-farmiloe-ai-pitches", "Journalists opt out of AI pitches 35% of more than 2,500 journalists on HARO choose to block pitches Pangram flags as fully AI-generated, even though screening is off by default.", "Human pitches win more often About 1 in 3 human-written pitches are selected for publication, compared with roughly 1 in 10 fully AI-generated pitches.", "AI pitches track with bad behavior 24.7% of banned accounts have submitted at least one fully AI-generated pitch, versus 6.8% of active accounts — roughly 3.6 times more likely.", "The full analysis, including methodology, is available from Pangram at pangram.com/blog/featured-case-study .", "Featured is the AI co-pilot for PR, a platform that helps PR professionals and subject-matter experts land media placements, build brand authority, and grow AI visibility. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively as standalone products within its portfolio. Learn more at Featured.com .", "Brett Farmiloe Featured brett@featured.com" ], "links": [ { "label": "https://www.pangram.com/blog/featured-case-study", "url": "https://www.pangram.com/blog/featured-case-study" }, { "label": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/maxspero_if-youre-trying-to-increase-brand-awareness-share-7508556779945988096-FRun/", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/maxspero_if-youre-trying-to-increase-brand-awareness-share-7508556779945988096-FRun/" }, { "label": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brettfarmiloe_when-we-bought-haro-and-decided-to-revive-share-7508282746801348608-IsGb/", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brettfarmiloe_when-we-bought-haro-and-decided-to-revive-share-7508282746801348608-IsGb/" }, { "label": "pangram.com/blog/featured-case-study", "url": "https://pangram.com/blog/featured-case-study" }, { "label": "HARO", "url": "https://www.globenewswire.com/Tracker?data=4OCPg6AGRiI8yZHHfcdWg38TGvTfMxM4Yf-4e_OLReIKjRz9pD85vuAwfnfTtxFUWmRNUxRdy2woEPSuPbEfWQ==" }, { "label": "Connectively", "url": "https://www.globenewswire.com/Tracker?data=Bf754_L9P4YdrDyUyU0yCRMsV0QPUu0nRqcNFi6h0x4mgVEwAYiHVr_M-geW3y_f0KSsTIPazqaKLx2jABbJ0A==" }, { "label": "Featured.com", "url": "http://Featured.com" } ] }, { "type": "media-mention", "title": "Inngest Profiles How Featured Runs Three Media Brands With A Team Of Seven", "description": "How Connectively, HARO, and Featured run three brands and 2,500 articles a month on a team of seven — and where the reliable, boring layer underneath actua", "summary": "The workflow platform published a customer story on how Featured's HARO and Connectively pipeline ships 2,500 articles a month on durable orchestration the team never has to operate by hand.", "published": "2026-09-15T04:11:00.000Z", "url": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/media-mentions/inngest-featured-orchestration-layer", "markdownUrl": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/media-mentions/inngest-featured-orchestration-layer.md", "sourceUrl": "https://featured.com/press/media-mention/inngest-featured-orchestration-layer", "highlights": [ "Online — Sept 14, 2026 · 11 min read", "Brett Farmiloe , Featured press@featured.com", "Articles published a month across three brands.", "Average expert answers collected per question before a run starts.", "Emails HARO sends a year to more than 60,000 journalists.", "Members on Connectively, Featured's expert-response platform.", "Pitches fielded across HARO and Connectively combined.", "People running all three brands today, down from an eight-person orchestration team in 2020.", "Inngest helps our trains (workflows) run; without losing sleep or manually shoveling coal into an engine.", "Orchestration decides what happens and when. The database decides what's allowed to happen at all.", "The story also covers two deliberate limits on what the orchestration layer is allowed to own. A Postgres uniqueness constraint, not workflow logic, guarantees an expert is only notified once per published article. And most functions don't retry: a run that can't produce an article the team would stand behind marks itself failed and stops, rather than risk auto-publishing something under a publisher's masthead.", "Featured is a PR co-pilot and the company behind HARO and Connectively, two of the best-known names in earned media. HARO sends more than 100 million emails a year to over 125,000 sources; Connectively has passed 100,000 expert members. Together the two platforms have fielded upward of 2.5 million pitches.", "In 2020, keeping Featured's pipeline running took eight people: a content strategist, two community-outreach specialists, a technical SEO manager posting articles by hand, staff writers, and a digital PR manager holding it together. Founder Brett Farmiloe called that group \"a team of 8 or so people that were the orchestration layer to make sure things ran reliably.