Brett Farmiloe

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Human in the Loop, on Everything: Featured CEO Brett Farmiloe on Build a Better Agency

Build a Better Agency

Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured and owner of HARO, joined Drew McLellan on Agency Management Institute's Build a Better Agency podcast to explain how agencies should run PR in the AI era. Every HARO pitch is scored for AI authorship, about 21% score as 100% AI-generated, and Farmiloe's rule for agencies is human in the loop, everything.

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Takeaways

  • About 21% of all pitches on HARO score as 100% AI-generated. Every pitch submitted through HARO is run through AI detection, and since reviving the platform Featured's investment has gone into maintaining quality and trust by giving journalists the transparency to filter.
  • Farmiloe's operating rule for agencies is human in the loop, on everything. AI can match expertise to media opportunities and draft a response, but a person still decides whether a pitch is right to send, whether the work is PR, content or technical SEO.
  • The HARO acronym is the pitch checklist: be Helpful, be Authentic, be Relevant and be On time. Helpful means knowing the journalist has a job to do and writing the pitch that helps them do it.
  • Featured ran as freemium B2B SaaS, with anyone able to answer up to three questions a month at no cost. Farmiloe ran a marketing agency for 10 years, serviced more than 500 small-business clients, and sold it at the end of 2021 to build Featured; he told McLellan to follow the money, because in Q4 2025 the investment was flowing to autonomous agents.

“Human in the loop, on everything. Human in the loop on PR, human in the loop on content creation, human in the loop on technical SEO, human in the loop on whatever, fill in the blank.”

— Brett Farmiloe · Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Featured

Companies discussed: Featured, Help a Reporter Out (HARO), Markitors

Episode notes and full transcript: featured.com/press/podcast/build-a-better-agency-537

Cite as: Brett Farmiloe on Build a Better Agency, “Human in the Loop, on Everything: AI and PR,” January 19, 2026.

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