64% of AI citations come from editorial coverage, data says

Brett Farmiloe (cold open): Most brands are invisible. Our AI citation report found that 86% of brands aren't mentioned for prompts and queries that they want to be mentioned for.

Nick Standlea: What steps do I take this week?

Brett Farmiloe: Now what's happening is, oh, the publications that aren't Fortune and Fast Company and Forbes, and the page two through 10 results, actually matter. It actually matters. We see 35% of journalists who come to HARO one-click opt out of anything that's AI generated. No matter how intelligent your workflow is, no matter how much you've trained it, you got to have a human in the loop to actually look at it. Now these customers are showing up to your business with trust, and that's invaluable. You could spin up a product and launch it, and the differentiator is going to be the person. How do we survive the next model update?

Nick Standlea: In December of 2024, a big company shut down HARO, Help a Reporter Out. If you've ever tried to get your business mentioned in the press, you know what HARO was. Three emails a day, reporters on one side, ordinary experts on the other. It had been running since 2008. It was free. And then one day, it just wasn't there anymore. Most people, including me, figured that was the end of it. My guest did not. He bought it. He had it running again about 22 days later. Still free, no login, the way that people liked it in the first place.

Brett started out as a financial auditor. He then drove across the country twice asking people how they found work that they actually cared about. He wrote a book about it. He built a phone app company shortly after that that did not work out. Then he ran an SEO agency in Scottsdale that sat at number one for four straight years, and he sold that firm. He now owns three companies that spent years trying to beat each other, and they're all in the media space. So today's big question: how does a business get visibility today in the age of AI? Brett, welcome to the show.

Brett Farmiloe: Hey, thanks for having me. Good topic.

Nick Standlea: Absolutely. Well, let's jump in right there, Brett. How do we get visibility in the age of AI?

Brett Farmiloe: Great question. A lot of layers to it. I think it's helpful to understand where I'm coming from in terms of some of the perspectives. As you mentioned, we own and operate three different brands in the media space. We have Featured, which is a co-pilot for public relations. We've got HARO, which is a journalist request service that connects journalists with sources. And we've got Connectively, which connects experts with publishers. And so we've got well over 2,500 publishers who are using Connectively. We've got 75,000 journalists who are on HARO. We've got hundreds of thousands of users, and all of them have this objective of how do I build visibility for myself and my small business.

And so the thing that is at the core of each one of these different platforms is you, your expertise, your knowledge. It's valuable. It needs to be featured in articles. And what's happened over the last few years as AI has just kind of taken over search engine result pages is that editorial coverage is landing folks in those AI answers. We recently ran a study that looked at about 22,000-plus AI citations across 405 GEO audits, or generative engine optimization audits. And the thing that we found was that about 64% of all AI citations were from earned media or editorial coverage. And so that's why we've seen platforms like ours start to become really popular as a place to carve out 15 minutes a day to answer relevant queries and to get you and your business featured, so that it's not only featured in that publication, but really the end objective is an increase in your visibility in those AI answers.

Nick Standlea: So what's the ratio these days of AI reading articles versus humans reading articles? Am I going to get more value from ending up in those AI search results or from the actual people that just read the article that had me quoted, or whoever "me" is?

Brett Farmiloe: I think where online attention is changing and how folks are consuming information has drastically changed, because some people aren't even going to the internet. Some people are just opening up their desktop version of Claude and having it run and then consuming information from there without ever having visited a web page. And others are going to their favorite publication and reading that and learning about information that way. So I think it's a mix. I think that recently there was a study from Cloudflare that said that there were more bots reading web pages than humans online. So you're seeing a lot of publishers optimize their websites for machines, knowing that the machines will consume that information and display that information to the end reader. But the destination has changed dramatically.

Nick Standlea: Yeah. All right, let's come back into how we get into these results. I did want to make sure to ask here. I found it really interesting when you acquired HARO. It gets shut off. And what does buying that even look like? Because it's no longer an asset up there. I mean, who do you call to buy a brand that's been turned off? And what's going through your head in the weeks or months leading up to that?

Brett Farmiloe: So the dots are that HARO was discontinued in April '24. When it was discontinued, it was announced that it would be rebranded into a platform called Connectively. And Connectively ran until December '24. And that's when I reached out on the general support email address. I think it was support@connectively.us, and said, "Hey, I saw that everything's shutting down. Are you interested in talking about an acquisition?" And somehow, some way, there was a generous support person that forwarded it on to the right people, and we were able to get a deal across the finish line. And what that looked like was an acquisition of assets that would allow us to revive and relaunch these different brands.