\" Today, the story reports, that orchestration layer is software, and a team of seven runs HARO, Connectively, and Featured together.", "The piece traces how a run moves from an open question to a published article. Rather than a durable timer that sleeps until a deadline, Connectively runs a cron sweep every 15 minutes that re-reads which questions have actually passed their current deadline — so a publisher pushing a deadline back needs no special handling. Once a question closes, one run works through 60 to 150 durable steps, evaluating experts on experience, expertise, authority, and trust, then admitting answers one at a time so a diverse set of perspectives makes it into the article instead of near-duplicates." ], "links": [ { "label": "Read the original", "url": "https://www.inngest.com/customers/featured" } ] }, { "type": "media-mention", "title": "Featured's Users Make 100,000 Media Pitches a Month, Running on Vercel", "description": "How Featured's users make 100K media pitches per month on Vercel, with a three-person engineering team managing three brands, including HARO.", "summary": "Vercel's customer team profiled how a three-person engineering group keeps Featured's chat-first PR platform running for three brands and more than 100,000 users, from a 374-site migration off AWS Elastic Beanstalk to an AI stack spanning 17 models.", "published": "2026-09-13T03:57:00.000Z", "url": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/media-mentions/featured-on-vercel-100k-media-pitches-a-month", "markdownUrl": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/media-mentions/featured-on-vercel-100k-media-pitches-a-month.md", "sourceUrl": "https://featured.com/press/media-mention/featured-on-vercel-100k-media-pitches-a-month", "highlights": [ "— September 11, 2026 · 4 min read", "Brett Farmiloe , Featured press@featured.com", "PR has always been about who has access to what.", "Featured connects one of its users with a journalist or publisher every 6 seconds. Its agents deliver more than 100,000 media pitches a month and have sent over 100 million Help A Reporter Out (HARO) emails in the past year, all supported by an engineering team of three.", "The cost of managing infrastructure by hand", "Before Vercel, infrastructure work pulled Featured's team away from product development. Hosting lived on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AI features depended on custom provider integrations, and long-running, multi-step jobs ran on separate orchestration infrastructure. Each layer worked, but each one added operational overhead for a three-person team supporting multiple brands.", "One platform for compute, AI primitives, and model access", "The migration started with a forcing function: Featured needed to launch 374 Sanity sites at once, and every Elastic Beanstalk deploy had to be manually spun up, migrated, and torn down. Vercel collapsed each site launch into a single-click deploy, and the team went on to migrate their entire app and agents onto the platform.", "All 374 sites now ship from one platform, with rollouts across all three brands happening centrally instead of one cluster at a time.", "A single abstraction handles all of Featured's model traffic across 17 models, turning provider swaps into a configuration change instead of a rewrite.", "Long-running jobs, monitoring media around the clock, qualifying opportunities, and combining signals into pitches, moved off custom orchestration onto Workflow SDK.", "In hindsight, doing each one of those by hand was kind of crazy.", "As users kept choosing conversation over navigation, Featured made chat its primary interface, delivered through eve, Vercel's open-source agent framework. The useEveAgent hook brought durable sessions, streaming, tool calls, and approval prompts out of the box, with model calls routed through AI Gateway. What would have been a months-long rebuild became a week-long replace and refactor.", "Featured is building toward being the AI layer for public relations, the same way dedicated agent platforms have emerged for legal and finance. The team's advice to other founders building in the agentic era: know that your data is your moat, and lean on tested abstractions like Vercel instead of reinventing security and infrastructure by hand.", "Featured is a co-pilot for public relations that subject matter experts and PR teams use to find media opportunities. Tell Featured's agents what you know, and they surface opportunities across journalist requests, podcasts, awards, and GEO, no PR background required. Founder Brett Farmiloe built the company after ten years running Markitors, a digital marketing agency with 500 small business clients who had real expertise but no way to reach journalists." ], "links": [ { "label": "View on Vercel", "url": "https://vercel.com/customers/how-featureds-users-make-100k-media-pitches-per-month-on-vercel" } ] }, { "type": "press-release", "title": "Featured Launches Find Awards To Search 4,596 Business Awards, Rankings And Best-Of Lists Across 43 Industries", "description": "Featured launches Find Awards to help PR professionals and experts find relevant awards to apply for all in natural language.", "summary": "New capability within Featured lets PR professionals search for relevant awards using natural language, with deadlines, entry costs, eligibility and application links.", "published": "2026-09-15T16:37:00.000Z", "url": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/featured-launches-find-awards", "markdownUrl": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/featured-launches-find-awards.md", "sourceUrl": "https://featured.com/press/press-release/featured-launches-find-awards", "highlights": [ "Finding business awards and recognition opportunities