Getting Featured in the Media in the Age of AI: Brett Farmiloe on The Marcomm Grind

Host 00:00

For those of you who are new to the Marcomm Grind, we are a free community of marketing and communications professionals. A lot of us might be on small teams, or you might even be out on your own as a freelancer, entrepreneur, solopreneur, what have you. And so a lot of us are tackling the industry now in our fields because it is so different. So whether you are new to marketing or comms, or just the way we work today is very different, especially with AI, that's a lot of what the Marcomm Grind is about. We're just figuring out how to do our jobs today, because it does look very different from how it looked in the past.

Today I'm super excited that we have Brett Farmiloe. He is joining us to talk about AI and pitching. He owns several companies, one of them being Featured, and he brought back the company HARO. If you were in media relations or PR, you might remember that Cision bought it, and now he brought it back. The one thing that's really neat, I think, about you is you're probably one of the few people who are actually able to share what pitching looks like, especially from an AI perspective, and especially what it looks like getting into a journalist's inbox from a data perspective. We've had over two million pitches come through, so that is a lot of data. I'm really excited that you can share that with us and give us that overview.

That's what we're going to dive into today. We're going to look at what pitching looks like today, what journalists see, and how to actually get those pitches into those inboxes, especially as many of us are probably starting to use AI in our work. It's expected that that's going to evolve and also be involved in some of the pitching process. So Brett, before we kick things off, I would love to know: how did you go about having HARO, and what does that look like today? Are there any differences between how it was before and how it is now?

Brett Farmiloe 02:05

First of all, thanks for having me on. I love the Marcomm Grind. The community is super cool to be a part of. I love the Circle experience and interacting with different members.

It's funny you mentioned data, because I actually started my career as an auditor in accounting, so everything's pretty data-driven on my end. And this is my fourth company, if you will. I ran a digital marketing company for a decade and basically didn't have any intention to run that. I got it to rank on page one for the term "digital marketing company" and then actually started a digital marketing company from that. That introduced me to the problem that we're solving with Featured and with Connectively and with HARO, which is that everyone has an abundance of knowledge to share but nowhere to really share it.

Across those three different platforms, originally we went to market with Featured and then with HARO. For those of you who don't know HARO, it's a free email newsletter sent out three times a day. It connects journalists with sources for stories. It was founded in 2008. It was acquired by Cision in 2010. It was discontinued in April 2024 and rebranded to Connectively, which essentially moved journalist requests over to a platform. And then Connectively was discontinued in December of 2024. That's when we stepped in and said, "Hey, we'd love to acquire these brands, revive these brands, bring them back to market." And that's how I mistakenly got the responsibility of managing and running three different brands that all focus on the journalist request space.

Today, we've sent well over 100 million emails from HARO within the last 12 months to subscribers. Connectively connects a source with a publisher or journalist every six seconds. And then Featured is a co-pilot for public relations. It's essentially like a ChatGPT for PR. The problem is that PR is so many different things today, and how do you have one centralized tool, without 53 different browser tabs open, so that you can get everything that you need, from pitching that journalist to building a media list to finding Substacks to podcasts, all of those different things?

Host 04:21

I love that, and I love that you're even incorporating things like Substack, because I know that was one of the questions in the Marcomm Grind community, and that we just get in general. Everyone's always looking at media, but even looking at Substack and newsletters, that's helpful for PR, comms, and marketing folks to figure out how to actually get in them.

For any of us who have pitched before, I think our biggest challenge, or the thing we always hope for, is that we want to make sure we're getting into a journalist's inbox. I would say prior to that, it was a lot of, "Okay, are our pitches relevant?" But now, because of AI, we've learned that, especially through your platform, pitches are being scored on whether there's AI use and maybe how that's being used. So can you share a little bit about that scoring mechanism, and maybe even some insight into what a reporter's inbox might look like from that perspective too, and then how they might decide, "Okay, this is a good fit," or "This is just AI slop"?