And the goal from day one was saying, hey, HARO was founded in 2008. It was founded and found product market fit very quickly because it was free for both sides. It was supported by newsletter ads. It provided a very valuable service to journalists who were on deadline who needed sources for their stories. And then it just leveled the playing field for anyone to show up and say, "Hey, I could be helpful for that story, and let me submit this information via email." And so we wanted to bring that back exactly how it existed in 2008, but with the different safeguards and guardrails behind the scenes that would allow that connection to be quality. So that's what the mission was from day one as soon as we revived it. It was just bringing it back how people enjoyed it.

Nick Standlea: Yeah. We have a lot of builders and entrepreneurs. I spend a lot of time creating stuff with Claude Code myself. What does the sprint look like between when that deal gets over the finish line and you're going to relaunch this? Because you guys executed it very quickly. That could not have been easy.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I think that there's a few things that make it possible. One is a great team. Two is great partners that you rely on for technology. And then probably three is just the simplicity of an idea that works. So part of when you're building, you don't know what to build. You're building and building and trying to find fit, and it's helpful when a brand has already found fit and been validated over 18, 19 years. So bringing back the thing that you know is fit is important, and that expedites a lot of the build. So I would say that those three components are what allowed us to execute so quickly.

Nick Standlea: Yeah. And just to keep everybody with us in the conversation, if you're not familiar with product market fit, what do you mean by that?

Brett Farmiloe: Product market fit is finding fit between the value proposition and your customers. So the value proposition of HARO, if you're a source, is getting featured in the media. And the customer that you need to find fit with is a small business owner, a founder that doesn't have the budget to go hire a PR agency and needs to do it themself. It's a subject matter expert that traditionally doesn't have a PR department to support them, but still needs to build up the credibility within their profession. And so product market fit within HARO is get featured in the media for folks who don't typically have a PR department to support them.

And also there's a PR agency. That's another huge ICP, or ideal customer profile, of HARO. And so what's their problem and what's their value proposition? Their problem is there's not enough media opportunities to get their clients featured, and HARO is this faucet of media opportunities that consistently supplies opportunities for that PR firm that come right to their inbox three times a day.

Nick Standlea: Yeah. And it's an excellent tool, if I didn't make that clear earlier, and the simplicity of it is really nice. Was the response there immediately when you relaunched?

Brett Farmiloe: One of my favorite stories is we hadn't told anyone that we were bringing it back, and we needed to test whether the website worked or not. And so we deployed it on a Friday afternoon at like 3:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time and just deployed it for like a couple minutes. And within those couple minutes, we already had 15 signups, and it had been offline for probably almost a year. And so just the fact that people were discovering it on a Friday afternoon, people were very, very, very excited to have it back. And that's one thing I think I underestimated in this: just the power of a beloved brand over the course of 18 years and what that could really do for a customer.

Nick Standlea: Yeah. Now, what does a successful pitch look like today in 2026?

Brett Farmiloe: I always use the HARO acronym as a way to guide folks on what a successful pitch looks like. So HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out, but in terms of how it can be successful for a pitch, it's: is it helpful? Is it authentic? Is it relevant? And is it on time? So helpful is, are you helping the journalist actually do their job? Authentic means you're not just 100% AI generating your pitches. You're actually the human behind it. Relevant is, you'd be surprised at how particular journalists are in their instructions of exactly what they're looking for. Everything from "here's the subject line I want you to send me" to "here are the qualifications that you absolutely need to have. Don't respond if you don't meet these things." So making sure that you have the job title, all the qualifications to actually qualify to pitch, is really important. And then on time means, hey, journalists are on deadline. They're typically looking for the best source as fast as possible. So if you could reply back before their stated deadline. Those are the key elements.

Nick Standlea: Of those key elements, which is the one most people get wrong?

Brett Farmiloe: Definitely the relevance one. They are saying, "Hey, even though I'm not a licensed so-and-so in Massachusetts, I am licensed in Ohio." Doesn't matter. Don't waste your time. Don't waste a journalist's time.

Nick Standlea: Yeah. Okay. So if I am looking for visibility for a business I work in or one that I founded, whatever the situation might be, and I've never done this before, what steps do I take this week?

Brett Farmiloe: I think the very first one is to do a GEO audit. So GEO, generative engine optimization, audit. You need to figure out which sites are being cited by AI. And then once you have done that research and figured out which sites are being cited by AI, then it's figuring out, okay, how do I get into those sites, and reverse engineering and figuring out what pitch to actually execute, and then pitching them and doing the thing that your strategy's identified.