can be time-consuming because programs are distributed across industry associations, publications, professional organizations, event companies and individual award websites. PR teams often have to research eligibility, entry fees and deadlines separately before deciding which opportunities are worth pursuing.", "Business awards. Award and recognition programs relevant to a company, industry, profession or business function.", "Application opportunities. Awards that businesses and professionals can enter, with links to the relevant entry page when available.", "Deadlines. Published entry deadlines so users can prioritize awards that are currently open or approaching.", "Entry costs. Published entry fees and currencies, including opportunities that are free to enter.", "Eligibility. Available information about who can enter or qualify for an award.", "Award sponsors. The organization behind each award or recognition program, plus published examples of previous winners.", "Find Awards gives PR teams a simpler way to approach award research. Instead of starting with a list of award websites and working through them one by one, teams can start with the type of recognition they want and use natural language to find relevant opportunities. The goal is to help teams find exactly what they're looking for without spending hours researching awards across different websites.", "Find Awards is now available on Featured.com.", "Featured is the AI co-pilot for PR, a platform that helps PR professionals and subject-matter experts land media placements, build brand authority, and grow AI visibility. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively as standalone products within its portfolio. Learn more at Featured.com.", "Brett Farmiloe Featured brett@featured.com", "Featured, the AI co-pilot for PR, today launched Find Awards, a natural-language search of 4,596 business awards, rankings and best-of lists across 43 industries. PR teams describe the recognition they want (\"free fintech startup awards,\" \"marketing awards closing in the next 90 days\") and get back matching programs with the submission deadline, entry cost, who qualifies, and a direct link to apply. Award discovery is free to use.", "Users can run Featured's Find Awards by typing a natural-language request into Featured.com, such as \"Find free business awards for startups in the fintech space\" or \"Find marketing awards in the United States with deadlines in the next three months.\" Find Awards interprets the request and returns award opportunities that match the user's criteria, including industry, geography, sponsor, maximum entry cost and deadline.", "For PR and marketing teams, Find Awards can turn awards research into an ongoing brand visibility strategy. Users can set up a workflow using their own criteria, then receive a fresh list of relevant award opportunities by email or Slack on a daily, weekly, monthly or custom cadence. Businesses can then use award wins and nominations across communications, marketing materials, websites, social media, sales materials and other brand-building activities." ], "links": [] }, { "type": "press-release", "title": "Featured Launches GEO Audit to Show Brands Which Publications AI Search Engines Cite and Which Ones to Pitch", "description": "Featured launches GEO audit to help users see how their brand is showing up across the 4 largest LLMs. Check how your brand shows up against search prompts", "summary": "New data from the Featured AI Citation Report: more than one-third of 22,881 AI citations come from sites with a Domain Authority below 40 — evidence that the publications shaping AI answers aren't the ones on traditional media lists.", "published": "2026-08-25T14:42:00.000Z", "url": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/featured-launches-geo-audit", "markdownUrl": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/featured-launches-geo-audit.md", "sourceUrl": "https://featured.com/press/press-release/featured-launches-geo-audit", "highlights": [ "Featured today launched GEO Audit, an AI visibility tool that shows brands which AI search prompts they appear in, which prompts they are missing from, which competitors appear instead, and which publications ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini cite. Featured's GEO Audit then ranks those publications as PR targets and drafts targeted pitches based on the findings.", "Users can run Featured's GEO Audit by typing \"Run an AI search result audit on [company website]\" into Featured.com. Each audit typically analyzes five prompts relevant to a brand's industry and category and generates results within a few seconds. The results appear in the chat along with a side panel containing cards and links for the audit findings.", "AI visibility The prompts where a brand is mentioned and where it is missing.", "Competitor visibility The competitors that appear when a brand is not surfaced.", "Cited sources The publications, websites, and specific articles ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini cite in their answers.", "Ranked PR targets The publications most frequently cited for relevant prompts, ranked as potential sources for PR outreach.", "Drafted pitches Users can draft a targeted pitch for a ranked publication directly from the audit report, with relevant