Brett Farmiloe 05:23

I'll start from the beginning. The reason why HARO was discontinued was really around quality and trust issues. Because it's an email-based product and because it's so accessible, it created a lot of spam and low-quality pitches, and that's ultimately what led to its discontinuation. So when we acquired it, the very first decision we made was that we need to bring back the quality and trust at its core. How are we going to do that? We found out that AI slop was really one of the main problems. And so we decided to send every single pitch through an AI detection service so that there was a score to that.

We partnered with Pangram, which is an AI detection tool, and they just did a case study on us. About 1.4 million pitches were scored for AI detection. 21% of all of those pitches were 100% AI-generated, and then we found that 35% of all journalists will opt out entirely of those AI pitches. By default, when a journalist makes a request on HARO, there's a little box that they could check to say "no AI responses," and that's unchecked by default. We see 35% of folks check that little box. What happens is that if a pitch is marked as 100% AI-generated, it won't be delivered to that journalist, and it will go back to you as the source that sent the pitch to say, "Hey, we detected that this was written by AI." If it's a false positive or whatever, you always have a chance to revise and resend your pitch to actually get it delivered. So there's a lot of AI activity that's happened, both on the monitoring side, to detect when there's a relevant HARO query, and then also on the drafting and pitching side.

I think that Pangram is a great AI detection technology, but journalists are way better. Journalists can sniff and smell and see an AI-written pitch from a mile away, because they get so many pitches. On average, I think there are about 42 pitches per query—one second, there's a huge spider that just popped in.

Host 07:38

Oh gosh.

Brett Farmiloe 07:40

I'm just seeing it go down. Just making sure. Anyways, there are 42 pitches on average on Connectively. There are 13 pitches on average through HARO. So there's quite a bit of volume that goes through these platforms.

The things that really stand out: I always say that "Help a Reporter Out" is the HARO acronym, but there's another acronym that I think is helpful for anyone that's looking to pitch. It's be helpful, be authentic, be relevant, and be on time.

Being helpful: oftentimes the mistake that we see in the inbox is essentially that it's about me pitching, and it's not about the journalist that is looking to write the story. So it's putting yourself in the journalist's shoes to essentially say, "Okay, will this pitch help them do their job?" I think that's step one.

Being authentic is just don't be AI. So instead of having a 100% AI-generated pitch, it's essentially saying, "Okay, how do I rise above the baseline or the bar and actually have an authentic pitch that makes it so that the person I'm representing can stand out?"

Being relevant: journalists are super descriptive in terms of the instructions for the source they're looking for. So if they're looking for a pulmonologist in Ohio, don't pitch a pulmonologist in California. Really simple in terms of that relevance.

And then being on time: journalists are on deadline. They're typically looking for the best source the fastest so that they can move forward with their story. Help a Reporter Out is a very fast type of service. Typically a journalist is going to get connected with their source within minutes or hours. And then for Connectively, we list out deadlines to pitch against. So just be cognizant that as soon as the journalist gets their story, they get paid. They could submit to the editor and get paid, and that's ultimately what they've got to do multiple times. So it's helping them do their job, being authentic, relevant, and on time.

Host 09:47

That's great, and those are some great tips, too. If you're pitching and it gets sent to a journalist, and it does come back saying that there was AI being used, does the journalist know?

Brett Farmiloe 09:59

Nope. If you send an AI-detected pitch, we're trying to help you out. We're trying to help you put your best pitch out there. So it's not sent to the journalist until it passes the AI detection.

Host 10:11

Okay, great. And just to reiterate, it does let you go back and refine it. Does it score it as you're writing it? Once you submit it, does it let you know?

Brett Farmiloe 10:21

Once you submit it, that's when you would be notified. Since HARO is email-based, there's no way for us to score it in real time like we can on Connectively, which is a platform.

The thing that I would say is there's so much worry and uncertainty around AI usage, and if you have to ask yourself the question, you're probably on the good side. We ban a user from HARO every 23 minutes because of violations of our terms of service, or because they're a fake persona, or they've got some crazy pitch farm that exists. We see a lot of bad. So the reason we have these guardrails in place probably isn't for the people on this call. It's mainly for people who are just setting it and forgetting it. They don't have a human in the loop. They're just having AI consume the query, write the pitch, send the pitch, all in an automated fashion. That's not cool. That's when we ban you for life. If you're asking that question, you're probably safe.