So I'll give you an example real quick. Let's just take an RV rental company, and they want to discover which sites are being cited. So Featured.com does this. You could go to Featured.com and run a free GEO audit. Just type in "run a GEO audit on" and the website URL. And what it will do is it'll look at all the citations. It'll organize and prioritize to figure out which sites you actually need to reach out to and the reason for your outreach. And so an example for the RV rental company is it'll discover some obscure mini mom-and-pop blog that talks about RV rentals, and it has this one blog post that has a listicle of all the RV rental tips that you need, but it doesn't mention your brand in this article. And so what this tool will do, and what many different tools will do, is it'll just say, "Hey, you should reach out to this editor. Here's their email address. Here's a pitch that you could send them." Click send, and it'll go off to that editor and essentially make that editor aware to say, "Hey, I actually should go and update that article and include this one company, because it makes my content better." That's an example of that.

Nick Standlea: Yeah, that's an interesting strategy right there. Now, before, you mentioned don't just have AI send your pitches. Let's unpack that a little bit more. What are the mistakes people are making? How should we use AI in this process? Because it's still a tool, I would imagine, that's part of the process. It's part of what you guys are developing. But there is a balance where we find the right amount of human and the right amount of AI to speed things up.

Brett Farmiloe: I'll give you the good example and the bad example. And we know this because we actually run every single pitch that comes through Connectively, that comes through HARO, through an AI detection tool. And so this AI detection tool will run and give it a score. And so 21% of all pitches that we get through HARO are 100% AI generated. And at the same time, we see 35% of journalists who come to HARO one-click opt out of anything that's AI generated. So that's kind of what's happening from behind the scenes on a platform perspective.

Now the good and bad example of how AI should be used. The bad example, I'll start with that one, is just having Claude ingest all these different journalist opportunities to auto-generate a response without ever looking at them, to auto-submit this stuff. That's spam, plain and simple. That is a bad example of how to use AI. No matter how intelligent your workflow is, no matter how much you've trained it, you got to have a human in the loop to actually look at it.

Now, a good example of AI use is you're on a treadmill and it's 5:45 a.m. and you've got your HARO edition or whatever, and you're working out and you voice something to an AI to say, "Hey, polish this response. Make this mine. Here's my insight. Here's my experience." And then AI can essentially generate an experience from what you voiced into it. Now, that's called AI assisted. It's something that the pitch got polished, but at the end of the day, it's your experience. It's your expertise that went through the system and then got to the journalist. And the journalists that we speak to, they care about getting connected with the right source. They don't want to be duped. They don't want to have more work that gets created for them where they have to check to see if this source actually exists, that what they said is true. They want to be able to get connected with someone for an interview. So there's a big difference between AI generated and AI assisted.

Nick Standlea: Yeah, it immediately makes me think of what's happening with college essays today and students. We have so many students that are like, "Can't I just have ChatGPT answer these things for me?" And it just smells like something created by a machine. And humans read these things, at least on the second pass, and at some point they read them and they just don't resonate with other people. And yet the AI-assisted version, where you give it the right elements and images and stories, your real stories that happened to you in your real life that can illustrate who you are and what you have to offer, those pop just as well as someone who grinds on it with pencil and paper or just typing it all out themselves. But that is the key switch, right?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. And I would say that journalists are like your most tenured professors in terms of AI detection. A journalist's inbox is a very scary place. I get on calls with them, and I ask them certain questions, and it's like, "Brett, look, in the 15 minutes that we've been talking, look at how many pitches I've already gotten." And so they're going through a lot of these pitches, and they're probably one of the most well-trained professions in terms of just looking at a pitch and determining if it's AI assisted or generated or not.

Nick Standlea: Right. Now, what does that look like if I respond to one of these emails that comes through, and a reporter does like it, and I meet the specifications and everything they're asking for? How does that process develop?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I think that it depends on a couple things, of what the query actually is. Some journalists will want to connect with you for an interview and essentially learn more. A lot of journalists do that. And I find, as someone who writes and contributes to a couple different publications, it's an incredibly valuable experience where you get all these pitches, you get your pick of the best sources, you get an interview, you write a great article. That's the magic.

The reality is that journalists are doing a heck of a lot these days. They are now entrepreneurs. They are supporting themselves with multiple different publications, multiple streams of income, and time is of the essence. And so some journalists will also use HARO as a way to just get great quotes. And they will take what's in the inbox. They might do a verification of the person and the information that's been given to them. They might just copy and paste and put it into their article and publish, and maybe never even tell you. So I think that the experience of using HARO depends on the journalist. You're able to research the journalists. We have HARO journalist profiles. You're able to click and see who this person is that's requesting and get a gauge on what they're writing about, the articles that they've produced. But the experience ranges from, "Oh wow, that was easy. In five minutes, I got featured in one of these different publications," to, "Okay, I went through the interview process and gave them what they needed."