context from the AI search results already assembled.", "Content gaps Cases where a brand's website is cited as a source but the brand itself is not mentioned in the AI-generated answer.", "The data comes from the Featured AI Citation Report, June–August 2026, which analyzed 405 GEO audits conducted through Featured during the product's preview period, between June 2 and August 21, 2026.", "Featured's GEO Audit also identifies a distinct type of visibility gap: an AI engine may cite a brand's own website as a source without mentioning the brand in its answer. In that case, the opportunity may be to strengthen or promote existing content rather than pursue entirely new coverage.", "Featured owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively, so the publications Featured's GEO Audit identifies as being cited by AI search systems can be pursued through journalist requests and bylined article opportunities on Featured.", "Paid users can set up Featured's GEO Audit as a recurring workflow to monitor changes in AI visibility and identify new opportunities daily, weekly, monthly, or on a custom schedule. These automated audits can deliver reports through email or Slack.", "Brett Farmiloe Featured brett@featured.com", "Featured's GEO Audit can uncover opportunities that traditional SEO metrics may not reveal. A niche publication with a relatively modest Domain Authority, for example, may be repeatedly cited by AI for a specific question while larger, traditionally authoritative publications are not. This gives brands a way to identify which sources are actually influencing AI answers rather than relying only on traditional measures of search authority.", "Domain Authority tells you about traditional SEO authority. It doesn't tell you which sources AI search engines actually cite. In our analysis of 22,881 AI citations, more than a third — 34.5% — came from sites with a Domain Authority under 40. Featured's GEO Audit shows a brand the exact sources shaping AI answers in its category and turns them into a ranked pitch list, so a PR team can spend its week getting quoted in the five sources that matter instead of guessing.", "Access and availability: Featured's GEO Audit is designed for marketing, PR, communications, and SEO teams that want to understand how their brands are represented in AI search and identify the publications that may influence those answers. Featured operates on a freemium, usage-based model. Free users can run one GEO Audit per day, while paid users can run additional audits based on their usage. The Lite plan starts at $29 per month when billed annually, and the Pro plan starts at $79 per month when billed annually. Featured's GEO Audit is available at Featured.com.", "Featured is an AI co-pilot for public relations (PR) that helps communications professionals and subject matter experts find earned media opportunities, draft responses, and secure coverage — across journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking engagements, awards, and generative engine optimization (GEO). The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively, which connect journalists and publishers with subject matter experts. Featured supports more than 100,000 users and helps 2,500 publishers fill content gaps with expert insights." ], "links": [] }, { "type": "press-release", "title": "Featured Launches Find Creators Search With 380 Million Creators Across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube", "description": "Featured launches Find Creators to help PR and marketing teams discover relevant creators across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube using natural language.", "summary": "New natural-language creator discovery tool helps businesses find relevant creators across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn and move from discovery to outreach.", "published": "2026-08-18T16:08:00.000Z", "url": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/featured-launches-find-creators", "markdownUrl": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/featured-launches-find-creators.md", "sourceUrl": "https://featured.com/press/press-release/featured-launches-find-creators", "highlights": [ "Featured today announced the launch of Find Creators, a new creator discovery tool that lets businesses search for creators and influencers across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn using natural language.", "With Find Creators, users can describe the type of creator they're looking for and search directly using criteria such as platform, follower count, average views, location, language, posting activity, and industry or niche. Users can combine these criteria in a single search to surface relevant creators from Featured's creator database, or search for specific creators using exact user handles.", "Rather than relying on follower count alone, users can unlock creator profiles and access additional insights including engagement rate, audience information, average likes and comments, previous collaborations, and contact information.", "Featured has expanded its creator discovery capabilities by pulling in data from publicly available profiles with at least 1,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, as well as publicly available LinkedIn profiles with at least 5,000 