HARO is alive. Most articles on this subject say it shut down in 2024 — that was true for a period and is out of date. As of August 2026 it is sending queries again, and we receive them. The more useful question is whether it is worth your time, and for most companies the honest answer is no. A good query draws 40 to 50 responses within hours and 200 or more by the end of the day, and it often closes before you have finished reading the email. This page covers what is actually live, why the arithmetic rarely works, the AI-detection trap that catches people trying to move faster, and how to monitor these platforms without anybody reading them.
On this page
- What happened to HARO, and where it stands now
- The platforms that are actually live
- The honest assessment: it is mostly a waste of time
- How we make it manageable
- Why query services underperform direct outreach structurally
- How to use query services well, if you use them
- The better use of the same hour
- Does AI search change any of this?
- The short version
What happened to HARO, and where it stands now
The short version: HARO ran for roughly fifteen years as a free email connecting journalists to expert sources, three times a day. Cision acquired it, rebranded it as Connectively in 2024, added paid tiers, and then wound that down. Widely reported at the time as the end of HARO — and most articles you will find still say exactly that.
They were wrong, or at least out of date. HARO is running again. As of August 2026 we are receiving queries from helpareporter.com in our own inbox, most recently within the last week, alongside mail still arriving from connectively.us. If you read somewhere that HARO shut down permanently, that was true for a period and is not true now.
Two things worth knowing about the current landscape. Connectively and Featured.com resolve to the same hosting infrastructure, which points to a shared operator rather than two independent competitors. And Source of Sources is run by Peter Shankman, who founded HARO in the first place — so the person who built the original is now competing with the brand he sold.
The platforms that are actually live
HARO (helpareporter.com) — relaunched and actively sending. The original brand, and still the largest audience.
Connectively — Cision's rebrand, still sending mail. Shares infrastructure with Featured.com.
Featured.com (formerly Terkel) — question-and-answer format, weighted toward expert content rather than breaking news.
Source of Sources (sourceofsources.com) — Shankman's own service. Free, closest in spirit to what HARO originally was.
Qwoted — the most credible commercial option. Better journalist verification than HARO ever had, a free tier, and paid tiers around $149 a month for meaningful access.
SourceBottle — long-running, strongest in Australia and the UK, lighter volume.
Social monitoring — reporters post requests directly on X, LinkedIn and Bluesky, and the #JournoRequest hashtag is still active. Free, immediate, unstructured.
The honest assessment: it is mostly a waste of time
I have run these platforms for years and I would tell most companies not to bother. The arithmetic does not work.
The window closes before you can act. A tier-one opportunity posts. Within a couple of hours it already has 40 or 50 responses. By hour six it is well past two hundred. Many queries close before you have even read the email, and the ones that stay open are being read by a journalist who now has to sort two hundred submissions.
The cost of responding is higher than it looks. A usable answer needs a real quote from a real executive. That means finding them, briefing them, getting the quote, getting it approved. By the time you have done that properly the query has closed. And when you ask an executive for a quote, they reasonably expect it to be published — so every response that does not convert costs you internal credibility as well as time.
The conversion rate is poor. Ours on query services is far below what the same effort produces on direct outreach, and direct outreach is not exactly easy: most pitches get no reply, though 63% of our graded replies between December 2025 and August 2026 were positive.
It is expensive. Qwoted, the strongest successor, runs around $149 a month for the tier that gets you meaningful access. That is real money for a channel with a low hit rate.
"The window on a good HARO-style query closes in hours. Forty or fifty people have answered before you have read the email, two hundred before the end of the day. The time it takes to get a real quote out of a real executive is longer than the query stays open, and every time you ask for one they expect to see it published. It is the worst effort-to-outcome ratio in PR."
Justin Mauldin, Founder, Salient PR
The shortcut that does not work
The obvious response is to have AI write the quote, get the executive to approve it, and submit fast enough to beat the queue.
These platforms now run AI detection. If your submission is flagged, the journalist sees that flag before they read a word of it, and they will not respond. You have not saved time. You have spent it acquiring a reputation.
There is no version of this where volume and speed substitute for having something genuinely useful to say. The crowding is the problem, and going faster makes you one of the two hundred rather than one of the few.
How we make it manageable
We still monitor these platforms, because occasionally something lands that is genuinely right for a client and worth the effort. What we do not do is have a person read the emails.