Host 11:33

Okay, great. In the Q&A, and I will actually drop that in the chat, you had given an example about people who are using AI. I think it was people on their treadmill who might be voicing what their response might be, but then they might use AI to clean it up. Can you talk a little bit about, from your perspective, what some best practices might be, or what other tips you might give folks who do use AI but are not going to just have AI write the entire thing and submit it on their behalf without checking it? What are good ways to actually use AI?

Brett Farmiloe 12:12

With Pangram, the AI detection tool that we've been using, they just came out with a new model, Pangram 4, that's really around mixed AI usage. Rather than "did you use AI, did you not"—that's an old model—the newer model essentially tries to take a look and see if there's actually mixed usage, and it gets way better at detection for that.

One of my favorite use cases—I talk to probably about 10 to 20 users a week just on user calls to figure out how they use our products—is someone on a treadmill at 5:00 a.m. looking through their journalist requests and voicing their stuff into their AI, and then using that to draft a pitch. To my understanding, that is acceptable use. It's not going to be marked as AI because it wasn't, "Here's a journalist request, write me a pitch." It's more so, "Hey, I as a human looked at the journalist request. Here are my original thoughts. Now help me polish it. Help me finalize this to get it ready for submission." I think that's where it's a good practice: being able to get that initial starting point based off of some sort of input to get to a polished output to send.

Host 13:34

Okay. So you can use AI. You just need to be intentional about how you're using it and make sure that you're actually checking, and not just using it for content generation, point blank.

Brett Farmiloe 13:45

Totally. And I get it. The biggest barrier is time. It's time and knowledge in terms of being able to submit.

There are two camps of journalists. I mentioned that there are 35% of journalists who opt out of AI. And then there's a whole other camp that doesn't even care. That camp is all about getting connected with the right source for the story, and they don't care if AI was the one that even connected them, as long as they have the source that they can now pick up the phone and call. That's ultimately where there's a division. I think that's really interesting, because there's a future where a journalist puts out a query and an AI PR agent monitored it and alerted the comms person to say, "Hey, this is a good opportunity. You should respond to it," and that pitch gets sent. If it's 100% AI-generated, some of those journalists don't even care, because they're going to now go do their job. They're going to set up an interview. They're going to talk. They're going to get what they need and then proceed with their story.

Host 14:52

Wow. So those would be the journalists who don't check that box. They literally don't care if they're seeing AI, as long as it gives them, ideally, a credible source and facts.

Brett Farmiloe 15:03

Yep. Because at the end of the day, journalists need to connect with sources for stories. Sourcing is this infinite problem that every writer has, and especially new writers that may or may not have the network that's required. You're also seeing a lot of movement for journalists. They're writing different beats that they've never written before. They're writing for five different publications as a freelancer, and they need to get connected with someone to put their story into an interesting spotlight for a reader. Oftentimes the source is what can inform the story. It's what can be featured in the story. And so journalists and PR folks always have this kind of battle, and they totally just need each other.

Host 15:49

Yeah. No, that's a really good point.

Brett Farmiloe 15:51

The last thing I'll say about AI detection: it's the hottest, most alienating topic I've encountered in the last year. There are people that have really, really strong feelings about this, and as a platform we're trying to get it right. Where we've ultimately arrived is, every single day in our inbox, it's always, "Oh, I wrote this pitch, but it's marked as AI."

Host 16:12

Okay, I hear that.

Brett Farmiloe 16:14

So it's like, okay, well, what do we do? A couple of things that we are doing: we're probably going to triple down in this space. Right now it's relying on just one AI detection technology that works really, really well, and now it's going to be introducing a couple of other ones. We're going to be partnering with another AI detection service to have a double false-positive type of check. We also are seeing that providers like Anthropic and OpenAI are releasing media APIs, and these media APIs will allow you to check for watermarks on text. That's another one, where if we can tap into their stuff, we could see if text is watermarked, and if so, that's going to be a pretty good, more reliable way.

So I don't think that we'll be talking about this topic in a couple of years. I think that ultimately there's going to be a more accepting manner from publications and journalists. Right now it's just so new and such a hot topic that people don't know where to really fall. But I think that ultimately the dust starts to settle on this topic over the next couple of years.

