HARO Link Building & the Best Alternatives for 2026

If you searched for HARO link building expecting to sign up and start pitching reporters, here is the news you need first: HARO is gone. The platform that taught a generation of SaaS founders how to earn expert-quote links shut down for good on December 9, 2024. This guide explains what happened, where those links live now, and exactly how to win them in 2026 without burning your whole week on it.

Key takeaways

• HARO became Connectively in 2023 and then closed permanently on December 9, 2024, so the original service no longer exists.
• The real "HARO" today is a set of replacements: Qwoted, Featured, SourceBottle, and a handful of journalist request platforms.
• Most expert-quote links are nofollow, but they still drive referral traffic, brand mentions, and trust signals that matter.
• A good pitch is fast, specific, and quotable in under 150 words. Speed and relevance beat polish.
• For most SaaS teams, source-response is best used as one ingredient in a balanced link profile, not the whole strategy.

What HARO actually was (and why people still search for it)

HARO stood for Help A Reporter Out. It was a free email service that connected journalists who needed expert sources with people willing to be quoted. Three times a day you got a digest of reporter queries. You replied with a tight, useful answer, and if a writer used your response, you usually earned a mention and a link from a real publication.

It worked because it solved a genuine problem on both sides. Reporters on deadline needed credible voices, and founders wanted links from sites they could never pitch cold. For years it was one of the few white-hat tactics that scaled.

The ownership history matters for understanding the shutdown. HARO was acquired by Vocus, folded into Cision in 2014, and then rebranded as Connectively in 2023. The rebrand added paid tiers, a clunkier interface, and a flood of AI-generated pitches that made the inbox useless for journalists.

The Connectively shutdown timeline

Here is how it played out, so you can stop chasing a dead link:

Date	What happened
2010	HARO acquired by Vocus
2014	Folded into Cision
2023	Rebranded as "Connectively" with paid plans
Dec 9, 2024	Connectively shut down permanently
Apr 2025	Featured.com revives the HARO brand name

Cision confirmed the closure on its own site, saying it would focus efforts on its core media products instead (Connectively has been discontinued). Industry coverage from Search Engine Roundtable and others documented the December 9 sunset as it happened. So if a blog post tells you to "sign up for HARO," it is out of date.

How expert-quote links actually work

The mechanic is simple. A journalist or blogger publishes a source request: "Looking for SaaS founders on remote-team tooling," for example. You send a short written quote. If they use it, they typically credit you with your name, your company, and a link back to your site.

You should know two things going in.

First, most of these links are nofollow. Major publishers tag outbound links with rel="nofollow" or rel="ugc" by design. Google has said for years that nofollow is a hint, not a hard rule, and that it may use those links for ranking in some cases. So the value is real but indirect.

Second, the value is bigger than the link tag suggests. A quote in a publication people actually read sends referral traffic, builds brand recognition, and creates the kind of unlinked and branded mentions that correlate with authority. Moz has long argued that implied links and brand mentions carry weight even without a clean dofollow. For a SaaS brand trying to look established, being quoted in a respected outlet does work that a directory link never will.

If you want the broader map of how this fits with editorial coverage, our guide to digital PR for SaaS covers the dofollow side of the same coin.

The best HARO alternatives in 2026

Several platforms split up what HARO used to do. Here are the ones worth your time.

Qwoted

Qwoted is the closest thing to a direct HARO successor and the one most former HARO users moved to. It has a strong base of journalists, a free tier for sources, and a cleaner interface than Connectively ever had. When Connectively announced its closure, Qwoted actively courted HARO refugees. If you only pick one, start here.

Featured (and the revived HARO brand)

Featured.com runs on a different model. Instead of time-sensitive reporter queries, it posts evergreen questions that publishers pull answers from. You write thoughtful responses, and they can get selected weeks later. In April 2025 Featured also acquired and revived the HARO brand name, so "HARO" now points back to a Featured property. The trade-off: it leans toward a paid model for sources who want volume.

SourceBottle

SourceBottle has been around quietly for years and is free. It skews toward lifestyle, business, and Australian and UK media, with fewer hard-tech queries. It is a fine secondary source if your SaaS touches productivity, finance, or small-business topics.

