HARO Is Dying: The Data, The Reasons, and What's Replacing It

Journalist request platforms have lost 50-64% of their activity since 2024. Here's why, and where smart PR pros are going instead.

The Numbers Don't Lie

According to data tracked by Elvis Sun, founder of PressPulse, the first company to use AI to match experts with journalist queries, here's what's happened to posts with #journorequest and similar hashtags on Twitter, now X:

2024: ~110 journalist requests posted daily on average
March 2026: ~40 requests per day
That's a 64% decline.

Platforms like Source of Sources (SOS) have seen similar drops, with roughly 50% less activity compared to their peak. The one exception is Qwoted, which has remained roughly steady with only a slight decline. But even there, the story is not good.

Here's the catch: while journalist requests are declining, the number of people responding is increasing. AI has lowered the barrier to entry for pitching, so more "experts" are flooding these platforms than ever before.

Fewer queries. More competition. Worse odds.

"We saw this firsthand at PressPulse," says Sun. "Many of our customers churned, and the complaints were always the same: conversion rates kept dropping. What used to work in 2023 stopped working in 2026. People were doing the same things, sending more pitches, and getting fewer responses."

When Connectively, the platform formerly known as HARO, shut down in December 2024, it was not a surprise. It was a confirmation.

Journalists are abandoning these platforms. The question is why, and what comes next.

Journalists Are Done With HARO

It's not just the numbers. Journalists themselves are calling it out.

Joni Sweet, a freelance journalist with bylines in Forbes, National Geographic, TIME, and Lonely Planet, wrote bluntly about why she stopped using HARO:

"HARO is a zombie platform... a spammy landfill unworthy of anyone's time."

Her experience mirrors what many journalists report. When she posted requests seeking medical doctors for health stories, she received responses from SEO specialists and lawn care professionals instead. The platform had become useless.

Sweet also argues that HARO has become a magnet for shady backlink operators using AI to mass-produce responses in seconds, with some services charging around $300 per month to automate the spam.

Why Journalists Stopped Using HARO

The short answer: AI made every pitch look the same.

Before AI, writing a great pitch required actual expertise. A cardiologist responding to a heart health query produced something a marketing intern could not fake. The effort was the signal.

Then ChatGPT collapsed that barrier to zero.

Now an intern with AI can produce pitches that look indistinguishable from the cardiologist's, maybe even more polished. Journalists stare at 200 responses that all look credible. They cannot tell real experts from fakers.

Their rational response? Discount everything. Assume it's probably junk.

This triggers a death spiral:

Journalists invest less time evaluating pitches and stop using platforms for important stories.
Real experts notice their expertise is being pooled with AI-generated fluff and leave.
Average quality drops, and journalists engage even less.
The platform becomes a zombie marketplace or shuts down entirely.

The only paths out are economically brutal: heavily censor the platform, or dramatically increase the barrier to entry.

Qwoted chose the latter, charging $149 per month just to be on the platform. That's absurd for most small businesses and independent experts. It removes smaller voices from the conversation entirely and arguably undermines fair journalism. Should only people who can afford $150 per month get quoted in the press?

Censorship is not much better. "It's a cat and mouse game," says Sun. "No AI detection is proven to be 100% reliable. And with new models releasing constantly, it's impossible to detect all of them. You patch one hole and three more open up."

Neither path solves the fundamental problem. They just slow the decline.

The "Market for Lemons" Problem

In 1970, economist George Akerlof wrote a paper about used cars that later won him a Nobel Prize. The insight: when buyers cannot tell good products from bad ones, the market collapses.

Sellers know if their car is a lemon. Buyers do not. Both cars look identical on the lot: polished, waxed, and running fine during the test drive.

Because buyers cannot distinguish quality, they only pay average prices. But average prices are too low for owners of good cars, so they stop selling. More lemons remain. Prices drop further. More good sellers leave.

The cycle continues until only lemons remain.

This is exactly what happened to HARO.

The pitch used to be the diploma, proof you knew your stuff. AI turned that diploma into something anyone can print for free. The signal no longer separates experts from fakers.

Anti-AI Measures Won't Save These Platforms

To their credit, platforms have tried to fight back. HARO, Qwoted, and others have implemented anti-AI measures such as CAPTCHAs, submission delays, pattern detection, and manual review.

But these are band-aids on a broken model.

The fundamental problem is not how spam is generated. It's that the economics reward spamming. As long as sending pitches is nearly free and the upside is a backlink or press mention, people will find workarounds. They always do.

AI detection is an arms race the platforms cannot win. Every new filter gets circumvented within weeks. The spammers are more motivated than the platforms because their business depends on it.

The only real solution is changing the underlying economics: making low-quality participation costly, or shifting to models where identity and reputation matter more than pitch volume.

How Other Industries Solved This

The used car market eventually fixed its lemons problem. Every solution has a PR parallel:

Warranties -> Verified credentials. A dealer offering a warranty says, "I'm confident this isn't a lemon." In PR, that means requiring experts to prove identity through professional profiles, institutional emails, and verified credentials.

Certified pre-owned -> Curated platforms. A trusted intermediary inspects and certifies quality. In PR, that means editorial teams vetting pitches before passing them to journalists.

CarFax -> Reputation systems. Track records that accumulate over time. In PR, that means showing journalists that a source has been quoted 47 times with high satisfaction, shifting the game from anonymous one-shots to reputation-based interactions.

But there is another solution the car industry discovered: skip the dealership entirely.

Tesla proved you do not need the middleman. By selling direct to consumers and controlling the entire transaction, it removed the information asymmetry altogether. Instead of fixing the broken marketplace, it replaced it.

The same thing is happening in PR.

What's Actually Replacing HARO

HARO was always a waiting game. Wait for a journalist to post a query, then compete with hundreds of others for the same opportunity.

The new model inverts this: find journalists before they ask.

Think about what this actually means. Instead of competing with 100 or more other pitches for a single query, you're creating your own opportunities. You're reaching out before the journalist even thinks to post on a platform. And you're not limiting yourself to the shrinking pool of journalists who still use these marketplaces. You have access to every journalist covering your beat.

AI is going to replace the marketplace itself. We no longer need a platform to facilitate the connection between experts and journalists. AI can monitor news in real time, predict when a story is about to break, identify which journalists are likely to cover it based on their beat and past writing, and deliver a highly curated list to experts, all without a HARO-style marketplace ever being involved.

Tools like Medialyst are already doing this, helping PR teams identify relevant journalists, track what they're covering, and reach out proactively with the right pitch at the right time. No open marketplace. No competing with spam. No lemons problem.

The reactive expert-quote marketplace is collapsing. What's replacing it is AI-powered proactive outreach: harder to spam, and fundamentally better economics for everyone involved.

What To Do Now

The free, open-access, anonymous pitch marketplace is dying. Here's how to adapt:

Stop competing in flooded marketplaces. If you're still treating HARO-style platforms as your primary media strategy, you're fighting a losing battle.

Build direct journalist relationships. Find the 20-50 journalists who actually cover your beat. Follow their work. Engage before you need something.

Lead with credentials, not pitches. When AI can generate any content, the credential becomes the pitch. A verified MD from Johns Hopkins responding with three sentences beats an anonymous user's beautifully crafted AI response, because identity carries the information that content no longer can. Make your expertise immediately verifiable: LinkedIn profiles, institutional affiliations, and past quotes.

Go proactive. Don't wait for queries. Identify trending stories in your space and offer commentary before journalists start searching. Then use AI to help you find relevant journalists fast.

The used car market took decades of institutional innovation to solve its lemons problem. The PR industry does not have that long.