Host 17:23

So interesting, talking about the watermarks, because I think it was July-ish when that whole announcement went out from Anthropic, and some folks didn't even know that OpenAI has had watermarks on some things. So there have been different ways to detect this; no one talked about it enough. And there was immediate concern with, "Oh my gosh, I use it and don't check it, so people are going to be able to tell," or, "Hey, but I run things through Claude or ChatGPT or what have you to fine-tune it." It might give you your finished piece, and even though you're reviewing it, you might copy and paste that. Would you imagine that if it did detect some watermarks in there, that would still be a hard flag for no, or could it tell how it was still being used, or that there was still value?

Brett Farmiloe 18:19

I think it just goes back to the mixed use of where does it fall. Is it 100% human-written? Is it 100% AI-generated? Because of the adoption, you're just seeing more mixed usage of it. So whether that's watermark detection or otherwise an API that you're calling, it's still about a percentage of certainty and having an acceptable level of what this is. Everyone is just figuring out what that acceptable level actually is. Some of the best ones to reference are the editorial guidelines of different publications. If you're pitching a specific publication, each one has its own AI policy that can be referenced and checked. You might have a publication that has an extremely hard stance on it. Most, I think, are just going to say, "Okay, mixed use is totally fine."

Host 19:15

Gotcha. Okay, great. Thank you. I would love to talk now a little bit about the perspective of AI assistants and how they've worked to get editorial coverage cited, from an AEO and GEO perspective. In the past year or so, everyone's like, "PR is having its moment again. Oh my gosh, PR is so relevant." Earned media definitely matters when it comes to citation. So what data points have you seen, or even from a landscape perspective, where people are now using earned media to enhance brand coverage and get more AI assistants to point buyers in that brand's direction?

Brett Farmiloe 20:01

I think this is the most exciting time ever for everyone on this call, in terms of just the impact that you're able to make on a company and its ability to connect with customers or recruit talent or whatever the objective is.

The thing that I will give a call to action on for everyone here, and this is a very simple checklist item, is to make sure that you have a press room, a press page on your website. This is the difference between PR in 2009 and where we're at today: getting featured in TechCrunch is no longer the finish line. It is the starting point. Your press room is the very first central place of truth that an AI assistant goes to determine the information that it should be indexing, checking, and then fanning out to ensure that that information is reliable. So if your founder is on a podcast, it could go in your press room, and that could now be the central source of truth. Then it could verify that podcast, that the founder's been there, and have some citable stats from within that podcast, and now that starts to appear in an AI answer.

The thing that most people miss—the stats are: 16% of Y Combinator startups have a press room. 27% of Inc. 5000 companies have a press room. And it is a huge missed opportunity, because 18% of all citations about a company come from a press room. So if there's one call to action for everyone, it's to create a press page. Make sure that it's agentic-ready. One tool that everyone can check out is called IsAgentic. You could basically put in your website and figure out how agent-friendly it is. We're finding that about 6% of the entire internet is agent-ready, meaning that the other 94% is making it very difficult for AI agents to access your information. This is a problem, because you're also seeing that the majority of traffic on the web today is AI agents. It's no longer human traffic. And so media relations goes to machine relations, and it starts with your actual press room.

Host 22:22

If you're part of a smaller team, do you have any best practices or tips for how to start on these platforms? Where do you even begin? What opportunities should you maybe start looking at first? And to give people a picture of how it might look when you start, maybe at 30 days in, this is some of the pickup you might expect, or you might be able to tailor your pitch differently because of feedback. Do you have any perspective on that?

Brett Farmiloe 22:52

Definitely. As a comms pro or PR pro, you're asked to do a whole lot more with a whole lot less, which is exactly why we built something like Featured. The call to action for that is we have workflows, and workflows are always-on PR assistants that do specific jobs within public relations.