Journalist-led platforms

Beyond the formal tools, journalists increasingly post requests directly. Watch the #JournoRequest hashtag and the various "X for journalists" communities, plus newer tools like Help a B2B Writer for niche business queries. Search Engine Journal maintains an ongoing roundup of these alternatives that is worth bookmarking.

A quick comparison:

Platform	Cost for sources	Best for	Closest to HARO?
Qwoted	Free tier + paid	General PR, tech	Yes
Featured	Free + paid	Evergreen expert answers	Partly
SourceBottle	Free	Lifestyle, business, AU/UK	Loosely
Help a B2B Writer	Free	B2B and SaaS niches	Loosely

How to write a pitch that gets selected

Reporters skim dozens of replies. Yours has to be usable on first read. Here is the structure I use.

1. Answer the exact question in the first line. No throat-clearing. If they asked about onboarding metrics, lead with the metric.
2. Give one concrete, quotable sentence. Specific numbers and a clear opinion beat hedged generalities.
3. Add a short proof point. A stat, a customer example, or a result. This is what makes you credible.
4. Close with a one-line bio. Name, title, company, and a link. Make crediting you effortless.

Keep the whole thing under 150 words. Here is a template you can adapt:

Subject: Re: [their exact query topic]

Hi [name], quick answer to your question:

"[One sharp, quotable sentence with a specific claim or number.]"

Some context: [one or two sentences with a real stat, example, or result that backs it up].

Happy to expand or share data if useful.

[Your name], [title] at [Company]. [URL]. Founded [year], [one credibility line].

Two rules beat everything else. Be fast, because the first strong reply often wins. And be relevant, because a perfect quote on the wrong topic gets ignored. Avoiding sloppy, off-target outreach is one of the link building mistakes that quietly wastes hours.

The honest math: time cost vs link yield

This is where founders need to be realistic. Expert-quote outreach is cheap in dollars and expensive in time.

A typical week looks like this: scan 30 to 60 queries, find 3 to 5 that genuinely fit, write tight responses for each. That is roughly 60 to 90 minutes. From that effort you might land one or two placements in a good month, and several of those will be nofollow.

Backlinko's analysis of outreach and similar industry data consistently show single-digit success rates on cold-style pitching, and source-response is in the same range. So the realistic yield is something like one usable link per few hours of focused work, not per pitch.

That is not bad. It is just slow and lumpy. If you need a predictable number of links by a deadline, source-response alone will not get you there.

Combining quote links with other link types

The smartest move is to treat expert-quote links as the "earned trust" layer of a broader profile, not the whole thing. A natural backlink profile mixes link types, and over-relying on any single tactic looks unnatural. Ahrefs research on link profiles backs the idea that variety and relevance matter more than any single source.

A balanced SaaS profile usually blends:

• Editorial and quote links for trust and brand signals (Qwoted, Featured, digital PR).
• Guest posts for contextual, topical relevance, covered in guest posting for SaaS.
• Link insertions and niche edits for placement on existing ranking pages.
• Linkable assets like data studies that earn links passively.

If you want the full taxonomy, our breakdown of the types of backlinks maps how each one fits a SaaS strategy and where the dofollow value really sits.

When to do it yourself vs outsource

Do it yourself when you are early stage, when you personally have a strong point of view, and when you can commit one focused hour a week. Founder quotes often perform better than agency-written ones because they sound real and carry genuine authority.

Outsource or buy other link types when your time is worth more elsewhere, when you need volume on a schedule, or when source-response is not producing enough dofollow placements to move rankings. The right answer is usually a mix, which is exactly the tradeoff we lay out in build vs buy vs hire for link building.

If you would rather skip the inbox grind entirely and acquire vetted links on real-traffic sites with predictable timelines, that is what Saaslinks was built for. You can browse the inventory and fund a wallet to start ordering placements that are tracked to indexed.

The bottom line

HARO is gone, but the tactic it pioneered is alive and well under new names. Qwoted, Featured, and SourceBottle let you earn the same expert-quote mentions, as long as you pitch fast, stay specific, and accept that the yield is slow and mostly nofollow. Use it as the trust layer of a wider profile, and pair it with the link types that actually move rankings on a timeline. When you are ready to add predictable, vetted placements to the mix, start with Saaslinks.