Featured, the company that relaunched HARO (Help a Reporter Out) in April 2025, announced that the platform has sent more than 100 million emails connecting journalists with sources over the past year. This milestone comes with new data that sheds light on how AI, spam, and crowded inboxes are reshaping the relationship between journalists and PR professionals.
According to HARO's 2026 statistics, the sheer volume of communication has led both journalists and sources to prioritize filtering and authenticity. The data reveals several key trends: 21% of pitches are entirely AI-generated, meaning more than one in five pitches submitted through HARO are written completely by AI. Meanwhile, 35% of journalists now choose to block AI-generated responses when submitting a request, and a user is banned every 23 minutes for spam or terms of service violations.
Additionally, 32% of journalist requests are rejected during the approval process, as the HARO team reviews the journalist, publication, and request for quality and legitimacy. Perhaps most notably, human-written pitches are approximately three times more likely to be used by journalists compared to AI-generated ones.
The rise of AI-generated pitches is one of the clearest signals in the data. While AI can help publicists and sources produce responses at scale, journalists are increasingly filtering those responses. “Human-written pitches are about 3x more likely to get featured than AI-written ones,” said Brett Farmiloe, CEO of HARO. “The sources who stand out typically come from fully human teams who can provide credible information, respond to what the journalist actually asked for, and make the journalist’s job easier. As inboxes get more crowded, being helpful becomes the differentiator.”
Every pitch submitted through HARO is analyzed using AI detection technology provided by Pangram. Journalists can also report unhelpful pitches, which triggers a manual review by the HARO team.
The data points to a growing challenge for PR professionals: as access to journalists increases, earning their attention is becoming harder. In increasingly crowded inboxes, relevance, credibility, and expertise are becoming critical ways for sources to stand out.
HARO, which was founded in 2008 and shut down by its previous owner in December 2024, was relaunched by Featured in April 2025. It delivers journalist requests directly to subscribers, giving subject matter experts, publicists, and PR professionals opportunities to respond to relevant media inquiries and earn coverage. Featured is an AI co-pilot for public relations 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 generative engine optimization (GEO). The company owns and operates HARO and Connectively, and supports more than 100,000 users while helping 2,500 publishers fill content gaps with expert insights.