connections. This brings a vast universe of creator profiles into a search experience built around how users naturally describe what they need.", "Once users find a relevant creator, Featured helps them take the next step with contact information and AI-assisted cold pitch drafting, turning creator discovery into actionable outreach.", "Find Creators expands on Featured's broader approach to opportunity discovery, giving businesses a new way to find and connect with relevant creators alongside media, awards, and other opportunities. Just as users can search for opportunities in plain language, they can now use the same approach to discover creators based on their industry, audience, location, and other criteria.", "Natural-language search filters Combine platform, follower count, average views, location, language, posting activity, and industry or niche in a single search.", "Cross-platform coverage Search creators across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn, or look up specific creators by exact user handle.", "Deeper creator profiles Unlock engagement rate, audience information, average likes and comments, previous collaborations, and contact information.", "Database scope Includes publicly available profiles with at least 1,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, and publicly available LinkedIn profiles with at least 5,000 connections.", "There are six PR professionals for every working journalist, and roughly 30 times more creators than journalists. The opportunity isn't competing harder for the same shrinking pool of reporters. It's connecting the people who have something to share with the people who want to share it. Find Creators is how you find those people in plain language instead of dozens of open tabs.", "Find Creators is now available on Featured.com.", "Brett Farmiloe Featured brett@featured.com", "Finding the right creators for influencer partnerships, product promotion, and brand awareness can be difficult and time-consuming, especially when businesses need to search across multiple social platforms to find creators who match their audience and goals. Find Creators simplifies this process by helping SMBs, marketing teams, and PR professionals quickly identify relevant creators based on their industry, target market, and campaign objectives.", "Featured is an AI co-pilot for public relations (PR) that helps communications professionals and subject matter experts find earned media opportunities, draft responses, and secure coverage — across journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking engagements, awards, and generative engine optimization (GEO). The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively, which connect journalists and publishers with subject matter experts. Featured supports more than 100,000 users and helps 2,500 publishers fill content gaps with expert insights." ], "links": [] }, { "type": "press-release", "title": "One in Three Journalists Now Filter Out AI-Written Pitches, Says Featured CEO Brett Farmiloe", "description": "One in three HARO journalists chose to filter out AI pitches, a box that is left unchecked by default.", "summary": "About 21% of pitches submitted through HARO score as fully AI-generated — and the opt-out that removes them is unchecked by default.", "published": "2026-08-13T16:05:00.000Z", "url": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/one-in-three-journalists-filter-out-ai-pitches", "markdownUrl": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/one-in-three-journalists-filter-out-ai-pitches.md", "sourceUrl": "https://featured.com/press/press-release/one-in-three-journalists-filter-out-ai-pitches", "highlights": [ "Roughly 35% of journalists using HARO have chosen to filter out pitches identified as entirely AI-generated, according to Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, speaking on the podcast Let's Talk PR & More.", "About 21% of those pitches score as 100% AI-generated, Farmiloe said. Journalists receiving them can switch on a one-click filter that removes them before they hit their inbox. Farmiloe noted that the opt-out is not a default setting and suggested the true level of objection is higher than the adoption figure indicates: \"I'd say it's even higher. Like I said, the submission form has that box unchecked by default.\"", "Adopt HARO's AI filter Dodge inbox clutter and gain an edge over PR rivals using generic AI pitches.", "Journalists reclaim time The filter fosters genuine expert-source connections amid AI noise.", "Every pitch is scored Featured's AI detection scores every pitch via Pangram, letting journalists filter AI-generated content with one click.", "35% opt out 35% of journalists opt out of AI pitches, while journalists now juggle eight income streams, reshaping media relations.", "You've got some that prefer that nothing AI generated hits their inbox because let's be honest, plenty of stuff hits the inbox on their end.", "The full episode of Let's Talk PR & More featuring Brett Farmiloe explores AI-generated pitches, how the media landscape is changing, how journalists are building new audiences and revenue streams, and what those shifts mean for the future of media relations.", "Featured is a platform that connects journalists, publishers and expert sources. