Does HARO Still Work for Backlinks?

Yes — but it isn't the HARO you remember. Cision rebranded it to Connectively and shut the platform down on December 9, 2024. Featured.com then bought the HARO brand from Cision and relaunched it on April 22, 2025, back in its original free email-digest format. The tactic still earns editorial links, just at a far lower hit rate than its 2015–2020 peak.

What actually happened to HARO

A short timeline, because almost every guide online is out of date on this:

Date	What happened
2008	Peter Shankman launches Help a Reporter Out as an email list
2010s	The service changes hands and ends up owned by PR software company Cision
Early 2024	Cision retires the HARO brand and migrates users to Connectively, a dashboard product with a paid pitch model
Dec 9, 2024	Cision shuts Connectively down to focus on CisionOne; annual subscribers get pro-rata refunds
Apr 16, 2025	Featured.com acquires the HARO brand from Cision
Apr 22, 2025	HARO relaunches — free for journalists and sources, ad-supported, back to three daily email digests

The Connectively era is the reason for HARO's reputation collapse. Moving to a dashboard with paid pitch credits changed the economics for sources without fixing the underlying problem, and the query volume that made the original list useful never came with it. The 2025 relaunch deliberately reverted to the format people actually used: a query lands in your inbox, you reply by email.

So does it still produce backlinks?

Yes, with three caveats that decide whether it's worth your hours.

Caveat 1: the ratio got much worse. In HARO's peak years a well-written response to a relevant query had a genuine chance of being used. Now every query attracts a flood of responses, a large share of them AI-generated boilerplate. Journalists have adapted by skimming for the first credible, specific, human-sounding answer and ignoring the rest.

Caveat 2: a lot of coverage doesn't link. Being quoted is not the same as being linked. Many outlets name your title and company without a hyperlink, and a meaningful share of the ones that do link use rel="nofollow" or rel="ugc". That's not worthless — see dofollow vs nofollow links — but it means your realistic link yield is lower than your quote count.

Caveat 3: not every query comes from a publication you want. Query lists mix national outlets with small content sites and affiliate blogs. The link from a site nobody reads is worth what any low-quality backlink is worth.

Where it genuinely shines: when you have real, specific expertise in a niche that journalists write about regularly. That's when the response rate stops being a lottery.

The current landscape of journalist-query platforms

HARO is no longer the only option, and running two or three sources is standard now:

HARO (Featured.com) — free for sources, three daily digests, classic email format. Broadest general coverage.
Qwoted — the most-cited alternative during the shutdown. Dashboard-based, strong in finance, tech, and B2B; free tier plus paid plans.
Source of Sources (SOS) — launched by HARO's original founder Peter Shankman after the Connectively shutdown; free email format.
Help a B2B Writer — narrower and B2B-focused, which means fewer queries but far less competition per query.
SourceBottle — strongest in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.
#JournoRequest on X and Bluesky — unstructured, fast, and where a lot of reactive requests now actually live.

Don't subscribe to all of them. Query volume is the enemy — pick the two whose queries genuinely match your expertise and read those properly.

How to actually get picked

The difference between sources who land quotes and sources who don't is almost entirely in the first two sentences.

Answer in the first line. No introduction, no "Hi, I'd love to contribute." Lead with the substantive claim the journalist can paste into their draft.
Be specific enough to be uncopyable. "Consistency is key" gets deleted. "We tested this on 340 accounts over eight months and the ones that posted twice a week retained 19% better" gets used — if it's true. Never invent a number.
Write in quotable sentences. Journalists want a pull quote, not a paragraph they have to edit. Give them two or three complete, self-contained sentences.
Include your credential inline. Name, title, company, and one clause on why you're qualified — at the bottom, in one line.
Answer fast. Many queries are effectively closed within a few hours of the digest going out.
Only answer queries you're genuinely qualified for. Journalists remember sources who wasted their time, and the good ones come back to sources who didn't.
Skip the AI draft. Editors have been trained by two years of slop to spot it instantly, and it's the single fastest way to get filtered.

Is it worth the time?

Be honest about the arithmetic. Reading digests and writing considered responses is a daily habit measured in 20–40 minutes, and you may go a week with nothing. Over a quarter, a well-run HARO habit typically produces a handful of quotes and a smaller handful of links — but those links come from real publications and are exactly the kind competitors can't buy.

The trap is treating it as your primary link source. It isn't predictable enough to be one. It works best layered on top of a baseline you control — a steady stream of relevant in-content links from 1-for-1 exchanges, plus resource content that earns links passively — so that a quiet month on the query lists doesn't stall your growth. It also pairs naturally with digital PR, which is the same skill applied proactively instead of reactively.

Frequently asked questions

Is HARO free in 2026? Yes. After Featured.com acquired the brand in April 2025, HARO relaunched free for both journalists and sources, funded by newsletter advertising rather than subscriptions.

Why did HARO shut down in the first place? Cision retired the HARO brand for Connectively in early 2024, then discontinued Connectively on December 9, 2024 to concentrate on its CisionOne platform. The brand was sold separately to Featured.com four months later.

Are HARO links dofollow? It varies by publication and is outside your control. Many are, some are nofollow, and some coverage doesn't link at all. Ask politely for a link if you're quoted without one — it's a normal request and often works.

Does HARO link building violate Google's guidelines? No. Responding to a journalist's request for expertise is editorial sourcing, not a link scheme. It only becomes a problem if money changes hands for the placement, which falls under Google's link spam policies.

How many responses does it take to get one link? Plan on dozens of genuine, well-targeted responses per placement. If you're answering queries outside your expertise, that number gets much worse and your sender reputation with those journalists gets worse with it.

The bottom line

HARO died, and then it came back better than the version that died — free, email-based, and explicitly positioned around human expertise at a moment when journalists are drowning in generated text. That's a real opening for anyone with genuine domain knowledge. Just size the channel correctly: it's a slow, unpredictable source of high-quality editorial links, not a volume engine. Answer only what you're qualified for, lead with the specific claim, and treat every reply as a pitch to a person who has ninety other replies open.