Nick Standlea: Yeah. Now, before we went on the air, you mentioned the long tail, and there are changes right now in the importance of the long tail. I'm really interested in that because that article, I believe it was in Wired magazine, called "The Long Tail" that came out so many years ago. It was right when Netflix had first come on the scene, and they were talking about how there was this dramatic change and how powerful the long tail was: that a video rental store could not carry a movie that was only rented one time every three months, but Netflix could, and they could carry thousands of those. And that long tail added up to all these views and brought in all these people that really loved that thing that maybe didn't apply to or appeal to a lot of people, but there was a deep love for it for the few who really loved it. And that was really powerful to uplift Netflix in the beginning of streaming. So what's going on with the long tail in all of this media landscape now?

Brett Farmiloe: I love that comparison. I think that's exactly what's happening. So traditionally with PR, most people think of PR and they think of a publication like Forbes or Fortune or Fast Company or Inc., and they want to get featured in these tier one publications. Or you think of Google and you think of search engine optimization, like page one or it doesn't matter. Now what's happening is, oh, the publications that aren't Fortune and Fast Company and Forbes, and the page two through 10 results, actually matter. It actually matters.

We ran our first Featured AI citation report that covered GEO audits on our platform between June and August. We looked at 22,000 AI citations. The big finding here was that 34% of AI citations were from websites with domain authorities of less than 40. And domain authority is a score of how authoritative your website is on a scale of one to 100. 100 being you're awesome, one being you may have just started your website. But one third of all sites that are being cited are that long tail. And that's very interesting for SMBs who want to get AI visibility, if they could focus on that third of the long tail. This is the third that is wide open. This is not the ones that are landing on your media list for the PR agency that you're hiring that's focused on getting you to those tier ones and getting you the nice placements. This is stuff where you could reach out to this mom-and-pop blog who covers [unclear] in Spain and get featured there, and it's incredibly helpful to now get your brand mentioned in those AI answers.

Nick Standlea: Right. So just to make sure I'm with you here. I get featured in a couple of websites that are not going to come up in a Google search, or they will come up in a Google search, it's just they'd be so many pages deep probably nobody's going to find them. And yet with Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, because they can search all of that and ingest all of that, then I'm actually being found where the end user is usually going now, which is ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and it's pulling those long tail results. And then there's not nearly as much competition to get whatever it is you're doing, your small business, into these long tail websites to be quoted by them or sourced by them. Is that right?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, that's pretty accurate. And you think about the job of Google over the last 20 years, and you think about the job of Perplexity or Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and the AI engine's job is to generate an answer. Google's job was to generate a directory of search results and let the user decide. And so Google's job was actually pretty easy. It was a ranking system, and you ranked things one through 100, and that was the job. Now the job with creating an AI answer is you've got to look across maybe 59 different sources. Let's hypothetically look across 59 different sources and generate an answer based off the information from those 59 sources. So who are those 59 sources? And I guarantee that a third of them might be those low authority, accessible website owners who you're able to get your brand mentioned by. And so if you're able to do that and be on four of the 59 or whatever it is, now that AI summary essentially is saying, hey, this brand that's mentioned in four out of the 59 places is one that maybe we should put into this AI answer summary.

Nick Standlea: Now, to switch gears just a little bit, how do your three brands that you've brought under this umbrella, that do different things, how do they work together? Let's unpack that a little bit, and which lane each one sits in, and then the synergy between them.

Brett Farmiloe: Sure. So HARO: three times a day, email newsletter, journalist requests. And those are really great for people who want to check their inbox three times a day. And people do, and they set calendar reminders for themselves because it goes out the same time every single day. And they'll look through the email and they'll answer the ones. Not everyone likes to do that. So Connectively exists as almost HARO in a platform. It's a platform where it's searchable, it's findable. You could go set up alerts and essentially find the queries that matter to you.

And it's interesting, because the limitation with HARO is that it gets sent out pretty much every five hours. So there's the morning edition, the afternoon, evening, and journalists typically have to wait till the next HARO goes out to get connected with their source, but they need them immediately. So there's like a four-hour gap that they're just waiting. So we put them all on Connectively for early access to HARO queries, so that the journalist gets the source that they need, and then Connectively users have a reason why they should sign up and subscribe, because they get early access to HARO queries plus all these other queries from the 2,500 publishers that use Connectively.

