Featured CEO Brett Farmiloe on What Still Wins a Journalist in Ten Seconds

Highlights

• The approach appears to be working. Farmiloe said journalist requests are up 68 percent year over year, subscriber numbers are up 54 percent, and pitch volume to journalists has grown 43 percent over the past 18 months. Across more than two million pitches reviewed, 21 percent are now fully AI-generated, and Farmiloe said human-written pitches are three times more likely to get featured.
• Farmiloe drew a clear line on AI use: a pitch gets flagged when there is no original human thought behind it, and Featured bans a HARO user roughly every 23 minutes, almost always for volume rather than a single bad pitch. He said the tool works best for monitoring a feed and polishing an answer, not for generating one from nothing.
• HARO rebuilt for trust. Featured rejects about a third of submitted requests, masks reply addresses, and scores every pitch for AI authorship before delivery.
• Growth returned. Journalist requests are up 68% year over year, subscribers are up 54%, and pitch volume has grown 43% over the last 18 months.
• Earned media feeds AI answers. Across 405 GEO audits of 378 brands, 64.5% of AI citations went to editorial coverage versus 1.7% to brand-owned content.
• One good quote journalists can lift without editing beats four paragraphs of context they have to mine.
• The full Q&A, including Farmiloe's playbook for a freelancer's first month on HARO and his breakdown of what gets a pitch deleted or banned, is available at The Marcomm Grind .
• Featured is a chat-first PR co-pilot and the company that acquired and relaunched HARO in 2025. It helps practitioners and in-house teams find opportunities, draft pitches in a spokesperson's voice, and track earned coverage — journalist Q&As, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking opportunities and awards.
• Press Office Featured press@featured.com
• HARO, the free email service that connects journalists with sources, relaunched in 2025 under Featured after Cision retired the brand. In a Q&A published by The Marcomm Grind, Featured CEO Brett Farmiloe laid out what changed under the hood, what a realistic first month looks like for a solo practitioner, and why he says a quote in an overlooked trade publication now matters more than a mention on a high-authority site.
• HARO works the same way it did in 2008: three emails a day, at 5:35 a.m., 12:35 p.m. and 5:35 p.m. Eastern, each carrying a new batch of journalist requests. What changed is the plumbing underneath. Featured rejects about a third of the requests submitted for review, masks every reply address, and scores each pitch for AI authorship before it reaches a reporter. Roughly 35 percent of journalists have opted out of receiving AI-generated pitches, and Featured withholds those pitches and notifies the sender rather than delivering them anyway.