We just launched a newsjacking workflow. What newsjacking does is you could essentially say, "Here's my client. Here's my spokesperson. Here's what they could talk about. Here's what's off limits. Go find me relevant news topics, and check this every two hours. You could Slack me, you could email me when there's a story with an angle and why this is relevant." I've got this on for a couple of clients that we take on ourselves. One is an RV rental company, and some of the different things that they're able to comment on are fuel prices and how that impacts RV travel, things like that. Last week I got this email that's like, "Inflation in Iowa is out of control. Gas prices are up by 10% in the last six weeks there, so how does that impact RV travel in the Midwest?" That's one that I would never even think of: "Oh yeah, let me monitor the news and think about what the angle is, and now let me press a button to go get connected with the right podcast to pitch about this topic, the right journalist to pitch, the right TV stations to go to."

We've streamlined this whole process, because when we talk to PR professionals, they're like, "Look, I spend two, three hours a day just scrolling through news headlines and trying to figure out what's happening in the world." So now you're seeing the shift with workflows to say, "All right, instead of two or three hours monitoring, I'm going to spend two or three hours pitching, in a room with the journalist, whatever it is." That's where the value really gets unlocked within comms roles.

So whether that's newsjacking, or workflows like monitoring HARO—I love our product, but opening an email three times a day and looking through a bunch of irrelevant stuff isn't a good use of anyone's time. We have a Monitor HARO workflow that you could set up on Featured that will look at all the different queries, notify you the minute that one comes out, and allow you to respond, so that you spend way less time monitoring. No 53 browser tabs open that you're clicking through. You need these opportunities to come to you, so you can do more with less.

Host 25:30

I'm kind of cringing at the tabs I have open in the background here. So with Featured, you can use HARO and everything through that? You don't have to necessarily sign up for all of it?

Brett Farmiloe 25:42

Yeah, exactly. You could send HARO pitches through Featured. We have an email connector, so you could connect to Gmail or Outlook and then send emails to journalists directly through Featured.

Host 25:57

Okay, great. And does Featured then let you know once your pitches have been received? Are you able to build media lists in there? Can you see that from a PR person's perspective?

Brett Farmiloe 26:10

Definitely. I think we've got about 67,000 journalists that are on HARO that are accessible on Featured, so you're able to create journalist lists, things like that. But we also added the ability to search about 1.5 million social creators across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. We just added 38,000 Substacks. We've got a huge list of publications for Medium. I think we just added about 17,000 Ghost newsletters, and then we also added beehiiv as well. So you could essentially make this a central starting point to build a list.

In terms of tracking and outreach, right now that's just done through your own inbox. We've got plans to make that more CRM-like, so that when you see a journalist that's suggested, there's history there: "Oh, you pitched this person in June and they didn't respond," or they did. But right now it's all through a native inbox.

Host 27:16

Okay, great. That's really helpful. And again, I love how it is taking different types of media and putting that all in one place, because my gosh, the PR role looks so different today than it did before. I've also seen a lot more people pitching themselves. Are you seeing that too? Or is it a mix of true PR folks who are pitching their executives versus people pitching themselves as the source?

Brett Farmiloe 27:45

It's actually kind of interesting, because I contribute to Inc. and to Fast Company, and periodically, probably about once a month, I'll put out a HARO request to help me write the article. The stuff that I see in my inbox as a "contributor," quote unquote, is interesting, because when I see a reputable PR firm or a comms pro that's got it together and they're pitching a source, I'll be biased in saying that I value that pitch more than the person who's self-representing themselves. It's just because it's a stronger pitch. It's more professional. It's more of what I'm looking for: that person on the other side knows how to be helpful, authentic, relevant, on time. So unless it's a subject matter expert that truly has the knowledge and expertise of what I'm looking for on a story, I'm going to typically side with PR and comms pros, for better or worse.

Host 28:50

I guess that kind of makes sense, right? Especially those of us who have studied how to pitch and built our career around some of that, too. It just looks better in the inbox.

Brett Farmiloe 29:03

I call it the HARO hangover, because when I put out a HARO request, my inbox takes about two weeks to recover.

Host 29:10

Oh gosh, I bet.

Brett Farmiloe 29:12

For Inc. or Fast Company, I'm getting probably over a hundred pitches for that.

Host 29:17

Wow.