So you've got those two, and then Featured is your co-pilot for PR. And because we own and operate HARO and Connectively, all of those requests get into Featured, so you're able to get access to all those. But what Featured really is: the problem with PR today is it's not one thing. It is almost everything. It is finding podcasts to pitch. It's finding journalists to pitch. It's finding the mom-and-pop blogs to get your GEO visibility up. It's responding to journalist requests, pitching byline articles, everything under the sun. And so what Featured does is it's almost like a ChatGPT for PR. It's got a chat box there. You could just put in a natural language prompt, get connected with the right media opportunities. You could set up workflows so that you've got an always-on PR assistant to monitor all these different things. And so Featured is very much almost like all of PR, and HARO and Connectively fit within that one section of PR, which is journalist requests. And so that's how they all three kind of work together.

Nick Standlea: Okay. And somebody who's just first dipping their toe into it, where should they start between those?

Brett Farmiloe: I would recommend signing up for HARO, because it gives you a great flavor for what's happening today in media. What are journalists looking for? Well, HARO will tell you three times a day exactly the sources that they need, the stories that matter, things of that nature. So I think that HARO is a great introduction to media. Connectively is great if you want to manage HARO, and Featured is great if you want to do your own PR and get connected with opportunities beyond journalist requests.

Nick Standlea: Got it. Okay. And then we were connected through a PR team. Which of those tools were they using, and how did that come together?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. So I think when you have what's called a podcast pitcher. We have 814,000 podcasts in Featured's directory, and that was started from an analysis of 5 million podcasts that exist. And so we took the 5 million, we got it down to 814,000 based off of who's an active podcast, which podcasts do people actually want to pitch. And so then you can go to Featured and say, "Find podcasts about blank," and it'll pull up the different ones. I'm amazed by it because it finds podcasts. I don't know what episode this is or what we're on, but you've been around, so it'll find you, and it'll find the podcaster with two episodes that they recently just started up a few weeks ago, but they're relevant for what it is that you want to talk about.

Nick Standlea: Interesting. And I mean, that's proof of concept right there, right? Because as far as I know, no one on the team submitted us to this directory or anything like that. It did that work behind the scenes, and it clearly worked, because as soon as I saw the inquiry come in, I was just like, oh. I always said "Haro," and apparently I should be saying "Harrow," so I'm going to correct that. One of our sponsors, Zapier, they still get called, what is it, "Zapier"? Everyone wants to call them "Zapier" because that's how it's spelled. But Zapier is the name because they produce Zaps that make little automations. But in any event, as soon as HARO came across, I was immediately interested because I was familiar with the tool, have used the tool successfully numerous times in the past. And that's just the cool side of these AI tools making things work like that. People get focused on people overusing these tools and not being authentic anymore, but there are some just incredible benefits to all of it as well.

Brett Farmiloe: Here's the thing that I've learned. When I ran my SEO company, and what inspired me to found these companies, we served probably like 500 small business owners. Everyone from an equipment financing person to an eyelash extension supply company and everyone in between.

Nick Standlea: Yeah.

Brett Farmiloe: Everyone's got knowledge to share. Everyone's got some interesting element to share about their business. And it's about connecting that person with the person that wants to hear it. And now media is becoming this accessible thing. It used to be very inaccessible. You had to have a $5,000 a month PR retainer to get into these publications. And what is media today? One of the most interesting stats that we've seen is that there's a little more than six PR professionals for every working journalist today. So the six-to-one ratio. So you can imagine what that journalist's inbox looks like. And on the flip side of this, there's 30 full-time creators for every journalist. And these full-time creators, this is all they do. They monetize from posting on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, hosting podcasts. So there's 1.5 million creators that are out there that this is their full-time thing. And so now this ratio gets flipped, where if you have 30 creators for every one journalist and six PR professionals for every one journalist, now there's five creators for every PR person. So now PR becomes, well, how do I get my message to these creators who actually want to share it, who need to create new episodes, create new content, things like that. So I think we're entering a really exciting time where you could take that eyelash extension supply person and you could find people who actually want to receive that message and talk about it. Really cool.

Nick Standlea: It is. And that's a great example. I mean, I immediately am like, what is that? What's a day in the life look like for the eyelash extension person who's running that company? And how's that different than running a media empire?

Brett Farmiloe: It's a lot of cardboard boxes. I'll tell you that.

Nick Standlea: Okay. What's a lesson you've learned that really strikes you right now, from running these various companies and what you're doing now, that entrepreneurs can put into practice?

Brett Farmiloe: I think the lesson is everything changes, and right now everything changes faster than how it used to change. Everyone can create products very, very quickly. One of the things that happened recently was that Reddit was this darling of AI answers, and then overnight it's an 80% drop on ChatGPT in terms of how often it was referenced, and now Reddit's out of favor. And so you have entire businesses that were optimizing for Reddit, and now overnight it's different. Everything changes very, very fast in this age of AI, and you need to be able to adapt, whether that's a product, whether that's a business. And so I think that it comes back to that product market fit of always reassessing what's the value proposition and who's the customer, and how do you make sure that that's always in a good place, that everyone's happy there. And you as a founder just have to constantly be aware, talk to your customers, figure out where they're having successes, where they're having failures, and then just readjust.