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively, helping journalists find relevant sources and giving experts opportunities to contribute to media coverage.", "Let's Talk PR & More is hosted by Sherry Goldman, president of Goldman Communications Group, and covers public relations, media relations, marketing and the evolving communications landscape.", "Brett Farmiloe Featured brett@featured.com", "Featured owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out), which has connected journalists with expert sources since 2008, and Connectively, a searchable database of requests from journalists and publishers. Every pitch submitted through Featured, HARO and Connectively is scored by AI detection, giving the company visibility into how public relations professionals are actually using generative tools — a dataset that is otherwise unavailable, because platforms see submitted pitches rather than the workflows that produce them.", "If journalists leave the opt-out box unchecked, the scoring is delivered as a signal rather than a block: pitches carry a color-coded percentage score and reach the journalist regardless, with the decision left to them. Featured performs the detection through a partnership with Pangram, an AI detection company. Farmiloe was explicit about the limits of the approach: \"I think that there's opportunities for false positives. Models are advancing and they're becoming better and better.\"", "Farmiloe attributed the volume of AI-generated pitching to a strategic misreading of how the channel now works rather than to the tools themselves. \"I think the misconception that a lot of PR pros sometimes have when they approach a platform like HARO is that it's a numbers game,\" he said. The framework he recommends is derived from the HARO name: be helpful, be authentic, be relevant, be on time. Farmiloe relayed a line from a journalist that he described as the blunt version of the underlying dynamic: \"I don't want to hear from you until I want to hear from you.\"", "Farmiloe said journalists he speaks with commonly report having eight sources of income, including work for multiple publications, Substack and consulting. He pointed to newsroom contraction, the growth of independent media and changes in the economics of publishing as factors driving journalists toward more entrepreneurial models. That shift is changing what media relations looks like: as journalists build audiences and increasingly depend on the performance and reach of their work, PR professionals may need to think beyond simply securing a placement and consider how they can help coverage reach an audience after publication. Farmiloe also questioned whether traditional measures such as domain authority are still enough to determine which media opportunities matter, as PR professionals increasingly consider whether coverage can influence how brands appear in AI-generated answers. \"I think the evaluation part of PR is going through a transformational shift,\" he said." ], "links": [] }, { "type": "press-release", "title": "AI Has Made Media Pitching Noisier and Less Effective, Says Featured CEO Brett Farmiloe", "description": "AI is making media pitching noisier. HARO and Connectively are cracking down by using AI detection on every pitch.", "summary": "The founder of Featured, which owns and operates HARO and Connectively, told Majestic's SEO in 2026 podcast that volume outreach has stopped working, and detailed the AI-detection scoring now applied to every pitch on both platforms.", "published": "2026-08-08T23:51:00.000Z", "url": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/ai-has-made-media-pitching-noisier", "markdownUrl": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/ai-has-made-media-pitching-noisier.md", "sourceUrl": "https://featured.com/press/press-release/ai-has-made-media-pitching-noisier", "highlights": [ "Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, said the collapse in effectiveness of high-volume media outreach is now visible in platform data, in an interview on Majestic's SEO in 2026 podcast series.", "Featured owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out), the journalist request service running since 2008, and Connectively. The company has visibility across both sides of the exchange, the requests journalists post and the pitches sources send back.", "Farmiloe said the pattern in that data is consistent. \"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.\"", "He traced the quality problem directly to the acquisition that brought HARO under Featured's ownership. \"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.\"", "Farmiloe also challenged a widely held assumption about response speed. \"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,\" he said, describing a framework built on the HARO name: helpful, authentic, relevant and on time.", "On measurement, he said the standard the market reports against is shifting. \"In 2026, the metrics are changing. AI visibility scores are one thing that we're seeing more and more innovators measure against,\" Farmiloe said. \"It's really around: is my brand visible in AI and LLMs?\" He described marketers moving their metrics toward the new front page of the internet.", "Asked what practitioners should take from the conversation, Farmiloe pointed away from tactics. \"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.