HARO Subscribers Are Up 54% Year Over Year, Says Founder Brett Farmiloe
In a Q&A with newsletter writer Alice Dubin, HARO founder Brett Farmiloe shared the numbers behind the service's comeback — and made the case for testing it rather than trusting it.
AI has driven the cost of sending a pitch to practically zero, but the cost of reading one hasn't changed at all. That gap is reshaping media relations, and HARO has a front-row seat to it. Farmiloe's team tracks millions of interactions between journalists and sources each year, and the data he shared points to a platform rebuilding trust on both sides of the inbox.
The numbers behind the AI pitch problem
- 43%
Increase in pitch volume to journalists over the past 18 months, per HARO data.
- 21%
Share of HARO pitches that are now completely AI-generated.
- 35%
Journalists who choose not to receive AI-flagged pitches at all.
- 3x
Human-written pitches were roughly three times more likely to result in a placement than AI-written ones, across nearly 1.4 million pitches HARO analyzed.
- 68%
Growth in requests from journalists over the past year — the hard side of the marketplace coming back.
- 32%
Share of journalist requests HARO rejects before they ever reach an edition.
“”Subscribers are up 54 percent year over year, a lot of them PR professionals. And it's free, and structurally so. Ads pay for it. There is no upgrade path we're steering anyone toward.
HARO moderation at a glance
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Accounts banned | Every 23 minutes |
| Journalist requests rejected | 32% |
| Journalist requests, growth | 68% in the past year |
| Subscriber growth, year over year | 54% |
Farmiloe's advice to PR pros isn't to trust HARO again on faith — it's to test it. Subscribe, watch three editions a day for five business days, and count how many queries are genuinely relevant to your clients. If the inbox comes up empty, he points to monitoring tools, including Featured's monitor HARO workflow, as a way to keep watch without reading every edition by hand.
About Featured
Featured is the AI co-pilot for PR, a platform that helps PR professionals and subject-matter experts land media placements, build brand authority, and grow AI visibility. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively as standalone products within its portfolio. Learn more at Featured.com.