Is HARO Dead? Expert-Quote Links After Connectively
•September 10, 2026•8 min read
For fifteen years "HARO link building" was the cheapest way to earn a link from a real publication: answer a journalist's question, get quoted, get cited. Then, in the space of five months, the service was shut down, mourned, cloned and bought back. The short answer to the title is no, HARO is not dead. The longer answer is that the links it produces are not what they were, and the way to win them has changed more than the tool has.
TL;DR. Cision killed Connectively, the rebranded HARO, on 9 December 2024. Peter Shankman, who founded HARO in 2008, launched Source of Sources as a free replacement, and on 16 April 2025 Featured.com bought the HARO brand from Cision and relaunched it as a free daily email with 800K+ registered sources and 75K+ journalists. Expert-quote links still exist, but the queue is longer than ever, journalists say half the pitches they get are irrelevant, and a quote earns a mention more often than a dofollow link. Treat HARO as a brand-mention and authority channel, answer only what you can answer with a number, and buy the links you need control over separately.
What actually happened to HARO
The timeline matters because most "HARO is dead" posts were written in the four months when it genuinely was.
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 | Peter Shankman starts HARO as a Facebook group, then a mailing list | Wikipedia |
| June 2010 | Vocus acquires HARO; it later becomes part of Cision (owner since 2014) | Wikipedia, PR Newswire |
| 2024 | Cision folds HARO into a paid platform called Connectively | Wikipedia |
| 9 Dec 2024 | Connectively is discontinued; the HARO emails stop | Cision |
| Late 2024 | Shankman launches Source of Sources (SOS), a free email digest on the original model | Source of Sources |
| 16 Apr 2025 | Featured.com acquires HARO from Cision, backed by Great North Ventures, and keeps it free, ad-supported, email-first | PR Newswire |
| 2026 | HARO runs again: up to three digests a day, Monday to Friday, free for journalists and sources | helpareporter.com |
So the service exists, under its original name and its original format. The Connectively brand now survives only as Featured's platform layer on top of the emails. What did not come back is the market conditions of 2015.
Why expert-quote links are worth less than they were
The queue got longer, not shorter
HARO's own about page counts 800,000+ registered sources against 75,000+ journalists and bloggers. Add Source of Sources, Qwoted and Featured's own request feed, and every reasonably popular query now lands in front of thousands of people who can generate a plausible answer in thirty seconds with an AI assistant. The journalist reads the first twenty. The other side of that inbox is measured too: BuzzStream's 2026 survey found 60.8% of digital PR professionals say finding relevant journalists got harder in the last year, and it cites Muck Rack's finding that 48% of journalists seldom or never receive relevant pitches. Volume went up; relevance did not.
A quote is a mention first and a link second
Being quoted does not guarantee a hyperlink, and when a link is given it is at the publication's discretion, with whatever attribute their policy applies. What you reliably get is your name, your company and your expertise inside an article on a real domain. That is not nothing: in Ahrefs' analysis of 75,000 brands, unlinked mentions correlated with AI-answer visibility about three times more strongly than backlinks did, which we covered in Brand Mentions vs Backlinks. HARO in 2026 is a mention engine that sometimes links, and it should be budgeted as one.
The link, when it comes, points where the editor wants
Almost always the homepage or an author bio, never the category page you are trying to rank. That is the structural limit of every earned-link channel, and it is why expert quotes complement placements instead of replacing them.
What still works in 2026
The practitioners who keep earning from HARO and its clones do a small number of things consistently. BuzzStream's survey puts "providing expert commentary" among the most-used digital PR tactics of 2026 for a reason; it works when it is done like this:
- Answer only what you can answer with a number. "In our catalogue of 9,670 vetted domains, 21% are DR60+" gets quoted. "It's important to vet your links" does not. If you have no proprietary figure for the question, skip it.
- Reply inside the hour. Digests arrive at fixed times; the journalist's shortlist is often closed before the deadline. Speed beats polish.
