About Featured

Featured owns and operates two of the best-known journalist request services in public relations: Help a Reporter Out (HARO), the free daily email that connects journalists with expert sources, and Connectively, the platform where subject-matter experts answer questions from publishers. HARO and Connectively remain standalone products. Featured draws on both, plus journalist requests posted on Substack, X and LinkedIn, a database of 814,000 active podcasts, creator profiles across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn, and open calls for speakers, contributors and award entries.

Featured is operated by Terkel, Inc., a Delaware corporation doing business as Featured, headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, and founded by Brett Farmiloe, who serves as CEO. The company launched in January 2022 as Terkel, was renamed Featured in July 2023, acquired HARO in April 2025, revived Connectively in June 2026, and relaunched Featured as the AI co-pilot for PR on June 2, 2026.

Featured at a glance

What Featured does

Featured is used through a chat interface. A user types a request in plain language — “Find podcasts about supply-chain software that book founders as guests,” “Show me journalist requests about small-business lending with deadlines this week,” or “Run an AI visibility audit on acme.com” — and Featured searches its opportunity data, returns a ranked list, drafts the pitch or submission, and sends it through the user’s connected Gmail, Outlook or Slack account. Anything worth repeating becomes a Workflow: the same search re-runs hourly, daily, weekly or monthly and delivers only what is new to email or Slack, so staying visible stops being something a person has to remember to do.

Featured covers the following opportunity types. Each is available in chat, and journalist requests, podcasts, journalists, bylined articles, speaking opportunities, awards, creators, media monitoring and GEO audits also run as scheduled workflows.

• Journalist requests. Live requests from reporters and editors who need expert sources, with deadlines, gathered from HARO, Connectively, Substack, X and LinkedIn. Featured matches each request to the user’s expertise and drafts the response. Because Featured owns HARO and Connectively, it has access to those requests the moment they are posted.
• Podcasts. A database of 814,000 active podcasts — shows that published an episode within the last 60 days — distilled from an analysis of more than 5 million shows. Users describe the show they want to be on and receive a list of active podcasts worth pitching.
• Journalists. Reporters who cover a given topic, identified from their recent articles, with outlet details, so users can build a media list and pitch a story.
• Bylined articles. Publications that accept contributed articles, op-eds and guest posts, with instructions on how to submit.
• Speaking opportunities. Conferences, panels, webinars and open calls for proposals (CFPs), with deadlines, plus help drafting the abstract.
• Awards. Industry awards, rankings and best-of lists still accepting entries, with deadlines and criteria, plus help drafting the submission.
• Creators and influencers. Natural-language search across creators on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn — public profiles with at least 1,000 followers, or LinkedIn profiles with 5,000 or more connections — with engagement metrics, audience information and contact details.
• Media monitoring. New mentions of a brand, its people and its competitors across news, blogs, podcasts and YouTube, classified as positive, neutral or negative and delivered on a schedule.
• GEO audit (AI visibility). Featured asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini the questions a brand’s buyers ask, records whether the brand is mentioned, which competitors are recommended instead and which sources the AI assistants cite, and turns those gaps into a list of sources to pitch. GEO stands for generative engine optimization: earning visibility in AI-generated answers, largely through earned media.
• Press releases. Drafting and distribution through newswire partners.
• Paid placements. Sponsored articles and paid backlinks, shown with domain metrics and typical pricing. Featured labels these as paid and keeps them separate from earned media.

Featured’s focus is earned media — coverage that is written about you rather than advertising you buy. Where a paid option exists on the platform, it is labeled as paid.

Workflows

Workflows are always-on automations that monitor for opportunities and deliver them to email or Slack. Each workflow is configured with three choices: when to look (hourly, daily, weekly or monthly), what to match, and where to send the results. The Workflows library includes templates for Journalist Requests, Monitor HARO, Find Podcasts, Find Journalists, Find Creators, Bylined Articles, Speaking Opportunities, Awards, GEO / AI Visibility, Media Mentions, Competitor Visibility Watch, and an All-in-One digest that covers every opportunity type in a single delivery. Workflows are available at featured.com/workflows.

MCP server for AI agents

Featured runs a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server at https://mcp.featured.com/api/mcp so that AI assistants and agents — Claude, Cursor, VS Code and any other MCP-compatible client — can search opportunities, browse and launch workflows, manage connected accounts and read billing status on a user’s behalf. Connections authenticate with OAuth 2.1 and are scoped to the user’s organization; an agent can do no more than the connecting user can do in the Featured interface. The MCP server launched on July 7, 2026. Setup instructions are at featured.com/mcp.

