The proliferation of AI in media outreach has made pitching noisier and less effective, according to Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, which owns the long-running journalist request service HARO. In an interview on Majestic's SEO in 2026 podcast series, Farmiloe said platform data now clearly shows that high-volume, AI-generated pitches are losing ground to more thoughtful, personalized responses.
"Less is more in 2026, in terms of being an outreach specialist," Farmiloe said. "What we've seen is that AI has made it incredibly easy to reach out to more people, and it's made it more noisy and less effective as a result." Featured operates both HARO and Connectively, giving the company visibility into both the journalist requests and the pitches sources submit. Farmiloe noted a consistent pattern in that data: winning pitches are not the ones sent in the highest volume but those with higher quality.
The decline in quality is directly tied to AI adoption, which Farmiloe says was a key reason HARO came under Featured's ownership. "The reason why HARO ended up in our ownership in the first place was a decline of quality and trust within the system, and a lot of that was targeted through the adoption of artificial intelligence," he explained. To counter this, Featured has made AI authorship visible rather than banning it outright. "We run AI detection on every single pitch," Farmiloe said. "We'll run a quality score on every pitch that goes through our platform - whether that's HARO, whether that's Connectively - and we'll allow journalists to see those scores. If it's 100% AI-generated, the journalists will see that. They've got a one-click filter to opt out of those pitches entirely."
Farmiloe also challenged the assumption that being first to respond is the key to success. "It's not necessarily being the first in line, but it's being at the top of the line with the best credentials and the most helpful response," he said, describing a framework based on the HARO acronym: helpful, authentic, relevant, and on time. He emphasized that the market's measurement standards are evolving. "In 2026, the metrics are changing. AI visibility scores are one thing that we're seeing more and more innovators measure against," Farmiloe said. "It's really around: Is my brand visible in AI and LLMs?" He noted that marketers are shifting their metrics "towards the new front page of the internet."
For practitioners, Farmiloe advised focusing on knowledge sharing rather than tactics. "The key takeaway is that you have knowledge to share, and that knowledge is highly valued by journalists and publications. Find a way to share that knowledge, and if you share your knowledge in a meaningful way, it will benefit your business." The full episode and transcript are available at https://majestic.com/seo-in-2026/additional-insights/brett-farmiloe.
