HARO & Digital PR: How to Earn Media Backlinks in 2026

HARO went through a rough two years. Cision renamed it Connectively, closed it entirely in December 2024, and for a period of time, all of the links to it from other sites were taking visitors to a dead platform. Featured.com acquired the HARO trademark and relaunched it as a free service by email in April 2025, which means a link building hack that most sites continue to recommend, needs revision. This guide covers what HARO looks like now, where Qwoted fits alongside it, how to pitch journalists directly, and what press releases actually do — and don’t do — for your rankings.

“Digital PR link building is the practice of earning backlinks and brand mentions from journalists and media outlets through platforms like HARO and Qwoted, expert quotes, and direct outreach.”

HARO alternative

“Alternative” used to mean HARO was gone and you needed a replacement. That’s no longer quite right. Cision discontinued the Connectively-branded version of HARO on December 9, 2024, after a paid-tier structure the PR community largely rejected.Featured.com then acquired the HARO brand from Cision and relaunched it as a free platform in April 2025, restoring the classic email-digest format journalists and sources were used to

That history matters because the smart move now isn’t picking one platform — it’s running several in parallel, since approval rates on any single one are low. Alongside relaunched HARO, consider signing up to: Featured. Com‘s own query stream (free, leaning B2B), SourceBottle, and Source of Sources, a Slack community created by the originalHAROfounder after the shutdown of Connectively. These do not promise coverage on their own, they just increase the number of relevant queries you see each week.

Journalist outreach

Platform queries are reactive — you’re one of dozens of people replying to the same request. Direct outreach is proactive, and it’s what separates occasional placements from a repeatable channel.

Build a beat list, not a contact list.

Build a list of 20-30 journalists that already report on your topic, not using a generic press list but through targeted research. A journalist that has written three articles on your niche over the past year is much more likely to be interested in your story.

Keep a spokesperson profile ready.

Having a named expert with credentials you can verify, a clean bio and two or three pre written angles that can be easily adapted allows you to reply to those tight turnaround times that win placements, rather than trying to craft a quote after the deadlines missed.

Follow the journalist, not just the query.

Engaging with a journalist’s existing coverage on LinkedIn or X before you ever pitch them makes the eventual email look like a continuation of a relationship rather than a cold ask.

Qwoted link building

Qwoted is another platform that links journalists at outlets such as Forbes and Bloomberg with expert sources, and operates quite differently than the blast-digest of requests found on HARO. You build a Source profile, then either browse open media requests or get matched to ones that fit your expertise, and respond directly through the platform rather than by email.

Reported approval rates vary by niche and by how competitive it is — one digital PR agency tracking its own campaigns put Qwoted’s approval rate around 6%, noticeably lower than some free alternatives, largely because Qwoted attracts submissions from established PR firms and agencies competing for the same requests. That makes a complete, credential-heavy Source profile worth the setup time before you start pitching.

Expert quote backlinks

In other words, it‘s the quote that get published or buried, and the threshold has risen. Journalist inboxes have been inundated with cookie-cutter, AI-produced pitches over the past two years, and by now most journalists have definitely been trained to recognize the difference.

Answer the actual question asked.

A response that veers into unrelated promotion of your product gets skipped, even if the writing is good.

Lead with a specific number or example.

“We saw a 22% increase after changing X” earns a citation far more often than “it’s important to focus on quality.”

State your credential in one line.

Name, title, and years of relevant experience, placed where the journalist can copy it directly into the story without needing to ask a follow-up question.

Press release SEO

A press release can still put real news in front of journalists and readers, but it stopped being a direct link-building shortcut years ago. Google’s own spam policies specifically call out optimized anchor text in press releases distributed on other sites as a link scheme when it’s meant to pass ranking credit, and reputable wire services now apply rel=”nofollow” to release links by default.

That doesn’t make releases pointless for SEO. The real value sits elsewhere: entity recognition and brand-name consistency across authoritative outlets, and the chance that a journalist reads the release and independently writes a follow-up story with a genuine editorial link. Treat the wire distribution as visibility, not equity, and save your link-building effort for the coverage a release might generate afterward.

Frequently asked questions

Is HARO still active in 2026?

Yes. After Cision closed the Connectively-branded HARO in December 2024, Featured.com bought back the HARO. Name and again launched this as a freemail-based service under the same ownership in April 2025.

What happened to Connectively?

Connectively was Cision’s rebrand of HARO, introduced with paid subscription tiers that much of the PR community pushed back on. Cision discontinued it completely on December 9, 2024, before Featured.com bought the HARO brand a few months later.

Is Qwoted better than HARO for link building?

Neither replaces the other — they surface different requests from different journalist pools, so running both increases your total number of relevant opportunities rather than one clearly outperforming the other.

Do press release links actually help SEO?

Not directly. Reputable distribution services nofollow their release links by default, so the SEO benefit comes from the editorial coverage and entity recognition a genuinely newsworthy release can generate, not from the wire link itself.

How long does digital PR link building take to show results?

It usually takes few month or so of regular pitching so the placements settle, as it‘s reliant on the journalist‘s response time and the rate that you establish your credibility as a new source on your beat.

Where to start this week

Choose one reactive platform (HARO or Qwoted) and one proactive habit…building your beat list of 20 journalists. Use each for one month, measure your actual response rate (not your best guess), and only add a second platform once you‘re certain that platform is justified.