HARO Subscribers Are Up 54% Year Over Year

Highlights

• Online, August 17, 2025
• 54% · HARO subscriber growth, year over year · Many of the new subscribers are PR professionals, according to founder Brett Farmiloe.
• AI has driven the cost of sending a pitch to practically zero, but the cost of reading one hasn't changed at all. That gap is reshaping media relations, and HARO has a front-row seat to it. Farmiloe's team tracks millions of interactions between journalists and sources each year, and the data he shared points to a platform rebuilding trust on both sides of the inbox.
• The numbers behind the AI pitch problem
• 43%: Increase in pitch volume to journalists over the past 18 months, per HARO data.
• 21%: Share of HARO pitches that are now completely AI-generated.
• 35%: Journalists who choose not to receive AI-flagged pitches at all.
• 3x: Human-written pitches were roughly three times more likely to result in a placement than AI-written ones, across nearly 1.4 million pitches HARO analyzed.
• 68%: Growth in requests from journalists over the past year — the hard side of the marketplace coming back.
• 32%: Share of journalist requests HARO rejects before they ever reach an edition.
• <p>Subscribers are up 54 percent year over year, a lot of them PR professionals. And it's free, and structurally so. Ads pay for it. There is no upgrade path we're steering anyone toward.</p>
• HARO moderation at a glance
• Farmiloe's advice to PR pros isn't to trust HARO again on faith — it's to test it. Subscribe, watch three editions a day for five business days, and count how many queries are genuinely relevant to your clients. If the inbox comes up empty, he points to monitoring tools, including Featured's monitor HARO workflow, as a way to keep watch without reading every edition by hand.