HARO is running again in 2026, but it is not the platform you remember: Cision shut down its successor Connectively on December 9, 2024, then sold the HARO brand to Featured.com, which relaunched it on April 22, 2025 as a free email of journalist queries sent three times a day. The live source request stack in 2026 is HARO, Qwoted, Featured, Source of Sources, MentionMatch, and SourceBottle, and pitching them is the cheapest way to get your name into the publications ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews actually read. Muck Rack’s May 2026 “What Is AI Reading?” analysis of more than 25 million links cited by AI found earned media accounts for 84 percent of all AI citations, while paid and advertorial content accounts for 0.3 percent.
What actually happened to HARO, and is it still running in 2026?
HARO exists, it is free, and it is owned by Featured.com. The timeline matters because most advice online is two owners out of date. Cision rebranded HARO as Connectively in 2023, then discontinued Connectively entirely on December 9, 2024, telling customers it was consolidating effort into CisionOne for monitoring, analytics, and outreach.
Four months later, on April 15, 2025, Cision announced it had sold Help A Reporter Out to Featured.com, a Scottsdale company founded in 2022 that already connected roughly 50,000 experts to journalists across 2,500 media outlet partnerships. Featured relaunched HARO on April 22, 2025 in its original format: a free email, three digests a day, funded by newsletter sponsorships. Separately, HARO’s original founder Peter Shankman launched Source of Sources in 2024, a free email list running the same three queries a day rhythm under a different brand. So there is no single HARO replacement in 2026. There are two descendants of the original idea plus a set of paid platforms that grew while Cision let the category go.
Earned coverage is now the largest single input to whether an AI engine names your firm. Get your free AI visibility audit and see which publications the engines already cite for your category, and whether your name appears in any of them.
Which expert quote platforms are actually live in 2026?
Six platforms are worth a working professional’s time in 2026, and they overlap far less than people assume. BuzzStream’s study of journalist request platforms found the average overlap between any two of them is just 17 percent, which means a single subscription hides roughly four fifths of the available requests. Treat this as a stack, not a choice.
1. HARO (owned by Featured.com)
Free, three email digests a day, no paid tier and no pay per pitch. Volume is high and so is competition, so speed decides most placements. Use it as the wide net at the bottom of the stack; it costs nothing but inbox attention.
2. Qwoted
The closest thing to the old HARO experience with a verification gate on both sides. Qwoted reports more than 30,000 journalists and over 100,000 experts on the platform. The Pro plan runs $99 per month, or $1,188 annually. In BuzzStream’s platform study, Qwoted produced the highest count of DR 80 and above sources, including Newsweek at DR 91 and The Epoch Times at DR 83. Approval rates in independent tests sit near 6 percent, which sounds brutal until you compare it to the 3.43 percent baseline response rate journalists give cold pitches.
3. Featured
Featured runs curated expert roundups for outlets including Fortune, Fast Company, and Yahoo, with paid tiers commonly quoted in the $99 to $149 per month range and cheaper entry plans below that. The model is different from a pitch: you answer a structured question and an editor selects. One tracked test of more than 1,000 pitches across platforms put Featured’s success rate at 42.31 percent, by far the highest in the category, because the curation filters spam before journalists ever see it.
4. Source of Sources
Peter Shankman’s free relaunch of the original concept. Up to three plain email digests a day, reply directly to the reporter, no dashboard and no subscription. BuzzStream’s research found Source of Sources delivered a 36 percent dofollow link rate across placements, the highest of any platform measured, which matters less for AI citation than for search but signals that the placements are real editorial coverage rather than roundup filler.
5. MentionMatch (formerly Help a B2B Writer)
Free, email driven, and curated to B2B topics only. Low volume by design, typically three to eight worthwhile pitches a week, with strong domain quality because the requests come from B2B publications and SaaS content teams rather than general consumer media. The right fit for software, finance, and professional services experts.
6. SourceBottle and social requests
SourceBottle is free and strongest in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Singapore, and it also surfaces non editorial opportunities. Alongside it, live journalist requests still move on X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Substack under tags like #journorequest and #prrequest. These vanish within hours, so they reward monitoring, not browsing.
Do quotes from these platforms really turn into AI citations?
Yes, and the mechanism is measurable. Journalism alone accounts for 27 percent of all links cited by AI in Muck Rack’s May 2026 study, and that share rises to 49 percent on time sensitive queries. Meltwater’s April 2026 analysis of 5.35 million citations put earned and news media at 39.5 percent of all LLM citations, up from 38.3 percent the month before.
The number that should reshape a marketing budget is the contrast: 84 percent earned versus 0.3 percent paid and advertorial. Engines are not weighting your sponsored content, your paid syndication, or your homepage claims anywhere near the way they weight an article where a reporter chose to quote you. That is the same conclusion we reached from a different angle in digital PR for AI visibility, and source request platforms are simply the lowest cost entry point into that earned pool. A $99 Qwoted subscription and a free HARO inbox buy access to the exact category of content that produces four fifths of AI citations.
Concentration is the catch. 5W’s AI Platform Citation Source Index 2026, which synthesized roughly 680 million citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, found the top 15 domains absorb 68 percent of the answer pipeline. A quote in a publication engines never retrieve is a nice screenshot and nothing more. Target outlets that already appear in your category’s answers, using the method in what sources do AI engines cite.
How does one expert quote become an AI citation?
An expert quote becomes an AI citation when it is specific enough to be extracted, attributed clearly enough to be attached to your name, and published somewhere the engine retrieves. Three conditions, all of which you control at the pitch stage.
Extractability comes from a checkable claim. “Intake response time is important” gives an engine nothing. “We reviewed 4,200 intake calls and firms that answered within five minutes booked 3.4 times more consultations” gives it a fact with an owner. Attribution comes from consistency: use the same name, title, and company string in every pitch so ChatGPT and Gemini bind the quote to one entity rather than three near duplicates.
