HARO alternatives in 2026: journalist request platforms, prices and what works

Journalist request platforms connect reporters who need a quote with people qualified to give one. A journalist posts a query, you reply, and if your answer is used you usually get a mention and often a link. For years this was called “doing HARO”. HARO closed, came back, and now shares the field with several successors.

What happened to HARO

Dates matter here, because a lot of advice online is out of date.

• Before the shutdown: Cision owns HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and rebrands it as Connectively.
• 9 December 2024: Cision shuts Connectively down. The largest request channel disappears.
• 16 April 2025: Featured buys the HARO brand from Cision.
• 22 April 2025: HARO emails resume in the original digest format.

At least one article published in 2026 still says HARO no longer exists. That confuses the Connectively shutdown with the brand.

The platforms and what they cost

Prices are from the vendors’ own pages where we could load them on 3 October 2026. Where we relied on older third-party lists, the table says so.

Platform	Model	Price for sources	Strongest in
HARO	Email digest, three a day, run by Featured	Believed free. We could not load the pricing page to confirm	US, all topics
Featured	Q&A marketplace that places answers with partner publishers	Free tier. Lite $29 and Pro $79 a month, billed annually	B2B, SaaS, marketing
Qwoted	Two-sided marketplace founded in 2018	Free for 2 pitches a month. Pro $149 a month for 35 pitches. Teams custom	US finance, tech, healthcare
Source of Sources	Email up to three times a day, launched in 2024 by HARO’s founder Peter Shankman	Free	US, all topics
MentionMatch	Formerly Help a B2B Writer, whose domain now redirects here	Free as far as we could verify	B2B, SaaS, marketing
SourceBottle	Call-outs with deadlines	Free basic profile, with an optional paid pitching service	Australia and New Zealand
ResponseSource	Journalist Enquiry Service, sold by category	From about £85 pay as you go, per older third-party sources	UK
#journorequest and #PRrequest	Hashtags on X, Bluesky and LinkedIn	Free	UK

Source of Sources claims a reach of more than 20,000 journalists. MentionMatch reports more than 9,000 registered B2B sources. Third-party lists from Ahrefs and Siege Media also name ProfNet, PitchRate, OnePitch, JustReachOut, Press Plugs, Editorielle and Expertise Finder. We have not checked their current prices.

For a sense of who used what before the shutdown: in an Ahrefs poll of 101 people in May 2024, Help a B2B Writer was the most-used alternative at 22 percent, with Featured and Qwoted on 18 percent each.

What it really costs

The subscription is the small part. The real cost is the expert’s time, which practitioners put at 15 to 30 minutes per pitch.

A BuzzStream survey from October 2025 put journalist requests at about $400 per link. It had roughly 70 respondents, more than half in the UK, so use it as a guide. In the same survey guest posting came in at about $150 and reactive PR at about $625. Agencies that resell this work are commonly said to charge $300 to $600 per placed link. That is a practitioner estimate, not a published price list.

Expect two to six weeks from your first pitches to your first live link.

How to win quotes

This is practitioner method. No platform publishes a formula.

1. Build a real profile. Use a named person with checkable credentials, a real headshot and a LinkedIn page.
2. Filter hard. Only answer queries in your field. Source of Sources removes people permanently for off-topic pitches, with no appeals.
3. Reply fast. Aim for one to two hours after the query lands.
4. Write a quote that can be pasted. About 80 to 150 words, with one fact the journalist will not get from everyone else. No attachments.
5. Track the result yourself. Journalists rarely tell you when a piece goes live, so set up alerts for your name and brand.
6. Ask for the link if it is missing. See unlinked mentions.

On success rates, one 2026 practitioner guide describes a low single-digit hit rate per pitch, with 30 to 50 pitches a week landing several links a month. That is low-confidence evidence. Treat it as a rough expectation.

The risks and how accounts get banned

The risk to your site is R1. A journalist chose to quote you, which is exactly the kind of link Google’s policies allow.

The risk is to your account and your name. AI-generated answers are the main reason for bans across these platforms. According to BuzzStream’s coverage of the relaunch, HARO under Featured uses AI-text detection, headshot verification, LinkedIn validation and community reporting, and bans are permanent. Journalists are wary too: in Cision’s State of the Media 2026, 53 percent of journalists objected to AI-generated pitches, and speakers at the 2026 Digital PR Summit said reporters now check whether an expert is real.

Two patterns give away low-value work:

• The same quote appearing on many thin “expert roundup” pages.
• Personas with invented names and AI headshots.

How to judge a placement

Count a placement as a win when:

• The publication has its own audience.
• The article is a real piece of journalism and not a list of 40 quotes.
• The link goes to your site and not only to a profile page on the platform.

Use the same checks you would apply to any publisher. Our guide to vetting a publisher covers them.

Who it suits

Professional services, health, finance, SaaS founders and niche specialists do well, because they have someone credible to quote. In an older Authority Hacker survey of 755 link builders, from around 2023 to 2024, 46.3 percent said they used HARO regularly.

When not to use it

Skip journalist requests if your site is anonymous, such as an affiliate site with no named expert behind it. You will have nothing a journalist can verify, and inventing a persona is the fastest route to a ban. If you have budget and data but no spokesperson with time to spare, digital PR is the better use of it.