Brett Farmiloe 29:18

If you're thinking about it that way, it's almost how a recruiter goes through resumes. For anyone who's been through the job hunt recently, you know how frustrating that can be, and you know the stats that say recruiters on average look at a resume for, I think it's six seconds or something like that, before they move on to the next resume. It very much feels like that for a journalist when they have so many pitches in their inbox. It's immediately that blink test.

This is something that I think is helpful to hear, because we spend so much time on the details of what goes into the pitch and all this different stuff. You almost have to, before you press send, get up from the computer, take a breath, and go back to the blink test, because that's essentially the test that you have to pass first. If you get past the blink test, then that's going to be the other 20%, but 80% of it is getting through the blink test with a good subject line and the right formatting. I can't tell you how many really poorly formatted emails come through, where it's one big text block.

Host 30:33

Oh wow.

Brett Farmiloe 30:34

Things like that. So just passing the blink test, I think, is a really good call to action.

Host 30:40

So from your perspective, when you put out those calls—and I know there are some general best practices, but journalists do have a little bit of their own preference—what's your preference? If you were putting out a call and we on the call were going to try to respond to that, from your perspective, what does a good pitch look like for you?

Brett Farmiloe 30:59

I almost jump into the opposite end of that question, of what I don't like. It's easier to think about that. I don't like it when multiple sources are pitched. It's like, "Oh, if you don't like this one, we've got this one. If you don't like those two, we've got that one."

Host 31:16

Oh gosh.

Brett Farmiloe 31:17

It's too much work. Just give me the one. So I think that's one thing that I'll see in some pitches.

Other stuff is that you almost have to play for both sides, because there are journalists that are going to copy and paste into their article, and then there are others that are going to set up a Zoom call, hop on there, and schedule an interview. Your pitch almost has to play to both sides, and/or you figure out who that journalist is, what their preference is, and how they typically operate. You could look at this because every single HARO request has a HARO journalist profile. You're able to see the articles that they've recently posted, the publications that they've written for, and any pitch preferences that we've identified that we're making available. That's usually pretty helpful to see if you should pitch something that could be copied and pasted, like, "Here's a quote, feel free to use it," or, "Happy to connect you with such and such source."

Host 32:24

Great. That all makes sense, and I can't imagine being on the receiving end and just what you've seen and what others have seen. We talked a little bit about how Featured can connect you to newsletters and publications, what have you. Now that we're seeing influencers, and almost anyone can have a newsletter, are there qualifications or certain guardrails that you go through before you post that request?

Brett Farmiloe 32:57

I think that you can look at subscriber count and following and things like that. For podcasts, for better or worse, listenership is one of those metrics that's not really reliable, quite honestly, but it's a metric that you could take back to your client and say, "Hey, look, there's at least some metric that I could put to this."

For us, when building our index, we looked at 5 million podcasts and we whittled that down to 814,000 podcasts. We did that based off of when the last update was. There are a lot of podcast databases that have a podcast that last posted in 2003, and you probably need something within the last 60 days. So even if they only have two episodes, it's still something that recently started up that's talking about a niche. There's a podcast for everything. And Substack's quickly having better coverage across these different verticals and things like that. So I would just say subscriber count and things like that.

Host 33:58

If someone is maybe newer at the PR role, or they're in a company, maybe a small company, and they're looking at platforms, can you get Featured, and maybe that means you don't necessarily need parts of, or whole, other vendor platforms like Muck Rack or Cision? Can you get away, to some extent, knowing that's not every single thing, with saying, "I'm just going to have Featured, and that's going to help me identify, from a pitching and media perspective, who my executives need to be in front of. I can see when requests come in," stuff like that?

Brett Farmiloe 34:34

Our goal with Featured is to make it a centralized PR tool. It's connecting with different subscriptions and sources that you just can't get away from. It's bringing a lot of that data into Featured, similar to how you almost do that within Claude. There are MCP connectors that allow all of these different services to go to the place where PR and comms pros are starting their day. Whether that's using Featured on featured.com or within Claude, you have to meet people where they're at.

Host 35:10

Mimi, I see that you had a few questions. Feel free to come off mute if you'd like to go ahead and ask them.

Mimi 35:14

Thanks, Leia. And lovely to meet you, Brett. I've really enjoyed the conversation today.