\"", "Quality over volume High-quality, personalized pitches beat high-volume AI outreach, giving brands an edge in media visibility.", "Trust through knowledge sharing Emphasizing authentic, helpful knowledge sharing builds trust between sources and journalists, benefiting all.", "AI detection and quality scores Featured uses AI detection and quality scores on pitches, letting journalists filter out AI-generated content.", "One-click filter on HARO HARO now labels AI-generated pitches and offers a one-click filter, reshaping how sources connect with media.", "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 full episode and transcript are available at https://majestic.com/seo-in-2026/additional-insights/brett-farmiloe.", "Featured owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively, connecting journalists with sources across the media landscape. Learn more at https://featured.com/.", "Brett Farmiloe Featured brett@featured.com", "The company's response was to make AI authorship visible rather than to prohibit it. \"We run AI detection on every single pitch,\" Farmiloe said. \"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 to opt out of those pitches entirely.\"" ], "links": [] }, { "type": "press-release", "title": "Featured.com Acquires Help A Reporter Out (HARO) from Cision", "description": "HARO, founded in 2008 and owned by Cision since 2014, returns to its original free, email-based format under Featured's ownership.", "summary": "HARO, founded in 2008 and owned by Cision since 2014, returns to its original free, email-based format under Featured's ownership.", "published": "2025-04-16T18:39:00.000Z", "url": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/featured-com-acquires-help-a-reporter-out-haro-from-cision", "markdownUrl": "https://brettfarmiloe.com/press-releases/featured-com-acquires-help-a-reporter-out-haro-from-cision.md", "sourceUrl": "https://featured.com/press/press-release/featured-com-acquires-help-a-reporter-out-haro-from-cision", "highlights": [ "Scottsdale, AZ — April 16, 2025 · 2 min read", "Press Office , Featured press@featured.com", "Featured.com, a platform that connects subject-matter experts with journalists, announced today that it has acquired Help A Reporter Out (HARO) from Cision, a global leader in media intelligence and communications solutions, which has owned HARO since 2014.", "Founded in 2008, HARO became a trusted tool for journalists seeking expert sources, and for professionals looking to share their insights through earned media. Under Featured's ownership, HARO will be revived to help reporters find real human expertise in a time when AI-generated content is increasingly prevalent.", "\"This is the perfect time to bring HARO back,\" said Brett Farmiloe, Founder and CEO of Featured. \"As AI floods the internet with generic content, journalists need credible, human sources more than ever. Our goal is to preserve what made HARO great, while modernizing it for today's media landscape.\"", "HARO will remain free for journalists and sources, supported by newsletter ads, and will return to its original format of delivering daily opportunities via email. Reporters will be able to submit a query and receive relevant expert responses in return, helping them discover sources faster and more efficiently. Those interested can sign up for early access at www.helpareporter.com .", "\"We're excited to build on HARO's legacy and make it easy for journalists to feature credible, diverse voices in their stories,\" Farmiloe said.", "With HARO's revival, Featured is doubling down on its mission to unlock expert knowledge and make it more accessible to the media. The acquisition is backed by a group of investors, including Great North Ventures.", "\"We're excited to support Featured in bringing HARO back,\" said Rob Weber, Managing Partner at Great North Ventures. \"This investment reflects our belief in community-driven platforms that strengthen trusted connections between experts and creators.\"", "Featured.com will continue operating independently, with both its platform and HARO's revival rooted in the belief that \"everyone's an expert at something.\"", "Acquired from Cision, which had owned HARO since 2014. Featured.com continues to operate independently.", "Free for journalists and sources, supported by newsletter ads, and back to its original format of delivering daily opportunities via email.", "HARO is live at helpareporter.com . This release is reproduced as issued on April 16, 2025; the original is available on PR Newswire .", "Featured is the AI co-pilot for PR, a platform that helps PR professionals and subject-matter experts land media placements, build brand authority, and grow AI visibility. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively as standalone products within its portfolio. Learn more at Featured.com ." ], "links": [ { "label": "", "url": "https://helpareporter.com" }, { "label": "www.helpareporter.com", "url": "http://www.helpareporter.com" }, { "label": "Featured.com", "url": "http://Featured.com" }, { "label": "helpareporter.com", "url": "http://helpareporter.com" }, { "label": "PR Newswire", "url": "https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/featuredcom-acquires-help-a-reporter-out-haro-from-cision-302428717.html" } ] } ] }