For more than a decade, SEO specialists and PR managers considered natural citation in major media publications the most valuable type of backlink. A single mention in a real article on Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, The New York Times or TechCrunch brings more benefit than dozens of weak guest posts. The platform that revolutionized this field was called Help A Reporter Out, or HARO for short, founded by Peter Shankman in 2008 and later acquired by Cision.
How HARO worked and why it was so valued
The working principle of HARO was surprisingly simple. When journalists from major publications were looking for expert sources for their articles, they would send specific queries to the platform. These queries were distributed to subscribers three times a day — morning, afternoon, and evening — in a single email digest. Each email contained hundreds of queries from journalists on a wide variety of topics, and experts would choose those matching their field and respond. If a journalist found your answer useful, they would include your name, company name, and a link to your website in their article. It was through this very mechanism that many small startups and independent experts gained the opportunity to appear in the world's most prestigious publications.
The major change of 2024 and the end of the HARO era
In March 2024, Cision relaunched its famous platform under a new brand and called it Connectively.us. This change came as a surprise to many users, and the old HARO domain was redirected to the new platform. Unfortunately, the new platform failed to live up to the expectations of its founders, and in November of the same year Cision announced its complete shutdown. Thus the platform that had given tens of thousands of experts access to media outlets for sixteen years ceased its activities. This news caused great concern in the PR and SEO community, since no alternative platform of such scale and audience quality existed at the time.
Platforms that replaced HARO in 2026
Today, in 2026, several new and growing platforms have emerged in the market connecting journalists with experts. Qwoted stands out particularly for the high quality of journalist queries in finance, technology and business topics, and is actively used by journalists from Bloomberg, Reuters and Wall Street Journal. SourceBottle is more focused on the Australian and British markets and is a good choice for those who want to work with local publications. Featured, formerly known as Terkel, uses artificial intelligence to adapt your responses for multiple publications and has strong ties with content marketing publications. JustReachOut offers an additional paid service for directly contacting journalists.
Real result: the experience of one SaaS founder
To understand the power of these platforms, it is worth looking at a practical example. The founder of one medium-sized SaaS company systematically used Qwoted and Featured for six months during 2025 and as a result received twenty-three natural backlinks from Forbes, Inc, TechCrunch, Fast Company and eighteen other major publications. His website Domain Rating grew from twelve to forty-one during this period, and organic traffic tripled. Most importantly, these links were not paid, so Google considers them completely natural and they do not suffer during algorithm updates.
The biggest mistake and how to avoid it
The only way to succeed on these platforms is to write honest and specific answers. Today journalists receive hundreds of responses to each query, and most of them are texts generated by AI, generic and devoid of personal experience. An experienced journalist immediately skips such an answer. A successful response must contain specific numbers, real examples, personal experience, and a direct answer to the journalist's question. It is also crucial to send your response within one to two hours after the query is published, because journalists usually stop reading after receiving a few quality responses. Through Sayt.uz hosting, you can build a professional website and corporate email, strengthening your expert profile and increasing journalists' trust in you.