Brett Farmiloe 35:19

You as well.

Mimi 35:21

Great. Yes, I'm Mimi. Most recently, I've been working in the tech sector. I really like your four tips on pitching to journalists and what companies should be doing more to be more agentic-ready. But interestingly enough, we're seeing more social media and AI algorithms now prioritize individual creators and influencers more than company pages. So to your earlier point, in terms of really focusing on having company press pages and press rooms, should that still be the focal point, or should we also be focusing on having more specific spokespeople pages?

Brett Farmiloe 36:03

Here are a couple of ratios that blow my mind. There are six PR professionals for every journalist, and there are 30 creators for every PR professional. So the ratio of making that match is very skewed in the traditional sense, and very in favor in where things are going.

One of the coolest LinkedIn hacks that we've seen as of late—by the time this comes out, it won't be a hack anymore; it won't work—is that what you put in the very first sentence of your LinkedIn post is actually getting cited by AI. So you could basically come out and say, "The best journalist request platform is HARO," or whatever unfounded claim there is, and sometimes that'll get indexed and cited.

I think where PR is today is not one thing. It is 38 different things, and there are all these different spokes on all the different stuff that you've got to complete and get done. So I don't think it's an or; it's an and. You've got to have your press room as a checklist item. You've probably got to have the spokespeople posting on the social media platforms that are going to connect with their audience, and by extension of connecting and growing that following, I think that's when you start to see some of those AI citations.

Mimi 37:28

No, that's great. I love the fact that you're a stats man. That's always very helpful. You can definitely tell you work in PR if you like your stats. So I guess with all the stats that you've been telling us and that you have at your disposal, how far do you see the use of AI going in the media, in terms of trends you're seeing?

Brett Farmiloe 37:48

Here's where I think we're at: there are a lot of headwinds with traditional media and traditional publications, and there are a lot of tailwinds with creators in terms of how people are getting their news today. People are following their favorite creators and getting their news from their social platforms. So if we're going to press fast forward on this movie and look ahead a couple of years, I think you're probably going to see individual creators have, if not more importance than traditional publications, then equal importance. That's one reason why you need to start investing in doing some of these creator-type pitches. And again, it's in your favor today. You have an unfair advantage as a PR and comms pro to pitch a creator, because there are 30 creators for every public relations professional. I think that's one really interesting thing.

At the end of the day, it just comes down to: am I getting in front of my target audience? Am I measuring this, and what do the analytics say? And then it's doubling down on the stuff that works and continuing to try it until it doesn't work anymore, and then you've got to move on to the next thing.

Host 39:02

If you had to give advice to someone who is getting into pitching, and they are trying to determine what the right publications or the right reporters and journalists are, what advice would you give? And how could Featured help them determine that?

Brett Farmiloe 39:23

A couple of things are actually really interesting about this, and if we're going down the data and stats realm, I'll go one level deeper. We recently did an AI citation report on Featured, where we have a tool called a GEO audit. You put in a website, you put in your prompt or whatever, and it looks across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini and figures out if you have visibility for these five different prompts, and it looks and sees what's actually being cited.

The unique part of this is that what's being cited by AI isn't on your traditional media list. The way we've always gone into these different systems to find the journalists that we need to pitch—the media list is looking dramatically different if your objective is AI visibility. We found that, I think it was 34.5% of all domains that were being cited by AI had a domain authority of less than 40. Domain authority, on a scale of 1 to 100, is how authoritative your website is. These are sites that are your mom-and-pop blogs that are covering a particular niche and are being cited by AI, and it's lending to that objective that you as a PR or comms pro have.

So I think that's where I would start. Number one, do a GEO audit. You could do one for free on Featured. Number two, identify what are the sites that are actually being cited by AI, and what are the types of content that are being cited by AI. Figure out what your strategy is from that audit, and then just execute. I think it's getting away from the traditional "let's go build a media list and here are all the different journalists," and instead, "let's build our AI visibility initiative," and use an audit to do that. And if you wanted to build and find journalists and newsletters and creators as well, you could do all that on Featured.