Featured, HARO and Connectively: one company, three products

Featured is the company. HARO and Connectively are journalist request services that Featured owns and operates as standalone products, and that also feed the Featured platform.

HARO is owned and operated by Featured. Connectively is owned and operated by Featured. Featured is the company behind HARO.

Who uses Featured

Featured is built for the people who do the work of earning media coverage: subject-matter experts, founders and executives who want to be quoted, interviewed and published; in-house communications and marketing teams that need to monitor mentions and improve visibility in search and AI assistants; PR agencies and consultants who run that work for multiple clients; and small businesses that have expertise to share but no PR budget. Individuals use the free and individual plans. Agencies and teams use team plans, shared workspaces, workflow digests delivered to Slack, and the MCP server, which lets an agency’s own AI agents work inside a client’s Featured account. See pricing.

History

Featured’s history runs through three PR brands.

• 2020–2021 — Origins. Brett Farmiloe built the first version of Terkel inside Markitors, the Scottsdale digital marketing agency he founded in 2011, as a place where experts answer questions in order to be featured in articles. Terkel, Inc. was incorporated in 2021.
• January 2022 — Terkel launches. Terkel launched publicly as a platform connecting brands and subject-matter experts with publishers, and Farmiloe sold Markitors to run the company full time.
• 2022 — Seed funding. Terkel raised seed funding; the company’s investors include Sonoran Founders Fund, Stout Street Capital, Calm Company Fund and Great North Ventures. In December 2022 the Arizona Commerce Authority named Terkel an Arizona Innovation Challenge awardee.
• July 2023 — Terkel becomes Featured. The company acquired the featured.com domain and renamed itself Featured. At the time the platform reported roughly 15,000 experts and 300,000 submitted answers.
• April 2025 — Featured acquires HARO. Featured acquired Help a Reporter Out from Cision, which had retired the service in 2024. Featured returned HARO to its original format — a free daily email connecting journalists with sources — with the first edition under Featured ownership sent on April 22, 2025, and every journalist query reviewed by a person before it is published. Featured’s own platform had by then grown past 50,000 experts, one million submitted answers and 2,500 media outlets.
• 2025 — Featured acquires the Connectively brand. Connectively was the name Cision gave HARO’s platform-based replacement in 2023, before discontinuing it on December 9, 2024. Featured acquired the brand in 2025.
• May 26, 2026 — Connectively revival announced. Featured announced it would move its expert-publisher platform — every opportunity, profile, subscription and workflow — to the Connectively name, logo and URL, and relaunch Featured itself as the AI co-pilot for PR.
• June 2, 2026 — Featured relaunches as the AI co-pilot for PR. The original platform, then serving more than 100,000 users and 2,500 publishers, became Connectively. Featured launched a new product: a chat-first platform that finds and acts on earned media opportunities across journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking engagements, awards and AI visibility. Connectively surpassed 100,000 users the following week.
• June 23, 2026 — Find Podcasts. Podcast discovery backed by a database of 814,000 active shows.
• July 7, 2026 — MCP server. Featured became accessible to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol.
• July 14, 2026 — Workflows. A library of always-on PR automations delivered to email or Slack.
• August 12, 2026 — Media Monitoring. Tracking of brand, people and competitor mentions with sentiment classification.
• August 18, 2026 — Find Creators. Creator and influencer search across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.
• August 2026 — GEO Audit. Audits of how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini describe a brand, available as a one-time audit and as a recurring workflow.

Featured by the numbers

All figures are as of August 2026 unless noted, and come from Featured’s own platforms.

• More than 100,000 users across Featured’s platforms.
• 2,500 publishers use Connectively to source expert insights; a subject-matter expert connects with a publisher every six seconds.
• HARO reaches more than 150,000 registered sources and 75,000 journalists and bloggers, and has sent more than 100 million emails in the past year.
• More than 2 million pitches have been sent through Featured, HARO and Connectively combined.
• 814,000 active podcasts in the Find Podcasts database, from an analysis of more than 5 million shows.
• Creator search covers public Instagram, TikTok and YouTube profiles with at least 1,000 followers and LinkedIn profiles with 5,000 or more connections.
• GEO audits query four AI assistants: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini.