Repetition seals it. One quote in one article is an anecdote to a retrieval system. The same expert making a consistent claim across five independent publications reads as consensus, and that is what gets restated in an answer without a hedge. Volume of aligned placements beats prestige of a single hit almost every time.
What does a pitch that wins placements look like on Qwoted or HARO?
Short, credentialed, and written to be pasted. Journalists on these platforms receive more than 100 pitches a week, so the one that gets used requires no editing. Lead with the answer, not your bio.
The working format is four parts: a two sentence direct answer to the question asked, one quotable line in first person with a specific number in it, two lines of credentials establishing why you can say it, and a link to a primary source backing the claim. Keep it under 250 words. Skip the introduction, the compliment, and the attachment.
Two hard rules. Speed: on HARO and Source of Sources, the digests go out three times a day and reporters usually close a request within the first few hours, so responses inside 60 minutes win a disproportionate share. And do not run pitches through an AI writer. Featured, Qwoted, and HARO all screen for generated text, and the penalty is a ban, not a rejection. You can use AI to research the reporter and their outlet’s past coverage. Write the quote yourself.
What does a monthly source request workflow look like?
Thirty minutes a day, run consistently, produces more AI citations than a quarterly press push. Set it up as a standing operation rather than a campaign.
Subscribe to HARO, Source of Sources, MentionMatch, and SourceBottle with a filtered inbox rule, and add one paid platform: Qwoted for tier one business and legal media, or Featured for structured roundups with a higher hit rate. Build a source sheet before you need it: three to five proprietary data points, your credential block, a headshot, and two prewritten quotes on the topics you get asked about most. Most missed placements are missed because the expert needed four hours to produce a statistic, not because the pitch was bad.
Then set a daily scan window, pitch three to five relevant requests, and log every one with the outlet, reporter, date, and claim used. The target for a solo expert is four to eight placements a quarter across the stack, enough repetition for engines to start treating your name as the standard source on a topic. The same logging discipline underpins press mention monitoring for firms.
How do you measure whether your quotes reach AI answers?
Measure citation share, not clips. Build a fixed set of 20 to 30 buyer questions in your category, run them through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Claude on a monthly schedule, and record whether your name, your firm, or an article quoting you appears in the answer or the source list.
Then connect the two logs. Match each placement date against the month your citation rate moved, and you learn which outlets are actually inside the retrieval loop. Perplexity can reflect a new article within weeks; presence in model training data builds over quarters. Expect the first movement 30 to 60 days after a cluster of placements. Outlets that never move the needle come off next quarter’s target list, which is how a source request program gets sharper instead of just busier.
Frequently asked questions
Is HARO free in 2026?
Yes. Featured.com bought HARO from Cision in April 2025 and relaunched it on April 22, 2025 as a free service with no paid tiers and no pay per pitch model. It is funded by sponsorships inside the newsletter, which goes out three times a day. Source of Sources, run by HARO’s original founder Peter Shankman, is also free and sends up to three digests daily.
What happened to Connectively?
Cision rebranded HARO as Connectively in 2023 and discontinued the platform on December 9, 2024, saying it was focusing on CisionOne for media monitoring, analytics, and outreach. Connectively no longer exists. Cision then sold the HARO brand to Featured.com in April 2025, which is why HARO is live again while Connectively is not. Any 2026 guide still recommending Connectively is out of date.
Should I pay for Qwoted if HARO is free?
Usually yes, if you are pitching tier one media. Qwoted verifies both journalists and experts, which keeps request quality high, and BuzzStream’s platform study found it produced the most DR 80 and above sources, including Newsweek and The Epoch Times. The Pro plan is $99 per month. HARO’s strength is volume and zero cost; Qwoted’s is access to outlets AI engines cite heavily.
How many platforms should I actually monitor?
At least three, ideally five. BuzzStream measured just 17 percent average overlap between any two journalist request platforms, so a single subscription hides most of the market. A practical stack is HARO and Source of Sources for free volume, Qwoted or Featured as the paid layer, and MentionMatch or SourceBottle depending on whether your audience is B2B or regional.
Do I need a backlink for the quote to count toward AI visibility?
No. AI engines read text, so an unlinked mention in a publication they retrieve still feeds your entity and authority signals. Links help your traditional search performance and Source of Sources delivered the category’s highest dofollow rate at 36 percent in BuzzStream’s research, but for AI citation purposes the quote, your name, and the outlet matter more than the anchor.
How long until quotes show up in AI answers?
Plan on 30 to 90 days after a cluster of placements rather than after a single quote. Perplexity and Google AI Mode pull live from the index and can reflect new coverage within weeks. ChatGPT and Claude blend retrieval with training data, so consistent presence builds over quarters. Journalism’s citation share rises to 49 percent on time sensitive queries, which rewards steady publishing over one push.
The stakes
Every AI engine answering “who is the best firm for this” is assembling that answer from journalism it can retrieve, and 84 percent of what it cites is coverage someone else wrote about you. You cannot buy your way into that pool: paid and advertorial content is 0.3 percent of citations. You get in by being the expert a reporter quotes, repeatedly, in outlets the engines already read. HARO, Qwoted, Featured, and Source of Sources are the doors, and three of the four are free or under $100 a month. The firms winning AI visibility in 2026 are not outspending their competitors. They are answering reporter requests within the hour while their competitors are still deciding whether PR is worth it.
Want to know which publications ChatGPT and Perplexity already trust in your category before you pitch a single reporter? Run your free AI visibility audit for a prompt by prompt map of where you are cited, where a competitor is named instead, and which outlets to target first.
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