HARO alternatives in 2026 (and is HARO back?)
Short answer
If you have not touched journalist outreach since 2023, here is the short version: Cision rebranded HARO (Help A Reporter Out) as a platform called Connectively in 2024, then shut it down in December 2024. In April 2025 Featured bought HARO from Cision and relaunched it as a free, email-based service, and in 2026 Featured also revived the Connectively name for a separate request platform (Featured). So yes, HARO exists again. Its old community of reporters, though, spent months spreading across other platforms, and many have not come back to one place.
That matters because earning editorial links (links a journalist or editor chose to give you because your quote was genuinely good) is still one of the cleanest, most durable forms of link building. It is the opposite of the risk profile you take on when you pay for placements. This article maps the actual 2026 landscape: who replaced HARO, what each platform costs and delivers, and the practical workflow that turns a daily pitch habit into real backlinks from real publications.
Key takeaways
What actually happened to HARO
HARO ran for over a decade as a free email service: three times a day, you got a digest of journalist queries sorted by category (Business and Finance, Tech, Health, Lifestyle, and so on). You replied to the ones that fit, and sometimes a reporter used your quote and linked your site. It was noisy and competitive, but it was free and it worked.
Cision, which owned HARO, rebranded it as Connectively in 2024 and moved it to a platform with paid tiers. The migration annoyed a lot of the existing user base, reporters and sources alike. Then Cision shut Connectively down entirely in December 2024. For a few months there was no HARO at all.
In April 2025, Cision sold HARO to Featured (an established source-request platform), and Featured relaunched it as a free service delivering requests by email (Cision). In 2026 Featured also revived the Connectively name, moving its own request platform to it; it runs alongside HARO as a separate product (Featured, June 2026). The honest framing: the brands are back, but the reporter network that HARO had did not wait. The journalists who used HARO did not all migrate to one place. They spread across Qwoted, Featured, SourceBottle, Help a B2B Writer, and increasingly to LinkedIn and X directly. So the real 2026 strategy is not "find the new HARO," it is "cover the two or three platforms where reporters in your niche actually post."
Note
Why this still matters in 2026
The 2026 platform landscape
Here is how the main players compare. Pricing changes often and tiers get renamed, so treat the numbers as estimates of the order of magnitude rather than a live price sheet. The columns that matter most are the free tier and how reporters actually use it in your niche.
| Platform | Free tier | Paid plans (pricing pages, October 2026) | Strength | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwoted | Yes, real requests | Pro $149/mo; free plan limited to 2 pitches a month | Strong free tier, good for tech, finance, marketing | Pitch limits on free plan |
| Featured.com (runs HARO brand) | Limited | Lite $29/mo and Pro $79/mo, billed annually; free plan available | Owns the HARO name, structured Q&A format | More 'answer a question' than live news |
| SourceBottle | Yes, free email digests | Low-cost add-ons | Great for lifestyle, health, small business; AU/UK heavy | Lower volume in some niches |
| Help a B2B Writer | Yes, free | Free / freemium | B2B and SaaS focus, run by Superpath | Niche by design, lower volume |
| LinkedIn / X (#journorequest) | Free | N/A | Direct access to reporters, no middleman | No filtering, you do the hunting |
Qwoted: the closest thing to old HARO
Qwoted is where a lot of serious sources went. The free tier gives you genuine media requests (not just structured questions), though only two pitches a month and a two-hour delay; Pro costs $149 a month (Qwoted pricing). The interface is cleaner than HARO ever was, and reporters from outlets like Forbes, Business Insider, and a long tail of trade publications post there. If you only sign up for one platform in 2026, start here.
Featured.com and the HARO name
Featured runs a structured format: a reporter or content creator posts a question, you submit an answer, and the best answers get published, often with attribution and a link. It is less "breaking news, need a quote in 2 hours" and more "expert roundup." That is fine, roundup links are still links, but calibrate your expectations. Because Featured now also owns HARO (requests by email) and Connectively (requests inside a platform), you will see all three names; they are separate products from the same company.
SourceBottle and the niche specialists
SourceBottle has run free email digests for years and skews toward lifestyle, health, parenting, food, and small business, with strong Australian and UK reporter representation. Help a B2B Writer (from the Superpath community) is laser-focused on B2B and SaaS topics and is free. If your niche is narrow, a specialist platform can out-convert the big generalists because the competition per query is thinner.
