HARO alternatives in 2026: every free journalist request platform, checked

What happened to HARO

Help a Reporter Out ran for sixteen years as the default way for an ordinary expert to get quoted in the press. Cision bought it, rebranded it Connectively, and shut it down on 9 December 2024 to concentrate on its CisionOne product. For most of 2025 the advice industry treated HARO as gone for good, and a wave of “HARO is dead, here are the alternatives” posts went up. Most of them have not been touched since.

They are now out of date, because the brand was bought and restarted. Featured acquired HARO and relaunched it, and today helpareporter.com is a working sign-up page offering free daily media queries, with “Powered by Featured” in the footer. Featured also runs a platform version at connectively.us, where queries appear as they are submitted rather than in a digest.

The checked list

Every row below was opened on 12 September 2026 and the result recorded. “Free tier” means whether you can read and answer queries without paying.

The four worth your time

HARO (helpareporter.com)

Free, no platform to learn, and the largest pool of general queries. You subscribe as a source and queries arrive by email. The trade-off is the one HARO always had: everyone gets the same email at the same time, so a good answer sent late is a wasted answer.

Connectively.us

Featured’s platform view of the same HARO queries. Because Featured owns HARO, queries appear on the platform when the reporter submits them rather than when the next digest goes out. If you are going to answer queries seriously, this is the version to use, and your expert profile there is a public page.

Qwoted

Journalists are verified before they can post, which cuts out most of the fake-request problem that damaged HARO’s reputation. The free tier caps how many pitches you can send each month and delays when you see new requests, so it rewards being selective rather than fast.

MentionMatch (formerly Help a B2B Writer)

Narrower and quieter than HARO, and better for it if you sell to businesses. You pick your areas of expertise and only receive matching requests, so the hit rate per query read is far higher than a general digest.

How to answer a query so it gets used

Journalists working from these platforms are usually filing the same day and are reading dozens of replies. What gets used is rarely the most impressive expert; it is the one who made the writer’s job easiest.

1. Answer in the first hour. Most queries close long before the deadline because the writer already has enough. Speed beats polish here.
2. Give them copy they can paste. Two or three sentences, written in the first person, already quotable. Do not offer to jump on a call.
3. Answer the question they asked, not the one you wish they had asked. Generic commentary about your industry is what gets deleted first.
4. Say something specific. A number, a concrete example, or a view that someone could disagree with. “It depends on the business” is not a quote.
5. Put your credentials in one line at the end — name, title, company, and the URL. That line is what becomes your citation.
6. Do not attach anything, and do not pitch your product. Both are the fastest routes to a spam report.

Expect a low hit rate and judge it over months, not weeks. Answering five well-matched queries a week is a realistic habit; answering forty badly matched ones is not, and platforms now run spam and AI-text detection against exactly that behaviour.

What a placement is actually worth

This is the part most guides skip, and it matters if your reason for doing this is search rather than ego.

When a journalist quotes you because they chose to, the link they include is a normal editorial link. Nobody paid for it, so nothing has to be marked rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", and Google treats it like any other citation. That is the whole reason these platforms are worth the effort, and it is a genuinely different thing from paid coverage.

Paid placements do not work that way, and any vendor who tells you otherwise is either mistaken or hoping you are. Under Google’s own spam policies, a link in content you paid for has to be marked as sponsored or nofollowed. This applies to our features too — the features we sell are labelled as sponsored and their links are marked accordingly.

Where the free route runs out

Free journalist requests have two real limits. You cannot choose when coverage happens, and you cannot choose what it says. If you need a specific thing published before a funding round, a launch, a hearing or a sales cycle, waiting for a relevant query is not a plan.

That is the gap we sell into, so read this with that in mind. A Blue Leopard feature is written by our editorial team from a ten-minute brief, approved by you word for word, and published on the publication in our network that fits your market. It is live within 24 hours of your approval, clearly labelled as sponsored, or you get your money back. One feature is $97; four features on four titles are $297 and eight are $497.

The honest recommendation is to do both. Answer queries every week because it is free and the citations are real, and buy a feature when you need a specific page to exist by a specific date. If you want help deciding which, our guide to getting featured in a magazine compares all five routes side by side.