- Write the paragraph they can paste. Two to four sentences, first person, a credential in the first line, no pitch for your product, no "happy to elaborate".
- Be the person, not the brand. A named founder with a LinkedIn profile and a real bio gets picked over "the team at X". Every quote adds to that person's entity, which is exactly the E-E-A-T signal search and AI engines are looking for.
- Pick five queries a week, not fifty. Reply rates collapse when you answer everything; editors recognise volume responders and filter them.
- Track the mentions, not just the links. Log every published quote, linked or not, and reclaim unlinked ones later with a polite note to the editor.
What a reply that gets picked looks like
The structure is the same on HARO, Source of Sources and Qwoted, because the journalist's problem is the same: a deadline, twenty tabs open, and a paragraph to fill. Line one is who you are and why you are qualified, in ten words. Line two is the answer with the number in it and the source of the number. Line three is the one caveat an editor would otherwise have to ask about. Then your name, title, company and a link to the page the number lives on. No introduction, no "I hope this helps", no attachment, no request for a link. The whole thing fits on a phone screen, because that is where it will be read. If the query asks for three tips, send three sentences, not three paragraphs; if it asks for a story, give the one concrete case with dates and outcomes, not a philosophy. Everything that makes a Reddit comment get upvoted makes a HARO reply get quoted.
How to measure it without fooling yourself
Keep one sheet: query date, outlet, whether you were published, whether a link was given and to which page, and the referral traffic in the following month. After a quarter you will know your real rate of quotes per reply and links per quote. In our experience the second number is the one that disappoints and the first is the one that matters, because every published quote is a mention on a real domain that AI engines and Google's entity systems can read. Watch branded search volume and direct traffic in the weeks after a run of quotes; that lift is the mention signal working, and it is the same discipline we recommend for any link programme.
The alternatives, honestly
- HARO (Featured). The largest free feed, email only, the noisiest inbox. Best for consumer and general-business beats.
- Source of Sources. Shankman's rebuild of the 2008 model, free, run by the founder himself, smaller and calmer. Best if you want fewer, better queries.
- Qwoted and Featured's platform. Profile-based instead of email, with more B2B and trade titles, and paid tiers for volume.
- Direct relationships. Ten journalists who cover your niche and know you answer fast beat any feed. Every HARO win should end with a short thank-you and an offer to be a standing source, so the next quote comes by direct email instead of through a queue of 800,000.
None of these will lift a specific commercial page. They lift the domain and the person. For the pages that need to rank, the relevance-first placement layer we described in Digital PR for Backlinks still applies: choose the donor by topic and real traffic on a vetted marketplace, point the link at the page that converts, and keep the two budgets separate. Placement pricing is per link and public, which makes the comparison easy: an hour of HARO replies versus a placement you control.
Is it still worth the time?
Yes, for a narrow definition of "worth". If you own a dataset or a practice that produces quotable numbers, an hour a week on HARO and SOS will earn a steady trickle of mentions on real publications, occasionally with a link, and it compounds into the founder's entity in a way nothing you can buy does. If you are answering generic questions with generic advice, the honest expected value in 2026 is zero: you are competing with 800,000 other sources and an AI-written pitch is indistinguishable from yours. Build the linkable asset first; HARO is where you quote it.
FAQ
Is HARO still free?
Yes. Since Featured.com acquired it in April 2025 it is free for journalists and sources, supported by newsletter ads, with up to three email digests a day on weekdays.
Are HARO links dofollow?
It depends entirely on the publication. Some link the source's site normally, some add nofollow or sponsored attributes, many quote without linking at all. Plan for a mention and treat a dofollow link as a bonus.
Does Google penalise HARO link building?
No. An editor quoting you and choosing to cite your site is the kind of link Google's spam policies protect. The risk is the opposite: mass-producing AI-written answers to hundreds of queries, which earns nothing and burns your name with editors.
What replaced HARO while it was gone?
Peter Shankman's Source of Sources filled the gap from late 2024, alongside Qwoted and Featured. All of them still operate next to the relaunched HARO.