Nick Standlea: Yes. And The Lean Startup is a great book for anybody that wants to learn more about that product market fit, because it's a pretty massive concept if you're not familiar with it.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, Eric [Ries] is one of our advisers.

Nick Standlea: Oh, no kidding.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. So he's been advising us for the last couple years. And I guess some of the stuff that I've taken from him and from others, it's just, I try to do between five to 20 calls a week with customers. And the customer will tell you. They will tell you what is right and what is wrong and what they need. And all you as a founder have to do is show up and ask. And so fortunately, I block off an hour every single day to welcome every single new subscriber we have, every single churned subscriber that we have, every upgrade, every downgrade, and just reach out to these people with a personal message. It's me. It's not AI. And just say, "Hey, I'm seeing what you're doing. I'm here. Anytime you want to talk, I'm in. And here's my calendar link." And I'll probably get about five to 20 demos a week. And it's the best time ever. Then I take that meeting. I have a skill in my Claude that will put it into an Asana task for a development team and say we got to ship this, and here's the priority. Here's the thing. Here's the ICP. Here's the problem. And then go back to that customer. And it's the most mind-blowing experience for that person, where they're like, "Hey, I just subscribed to this $39 a month thing. The founder reached out to me. I talked to him. I said this was my problem, and then they solved it and shipped it in 24 hours." So that's how you have to just keep going and iterating to build your product, day by day, brick by brick.

Nick Standlea: That is incredible. I am also a believer in the philosophy that if you will listen to the market, they will tell you what they want, what they need, rather than trying to tell them what it is they need or want. But you've got to make the time to listen. And you've taken it to the next level, though. I'm just pausing for a second. The idea that you're connecting with the customers directly and then listening so much that you're immediately putting a tweak or a new feature onto the product based on that feedback. That would be mind-blowing as a user of one of these services to then see it within a couple of days, or shorter than that, suddenly it exists. And that strikes me as being on the cutting edge of where businesses need to think and act today.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, it's basic, super basic business. One of the inspiration areas that I've looked at is gym memberships. Gym memberships traditionally have super high churn, and they've researched this over four decades about how do we get people to go to gyms? How do we get them to keep paying us? And one of the things that struck me in these studies is that if one person from the gym greets a member within the first seven days, then there's a 20% less likelihood that they churn. If two people greet them in the first 15 days, there's like a 40% higher likelihood that they stick around. Up to four people, and then it's like if four people know your name and greet you, and the whole gym, the people that work there, are like, "Brett, welcome back," 80% likelihood that I'm not going to churn.

So you've got to be able to humanize a business in 2026. I think that if you're a customer and you are able to access the team behind the product, that's different. I grew up when Facebook was coming out. I couldn't email Mark or know the people who were there. A lot of these companies are so big and faceless that you lose the connection. And I think that that's the difference between how businesses are going to be built in the future. It's going to be very easy to launch businesses. You could spin up a product and launch it, and the differentiator is going to be the person. It comes back to the human, whether it's business building or whether it's being able to get quoted and featured in the media. Journalists want to connect with real people and feature real insights in their stories. Customers want to buy from real businesses with real people. It doesn't change.

Nick Standlea: Yeah, you've got my head spinning right now, because we have a new product called Reach that's got all kinds of information on every high school across the country and every college across the country. And in my educational consulting, I have customers' phone numbers and I have their email addresses, so I can call them, I can email them and just say, "Hey, I just want to check in. Let's see what's going on." And just like you, I learned so much from direct interaction with the customer. This new project, there are people spending time with these tools, but there's not a direct way to call them. But I'm already thinking, many of them submit an email address so they can get a more detailed report, and just sending all of those people an email and saying, "Hey, I want to check in. Here's a Calendly link if you want to talk about your experience and what you wish was on here, what features you'd like to see." I mean, that could be really powerful. And just like you said, a huge differentiator in this age right now, where it's become so much easier to build a new thing, but almost a little bit more difficult unless we intentionally carve out the time to connect directly with the customers.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. And if you're going to go down this route, the advice that I would have is provide a positive ROI for the customer who devotes their time. So the positive ROI, the reason why this works, is if they say, "Here's a problem," and we let that problem sit there, it's not good. So that's why you've got to be able to ship that, so that they know that, hey, that 15 minutes that I invested with Brett was probably some of the best 15 minutes that I spent this week, because now I was listened to. I now have the feature that I want. And so you've got to have a good ROI, which is why a lot of companies will dangle Starbucks gift cards or whatever. You've got to have the balance with that equation.