Host 41:18

That's a great place to start. I feel like a lot of us have no idea, right? You can speculate, but you don't know how you're actually showing up. So I think that's great, starting with an audit, so you have a starting point and then you can build from that.

On the topic of GEO, I actually have noticed that more content management systems, especially with websites, are now building in their own—if not necessarily an audit—but they're helping you with AEO. They might look at meta tags and what have you. And I actually noticed one that says, "Hey, refresh your blogs so they can be found more in AI search." I understand that, and I think many of us can figure out how to do that from a blog perspective. Now, how should someone think about that from the press room, outside of just the blog? So not really owned, but more of that earned media, because it's not like you're going to go right in and update a press release. What opportunities might there be to refresh that content, or is it just to get more placements?

Brett Farmiloe 42:21

Owned is a huge opportunity, and in particular content refreshes, because I feel like there was a time period where we were just pumping out blog content. I don't know if that's subsided—I don't have any stats on that—but it just felt like we went through a moment where we were putting out four blog posts every single week, month, whatever it is. All of that content still exists. How do you refresh that and make it so that it could work to your advantage?

I think there are a couple of ways to refresh blog content, but I'll cite one research paper that came out. It's a little older; it was in 2024. There's a team of researchers from Princeton and other universities that found that quotes increase AI visibility. What this research paper did was it actually had AI-generated quotes that got inserted into content refreshes, and it measured how that impacted search ranking. It found, on average, a 41% increase in a page's search ranking if you just included a quote in the article.

I think that's actually a great call to action. If a PR and comms team is looking to elevate the thought leadership of their company, how do you actually take the thought leaders of your company and get their quotes into the actual blogs that exist on your own website? Because if quotes increase AI visibility, and your objective is to go get your team quoted, what better opportunity than your own blog?

Host 43:55

That's an interesting data point. I've built in content refreshing where that wasn't necessarily as high up on my to-do list in the past, but given how it really does impact your ranking with AI, okay, we've got to do it. And it's sometimes a little bit—I don't know if I should say easier, but I'll say easier than always turning out net-new content, especially if you're going to be doing it on a frequent basis. It also depends on the size of your team. So refreshing is a great tip as well.

Any last-minute remarks that you want to leave with the community here?

Brett Farmiloe 44:36

I think we're in a really overwhelming time. We joke about the 53 browser tabs, but that's the reality of what's going on in all of our brains right now, because you listen to this session and then you go to the next, and before you know it, you're looking at, like, my Post-it notes here. It's just to-do list galore, right? So I think the call to action really is to try to simplify things, calm down, take a breath, and try to figure out a really simple way to push forward.

The things that I would say are really simple, basic building blocks: sign up for HARO at helpareporter.com so you can put your email address in and start to immediately get media opportunities into your inbox. Do that. I would go sign up for a Featured workflow. You've got the code if you need more usage, but we also make these workflows available on free plans. So you could just go set up a newsjacking workflow and start to have some of that stuff enter into your inbox, connect those opportunities to all of the different stuff that we've built within Featured, and you can start to see how these dots are connecting and take a couple of hours out of your day to get that back. I think it's about utilizing some of the tools that builders are building—us, others—because there's a lot of innovation that's happening in the space.

And maybe the last thing I'll say is just measure it, because we're all figuring it out, and the measurements are going to change. But how do you know that this stuff is actually driving results? Some of that's qualitative, some of it's quantitative. The qualitative is your sales team asking, "Hey, how'd you hear about us?" and it's like, "Oh, well, we found you on ChatGPT." And it's like, "Cool, plus one for us." So anyways, try to simplify it. Don't get overwhelmed, and it'll all be okay.

Host 46:31

I love that. Simplifying, I think, is something we all could use and be intentional about. So thank you for saying that. But thank you so much, Brett, for joining us today, and thank you to everyone who joined today. I hope you enjoyed today's session, and we will see you all at the next one.

The Marcomm Grind is a free community of marketing and communications professionals, many of whom work on small teams or independently as freelancers, consultants, and solopreneurs. Its sessions focus on how marketing, communications, and PR work actually gets done today, as AI reshapes the day-to-day of the profession, with practitioners and industry guests sharing what’s working now.