35% of Journalists Filter AI Pitches on HARO, Says Featured CEO

Roughly 35% of journalists using HARO have chosen to filter out pitches identified as entirely AI-generated, according to Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, speaking on the podcast Let's Talk PR & More.

"You've got some that prefer that nothing AI generated hits their inbox because let's be honest, plenty of stuff hits the inbox on their end," Farmiloe said.

Featured owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out), which has connected journalists with expert sources since 2008, and Connectively, a searchable database of requests from journalists and publishers. Every pitch submitted through Featured, HARO and Connectively is scored by AI detection, giving the company visibility into how public relations professionals are actually using generative tools - a dataset that is otherwise unavailable, because platforms see submitted pitches rather than the workflows that produce them.

About 21% of those pitches score as 100% AI-generated, Farmiloe said. Journalists receiving them can switch on a one-click filter that removes them before they hit their inbox. Farmiloe noted that the opt-out is not a default setting and suggested the true level of objection is higher than the adoption figure indicates: "I'd say it's even higher. Like I said, the submission form has that box unchecked by default."

If the journalists leave this box unchecked, the scoring is delivered as a signal rather than a block. Pitches carry a color-coded percentage score and reach the journalist regardless, with the decision left to them. Featured performs the detection through a partnership with Pangram, an AI detection company. Farmiloe was explicit about the limits of the approach: "I think that there's opportunities for false positives. Models are advancing and they're becoming better and better."

Farmiloe attributed the volume of AI-generated pitching to a strategic misreading of how the channel now works rather than to the tools themselves. "I think the misconception that a lot of PR pros sometimes have when they approach a platform like HARO is that it's a numbers game," he said.

The framework he recommends is derived from the HARO name: be helpful, be authentic, be relevant, be on time. Farmiloe relayed a line from a journalist that he described as the blunt version of the underlying dynamic: "I don't want to hear from you until I want to hear from you."

The conversation also explores a broader shift in the media landscape. Farmiloe said journalists he speaks with commonly report having eight sources of income, including work for multiple publications, Substack and consulting. He pointed to newsroom contraction, the growth of independent media and changes in the economics of publishing as factors driving journalists toward more entrepreneurial models.

That shift is changing what media relations looks like, he argued. As journalists build audiences and increasingly depend on the performance and reach of their work, PR professionals may need to think beyond simply securing a placement and consider how they can help coverage reach an audience after publication.

Farmiloe also questioned whether traditional measures such as domain authority are still enough to determine which media opportunities matter, as PR professionals increasingly consider whether coverage can influence how brands appear in AI-generated answers. “I think the evaluation part of PR is going through a transformational shift,” he said.

The conversation goes beyond AI-generated pitches to explore how the media landscape is changing, how journalists are building new audiences and revenue streams, and what those shifts mean for the future of media relations.

The full episode of Let's Talk PR & More featuring Brett Farmiloe is available here.