Nick Standlea: Yeah. I've had that experience, right? Google Ads asks for it all the time, feedback on their product. And some of their surveys take 20 minutes to fill the whole thing out, and we're sitting there six months later and none of it made any sort of a difference. And it's like, why did I waste 20 minutes telling you what I think? Because there are plenty of things in here that would make this product better. But you don't feel listened to. I really like that: positive ROI for the person who's going to invest 15 minutes to give you feedback on what you're working on.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, absolutely. Any way that you can, whether that's pushing a product, whether that's publicly thanking them on your LinkedIn, a roundup of all the different people that you spoke with that week and the impact it made, whatever you could do to have a good ROI.

Nick Standlea: Yeah, that's really good. I did have one LinkedIn post that people really liked, and it was just about, hey, we sent this tool to some college counselors and said let's see if you can break it. And somebody did. They entered in some really odd combination of stats that we hadn't thought of, and it probably wouldn't exist in real life, but they did find the hole in it. And then we did a post on, hey, thank you so much for doing this. And people then responded to that post, and more people wanted to go see if they could go break it and find bugs with it, and it was this really positive feedback loop. Brett, thank you for this little side conversation where you're coaching me on my CEO duties. To bring it back to our main thread here, where do you see things, if it's possible to see into the future, where do you see media shifting next? Because as you've mentioned, things are changing really fast and really often.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I think that we hit on a lot of the quantitative things: that there's 30x more creators than journalists, that 34% of all AI citations come from websites with domain authorities of less than 40. So the long tail is getting longer. It's getting more accessible, and I think it's also getting more fragmented. So you've got to be able to start your efforts, if it's getting more broad, you've got to start your efforts by getting more granular, and you've got to be able to focus on what is actually going to move the needle for me in my business. And having that clarity has always been rare, because the secrets lie within a $5,000 retainer. And so now I think that it's becoming more accessible and open, where you could prompt and query something like Claude or Featured and be able to get connected with opportunities that are going to help move things forward. So I think that's part one, is getting more granular. And then maybe part two is showing up to the gym. It's being able to put in the work. And most people, month one is great at the gym, and then month two gets a little harder, and month three you're a little more MIA, and you've got more problems in the business that outweigh the PR efforts and things like that. But consistency is what's going to win moving forward in the age of AI.

Nick Standlea: Well, let's connect that then. What are the benefits, if you're saying, "Hey, Nick, this is why you should stick with it"? And I love going to the gym, so I understand that payoff, right? I feel better when I stick with it, and I start to feel a lot worse when I drop off with the workouts. In keeping up with our PR strategy, what's the thing we're driving towards down the line? What does that look like, and the direct benefits for me by doing that?

Brett Farmiloe: What it looks like, the consistency payoff, is getting on a customer call and asking, "How did you hear about us?" And when they say, "Oh, just found you. I was doing some AI search and they recommended you," it's like, all right, that's what consistency looks like. So right now, today, our AI citation report found that 86% of brands aren't mentioned for the prompts and queries that they want to be mentioned for. So most brands are invisible. And so that's the reality of what today looks like. The consistency is like, okay, maybe you go through month one and month two, and you're getting releases out there. You're getting featured in the media. Things are good. You're starting to see now your brand is getting mentioned for some of these different prompts and queries. Consistency is like, okay, what about the next model update? What about Perplexity? ChatGPT might be mentioning you, but Claude might not. And so consistency is all about, how do we survive the next model update? How do we get into all of the AI engines? Because now it's four instead of one with Google. So I think that the payoff is, hey, our customers are coming to us from an AI recommendation.

Nick Standlea: Yeah. When I talk to fellow entrepreneurs, that is what everyone is talking about right now. It's just, how do I get into those AI results? Because even if we're not looking at data, we know that's where people are going right now for their information. And so that's an excellent answer. That's motivating to me right now.

Brett Farmiloe: That's really cool. People have personal connections now with their AI. Think about that. What's that quote? It's like, you are who you spend time with, the top five people or whatever.

Nick Standlea: Yeah. The average of those five people.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. Like, who are you spending most of your time with today? I bet you're talking to your AI sometimes more than your spouse on a daily basis.

Nick Standlea: You've got a personal connection with your AI.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. You have a strong connection with your AI. And so think about how most businesses have grown the business over the last few decades. It's referrals. You find the best people to hire and you get your most customers from referrals. And so if people are now trusting their AI, and your AI is referring you to certain companies, they're not referring a list of 10. They're saying, "Here's one, maybe two, maybe three, unless you really prompted me and asked for it, to go talk to." And so now these customers are showing up to your business with trust. And that's invaluable. That is a different referral than what existed of being found in a Google search, where someone's like, "Hey, I Googled 'digital marketing company.' I'm talking to 10. What makes you different? I don't trust digital marketing companies." So I think that's what's happening.