Tip
Do not sleep on social
#journorequest or #prrequest). There is no paywall and no queue, just a journalist asking for a source. The catch is there is no filtering, so set up saved searches and check them daily. The reply-fast advantage is even bigger here because far fewer people are watching.How to actually earn links from these platforms
The mechanics are simple. Winning consistently is not. After running this kind of outreach, the pattern is always the same: a small number of disciplined habits produce most of the wins, and almost everyone quits before the habits compound.
- Pick your two or three lanes. Define the topics where you are genuinely a credible source. A reporter can smell a stretch. Only pitch queries where your answer would be better than a generalist's.
- Reply fast. The single biggest lever. Most usable quotes are submitted within the first hour, and many reporters stop reading after they have enough. If you can pitch within 30 to 60 minutes of a query going live, your odds jump dramatically.
- Lead with the quote, not with you. Give the reporter a clean, copy-paste-ready quote in the first two sentences. Specific number, contrarian take, or vivid example. Then one line of credentials. That is it.
- Keep it short. Three to five sentences. Reporters skim. A wall of text reads as someone who wants a link more than they want to help.
- Make attribution easy. Sign off with your name, title, company, and the URL you would like cited. Do not demand a dofollow link, just provide what they need if they choose to link.
- Track everything. Log every pitch in a spreadsheet: date, platform, query, whether it landed. Without tracking you cannot tell which lanes convert and you will burn out guessing.
On volume: a realistic published-link rate for a focused source is somewhere in the range of one win per 20 to 40 quality pitches when you are starting out, improving as your name starts getting recognized by repeat reporters. That is an estimate from typical practitioner experience, not a guarantee. The number that kills people is the time cost: 20 good pitches is several focused hours. Treat it like a channel with a payback period, not a quick hack.
Watch out
Mind the spam and the no-follow reality
nofollow or sponsored attributes to outbound links by default, so a published quote is not always a ranking link. The brand mention and referral traffic still have value, and Google can treat even nofollow links as a hint. Second, low-quality 'as featured in' farms have piled into this space. Getting quoted on a thin, ad-stuffed site that exists to sell quotes is not a win and can look manipulative at scale. Aim for publications you would be proud to cite.Tooling that makes outreach less painful
You do not need much software to start, but a few things help. A media database like Semrush's PR or prospecting features can surface journalists and outlets in your niche so you can pitch them directly outside the request platforms. If you write a lot of pitches, an AI assist like Frase can speed up first drafts of your expert answers (edit them hard, never send raw AI text to a reporter, they will spot it instantly). We keep an up-to-date rundown of what is worth paying for in our guide to the best backlink and SEO tools this year, and they are listed in our SEO tool directory.
The other underrated tool is a simple saved-search and alert system. Most of the edge in this channel is being early, and being early is a notification problem, not a writing problem. Set up alerts for your lanes on every platform and on social, and triage them like email.
Where journalist links fit in a real link strategy
Be clear-eyed about what this channel is for. Editorial mentions from reputable outlets build topical authority and trust, and they diversify your backlink profile with links you could not otherwise get. What they are bad at: targeting a specific money page on a deadline. Reporters link to your homepage or your best resource, not to the product page you are trying to rank this quarter.
That is why most mature operators run journalist outreach as one channel among several. You earn brand-level authority from HARO-style links, you control on-page distribution of that authority with a deliberate anchor text strategy, and you use internal linking to push the equity from your strongest pages to the pages that actually need to rank. The links you earn are also self-balancing for your anchor profile: because you rarely dictate the anchor, you end up with natural branded and naked-URL anchors, which is exactly the dilution a healthy profile wants.
A reasonable 2026 blueprint for most solo SEOs and small teams: spend a fixed weekly block (say two focused hours) on Qwoted plus one niche platform and social monitoring, treat every win as authority rather than as a targeted ranking lever, and pair it with controlled tactics for the pages that need to move. Consistency beats intensity here. The source who pitches three good answers every weekday for six months ends up with a press page that itself becomes a reason for new reporters to reach out.