We aggregate them into one place. Featured.com, Source of Sources and the other live query services feed into a single system rather than several inboxes. Our ingestion still carries the dead ones too — HARO and Connectively — because platforms in this category close without much warning and it costs nothing to keep listening.
AI reads everything, daily. Every incoming query is scanned against each client's positioning, spokespeople and current news. Nobody on the team opens a HARO-style digest.
Only genuine matches surface. A human looks at the handful that clear the bar, not the hundreds that do not.
Nothing gets missed. Across every platform we ingest, something relevant arriving at 6am is visible immediately rather than discovered in a digest three days later, when the query has long closed.
This does not change the underlying arithmetic. The channel is still crowded, still fast, and still converts worse than direct outreach. What it changes is the cost of participating: if monitoring is free, then the occasional genuine match is upside rather than a tax on somebody's morning.
If you are doing this by hand, that is the part to fix first. Not your response templates — the reading.
Why query services underperform direct outreach structurally
The problem is competition per opportunity. One query goes to thousands of subscribers and the reporter receives dozens to hundreds of responses, most irrelevant. You are competing on speed against people who have nothing else to do that morning.
Direct outreach inverts it. You choose the journalist, you know what they have written recently, and you are one of a much smaller number of emails on a subject they demonstrably cover.
"When a reporter does reply, 63% of the time it's a yes. The hard part was never convincing them. It's getting read at all."
Justin Mauldin, Founder, Salient PR
How to use query services well, if you use them
Answer within the hour. Reporters working a query usually pick from the first handful of usable responses.
Answer the question asked. Most submissions pitch the company instead of answering. Answer first, mention the company once at the end.
Be quotable, not comprehensive. Two or three sentences a journalist can lift verbatim beats five paragraphs they have to edit.
Include credentials in one line. Name, title, company, and why you are qualified.
Never pitch a different story. It is the fastest way to be ignored permanently.
"Volume doesn't fix a bad list. Sending 200 pitches to people who don't cover you gets you the same result as sending 20, except now you're on more block lists."
Kayla Haines, Media Relations, Salient PR
The better use of the same hour
The time spent monitoring queries usually produces more if spent building a list of twenty journalists who actively cover your subject and approaching them directly with something they cannot get elsewhere.
"Before anything goes out I check whether the reporter has written about the category in the last 90 days. If they haven't, they come off the list. That one rule kills more pitches than any editing pass."
Lindsey Ranger, Account Lead, Salient PR
"The reporters who answer fastest are the ones we've sent something useful to before without asking for anything. That's not a tactic you can start the week you need coverage."
Kayla Haines, Media Relations, Salient PR
Does AI search change any of this?
It raises the value of being quoted by name. A peer-reviewed study of generative-engine optimisation (KDD 2024) found that adding direct quotations, statistics and cited sources measurably improved how often a page was surfaced in generative answers — by up to 40% on the authors' benchmark, with the size of the effect varying by subject area.
A quote in a credible publication is now an input into what AI systems say about your category. That makes expert-source placement more valuable than it was when the only benefit was a backlink — and it means the quality of the publication matters more than the quantity of placements.
The short version
- HARO is not dead. It shut down under Cision, then relaunched. It is sending queries again as of August 2026, whatever older articles say.
- Connectively and Featured.com share hosting infrastructure. Source of Sources is run by Shankman, who founded HARO originally.
- The successors are mostly not worth your time. A good query has 40–50 responses within hours and 200+ by the end of the day. It often closes before you have read the email.
- Getting a real quote from a real executive takes longer than the window stays open — and they expect to see it published.
- Having AI write the response does not work. These platforms run AI detection and the journalist sees the flag before they read anything.
- Qwoted runs around $149/month. Real money for a low hit rate.
- Fix the reading, not the writing. Aggregate the platforms and let software scan them, so participating costs nothing and the occasional genuine match is upside.
- Direct outreach converts far better: 63% of graded replies a yes.
Salient PR runs earned media programmes for technology companies. All outreach figures come from our own database covering December 2025 to August 2026 and are updated quarterly.
Sources
- Salient PR outreach database, Dec 2025 – Aug 2026
- Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD
If you want to know whether this is worth your time in your category — Salient PR is a technology PR agency working with technology companies. See how we work or start a conversation.
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HARO is live again in 2026. Why these query platforms are mostly a waste of time, and the few cases where they still pay.