Nick Standlea: No, that's interesting, because when you find a business, even when you're looking for that specific thing that they offer and you find them through Google, you as a customer still show up with a degree of skepticism, and you're checking where they're really coming from when you get someone on the phone or through email. And if one of these authoritative AI platforms recommends something directly, I mean, it was the result of one of one or one of three, you're going to come to it with so much more trust. That feels insightful.

Brett Farmiloe: Totally. And especially because you've already pre-vetted via your AI. So it's not like you just clicked a blue link and you're on a website and you pick up a call. It's like, "Here are my concerns, Claude, and you're recommending this company. Okay, great. I have some questions about this company." Let me have the call before I have the call. And that's why you're going to show up on that call as a much different consumer.

Nick Standlea: Yeah. For young people, or actually I would say for parents of young people, right? They're all very concerned on where these things are going. What skills should my kids be developing in order to be competitive down the line? And I know this is a little out of your wheelhouse, but I'm just going off of instinct here. I feel like you may have an insight here into this.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I got three kids, so I think about this all the time, and I'm scared out of my mind about how to coach the 13-year-old, how to coach the 10, how to coach the seven. So I think the skill that matters is language. It's being able to type, speak, and being able to describe what you need. And as the kids are playing Fortnite or whatever, it's like, all right, you're getting away from the skill that you're going to need, which is you're going to need to be able to connect with people. You're going to need to be able to describe in very clear words what it is that you need, the problem that you need to solve, the solution that you're thinking of. So I think that's probably it. And so what's scary is, well, how do you know what to describe if you don't have the expertise in the thing that you're describing? So you need to be able to have a very clear-cut initial prompt, if you will, to start, and then be able to have all the stuff come back, read, and then write. And so reading and writing, I think, is actually a pretty critical skill.

Nick Standlea: That's interesting, because you're the second person this month who I've spoken to. Joe Lazer, an author, talked about a very similar concept, which is that initially, when the models all started coming online, the big predictions were that language skills were just going to plummet in value, right? Because these tools are going to do all the writing, the reading, and the talking for us, apparently. And that feels like a real shift for a lot of people, where they're going, no, those are actually the most important skills. Those are the ones we should be pouring energy into, because that's how you interface with these tools that are super powerful, but they are not all-knowing and all-capable and can't do any of the human stuff. And so being able to use language effectively is actually the superpower that you're looking for.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, exactly. So at least that's what I'm telling my kids to do. It's go read and write. They're like, "Dad, you're old."

Nick Standlea: Yeah, that's true. And it might still be really good advice for them. And then, Brett, as we start to wind this thing down, what do you think your suite of companies, what are they going to look like five years from now?

Brett Farmiloe: Well, I think that they're going to be accessible doors to public relations. And like I've said, PR is confusing. For decades, it's been a secret behind a $5,000 a month retainer. And now it's becoming more clear about what is PR, what do you need to do, and what's the unique value that you bring to a relationship within the media. So I think that's really exciting. That's basically what I think the trajectory is for our companies: you should be able to show up as you are, with a limited amount of time, share the valuable thing, and make it valuable for everyone involved.

Nick Standlea: That's an excellent positive note to end on right there. Love it. Brett, it's been super educational. I feel like I learned so much during this conversation, and I'm sure everybody else has, too. Really appreciate your time and expertise today.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, it was fun. I'm glad we got to talk about it. So thanks for having me on.

Nick Standlea: Fantastic. Oh, and then if anybody wants to find you and your platforms online, don't want to forget the most important part. Where do they go to find all that?

Brett Farmiloe: So you go to Featured.com as a co-pilot for PR. You've got Help a Reporter Out at helpareporter.com, and you've got Connectively at connectively.us. And then I can be found on LinkedIn. Like I said, down to connect anytime.

Nick Standlea: Great. And we're going to have all that in the show notes if somebody just wants to scroll down and click directly on it. Have a fantastic rest of your week, Brett.

Brett Farmiloe: Cool. Thanks, Nick.

Nick Standlea: All right. Okay, everybody. Until next time: ask questions, don't accept the status quo, and be curious.

Featured is an AI co-pilot for public relations (PR) that helps communications professionals and subject matter experts find earned media opportunities, draft responses, and secure coverage across journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking engagements, awards, and other PR opportunities. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively, which connect journalists and publishers with subject matter experts. Featured supports more than 100,000 users and helps publishers fill content gaps with expert insights.