SEO PlaysHARO is gone. These journalist-request platforms still work
Journalists need sources before deadline, and they need them from strangers. That demand used to run through HARO. HARO is gone; the queries moved to a handful of successor platforms, and most of them still cost nothing to join.
What twenty minutes a day buys you is editorial links on news domains — the kind the paid link market prices in the hundreds and still cannot reliably deliver, because no amount of money makes a reporter quote someone who has nothing to say.
The mechanism is unforgiving in exactly two directions: relevance and speed. Reporters close a source hunt within hours, and pitching off-topic gets you removed from the platform. Single-digit hit rates are normal here, so this is a daily habit with a tight filter, not a campaign with an end date.
What you get
A daily twenty-minute pipeline of journalist requests from free platforms, and the pitch shape that lands quotes on real news domains.
Steps
- Sign up at Source of Sources (sourceofsources.com) — free, run by HARO's original founder; up to three emails a day of journalist queries, and you reply directly to the journalist. Platform status reviewed 2026-09-01.
- Join Qwoted (qwoted.com) as an expert; the free tier was live at review time, and requests are answered inside the platform.
- Add Featured.com; requests and podcast invites sit behind the login, so check the current free allowance before paying for anything.
- Save a search for #journorequest plus your topic on X and Bluesky; requests often appear there before anywhere else.
- Pick one query a day that you have a real statistic or firsthand experience for, and skip everything else. Off-topic pitching gets you removed from Source of Sources — their rules say no exceptions.
- Reply within two hours of the email landing; journalists close their source hunt fast.
- Put the full usable quote in the first email: two or three sentences with one concrete number, a one-line credential, and the exact attribution line you want. No attachments, no press kits.
- Log every pitch in a sheet and let volume do its work; a low hit rate still compounds when the cost per pitch is ten minutes.
How to verify it worked
- Google Alerts on your name and brand catches the published article; confirm the link and its rel attribute in the page source.
- Your pitch log shows reply rate over time; if it sits under a few percent after 30 pitches, tighten step 5 (relevance), not your bio.
Why it works
A pitch is not an argument, it is a ready-made quote. The reporter is filling a hole in a paragraph before a deadline, so whoever hands over usable copy — a number, a credential, an attribution line — gets used, and whoever sends two paragraphs about themselves gets skipped.
Evidence
Platform data in our research: Source of Sources shows the best dofollow rate of the successor platforms (~36 percent); Qwoted approval runs around 6 percent with roughly 70 percent of its queries from DR 70-100 publications; one pitch a day yields about two links a month.
Practitioner report, 2025-10: two links from DR 92-94 publications out of one pitching cycle.
Practitioner report, 2026-07: 42 backlinks in four weeks at a 6.5 percent reply rate, from volume pitching with a tight relevance filter.
Last reviewed: 2026-09-01. A play whose evidence stops holding up is rewritten or retired.