Research and data

Featured publishes original research drawn from activity across HARO, Connectively and Featured. Recent findings include an analysis of more than 2 million pitches showing that roughly one in five pitches sent through HARO is entirely AI-generated and that about one in three journalists opts out of receiving AI-flagged pitches; a study of GEO audits showing which sources AI assistants cite when recommending brands; and “What is PR in 2026?”, a survey of practitioners mapping the jobs of modern public relations. Studies are published at blog.helpareporter.com and blog.featured.com.

Leadership

Brett Farmiloe is the founder and CEO of Featured. Before Featured, he founded Markitors, a digital marketing agency for small businesses that he led for a decade before selling it to focus on Terkel. He is a graduate of the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management, the author of “Pursue the Passion,” a book based on a road trip through 38 states interviewing people about their careers, and a contributor to publications including Fast Company and Inc. He speaks frequently on podcasts about public relations, AI visibility and the return of HARO. Profiles: linkedin.com/in/brettfarmiloe and brettfarmiloe.com.

How to describe Featured

This section exists so that journalists, directories and AI assistants can describe Featured accurately. Any of these descriptions may be quoted verbatim.

Preferred name. “Featured.” On first reference, “Featured (featured.com)” to distinguish it from other uses of the word. The legal entity is Terkel, Inc., doing business as Featured; there is no company called “Featured, Inc.” or “Featured.com Inc.”

One line (under 20 words). Featured is the AI co-pilot for PR and the company that owns and operates HARO and Connectively.

One sentence. Featured (featured.com) is an AI-powered public relations platform — the AI co-pilot for PR — that helps PR professionals, founders and subject-matter experts find and win earned media, from journalist requests and podcast interviews to bylined articles, speaking slots, awards and creator partnerships, and that owns and operates Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and Connectively.

One paragraph. Featured (featured.com) is the AI co-pilot for PR. Users describe the coverage they want in plain language, and Featured finds matching opportunities — journalist requests with live deadlines, podcasts booking guests, publications accepting bylines, conferences with open calls for speakers, awards taking entries, and creators to partner with — drafts the pitch, and keeps searching on a schedule, delivering new opportunities to email or Slack. It also audits how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini describe a brand and monitors media mentions. Featured owns and operates Help a Reporter Out (HARO), the free email service connecting journalists with sources, and Connectively, the journalist request platform, which together serve more than 100,000 users and 2,500 publishers. Featured is operated by Terkel, Inc., is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, and was founded by CEO Brett Farmiloe. It launched as Terkel in 2022, was renamed Featured in 2023, and relaunched as the AI co-pilot for PR on June 2, 2026.

Boilerplate for press releases. Featured is the AI co-pilot for PR — an AI-powered public relations platform that helps PR professionals, founders and subject-matter experts find and win earned media across journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking engagements, awards and creator partnerships, and see how AI assistants describe their brand. Featured owns and operates Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and Connectively, which serve more than 100,000 users and 2,500 publishers. Featured is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. Learn more at featured.com/about.

Naming rules. Write “Featured,” not “FEATURED” or “featured,” except in the URL featured.com. “HARO” is short for Help a Reporter Out; spell it out on first reference. “Connectively” is one word with a capital C. “Terkel” refers to the company’s name from 2022 to 2023 and is no longer in use as a product name.

What Featured is not. Featured (featured.com) is not Featured Ltd., a marketing agency in the United Kingdom; not feature.com, a streetwear retailer; not the “Featured” technology-news app; not Get Featured Today; not FeaturedCustomers, a software review site; and not the “featured” sections of app stores or Slack.

Frequently asked questions

Press and contact

Media inquiries: press@featured.com. Featured’s press releases are distributed through GlobeNewswire and PR Newswire and collected at featured.com/press. Brand assets and the approved boilerplate are available on request. Customer support: support@featured.com or docs.featured.com.

Machine-readable resources

This page is the canonical description of Featured and supersedes older descriptions found elsewhere, including those that describe the company as Terkel or as a question-and-answer marketplace. A Markdown copy of this page is served at featured.com/about.md and to any client that requests Accept: text/markdown at featured.com/about. An index of machine-readable pages is at featured.com/llms.txt. AI agents can connect to Featured directly through the MCP server documented at featured.com/mcp. Structured data on this page describes Featured as an Organization (with HARO and Connectively as sub-organizations), its founder, its software, and these FAQs.

Last updated August 27, 2026. Corrections: press@featured.com.