A reporter on your beat just published a story with three expert quotes. None of them came from you, and the three companies quoted are now the names ChatGPT mentions when someone asks who leads your space. Here is the honest answer to how they got there. Getting quoted is not luck and it is not paid for. It is a repeatable routine: pick the journalists who actually cover your subject, be reachable in the hours after they ask for sources, and say something specific they cannot get anywhere else.
What are the three ways into a major publication?
You can be quoted as a source, you can write the article yourself, or you can pay for placement. Founders mix these up constantly, and sellers profit from the confusion.
Quoted as a source. A journalist writes the story and quotes you in it. Free, earned, and the strongest signal of the three, because someone independent chose you. This article is about that route.
Contributed author. You pitch an editor and write the piece yourself. Also earned, but a different skill with different rules, covered in how to get your article published in online media.
Paid placement. You pay, and it runs with a label. Forbes' own editorial standards list programs like Councils and BrandVoice under partner and sponsored content, separate from its newsroom, and prohibit staff and contributors from taking compensation from the people they cover. In other words: you can rent space near journalism, but you cannot buy journalism. Whether renting is worth it is a separate question, answered in whether Forbes Councils is worth it.
The source route is the least understood, the least crowded, and the only one that costs nothing but attention. So the rest of this guide is about doing it well.
What happened to HARO, and what replaced it?
HARO is alive and free again, and most guides online have this wrong. The short version of a messy few years: Cision folded HARO into its paid Connectively platform in 2024, then shut Connectively down on 9 December 2024. In April 2025, Featured.com bought the HARO brand from Cision and restarted the free email digests on 22 April 2025. Even fresh 2026 articles still tell founders the whole category is dead. It is not.
Where journalists actually look for sources now:
| Platform | What it does | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| HARO | Journalist requests by email, three times a day | Free and ad-supported, run by Featured.com since 2025 |
| Qwoted | A marketplace where reporters search verified experts | The free tier covers two pitches a month; heavier use is paid |
| Connectively | A browsable platform version of HARO | Cision killed the original in 2024; Featured revived the name in 2026 as HARO's sister product |
| MentionMatch | Requests from B2B and trade writers | The renamed Help a B2B Writer |
| #JournoRequest | A hashtag journalists post on X and Bluesky | Worth watching for your keywords; a public reply pitch is spam |
Fifteen minutes a day across one or two of these is enough. The platforms are not the hard part. The response is.
How do you become the source journalists come back to?
Match the beat before anything else. In Muck Rack's 2026 survey of roughly 900 journalists, 88% said they immediately discard pitches that miss their beat. The same survey found 86% say at least some of their stories start with a PR pitch. Read those together: journalists genuinely want outside sources, and they bin almost everyone who wastes their time.
So build a shortlist of five to ten journalists who actually cover your niche, read their recent work, and respond only to requests you are truly qualified for. One precise answer to the right reporter beats fifty scattergun replies. And keep it short: in Muck Rack's earlier survey cycle, 65% of journalists preferred pitches under 200 words.
Speed matters more than founders expect. Qwoted's own guidance to experts is to respond as fast as you can write something relevant, because a reporter may close a request early once the right source appears. In our own pitching work, the difference between answering within a couple of hours and answering the next day is often the difference between quoted and ignored.
What should your reply to a journalist actually say?
Answer their question in the first two sentences, in words they could print without editing you. Then stop talking about yourself. A reply that works has five parts:
- One line of standing. Name, role, and the single fact that makes you qualified for this question.
- A direct, quotable answer. Two or three sentences of substance, not throat-clearing.
- Something concrete. A number from your own operations, a real example, or a prediction you can defend.
- Availability. Offer a quick call and a headshot, and mean it.
- No sales pitch. The story is theirs, not yours. A reply that markets your product marks you as a source to avoid.
The mistakes we see founders make are the same everywhere: replying to requests outside their expertise, attaching a press kit nobody asked for, sending quotes that say nothing ("we are excited about this space"), and chasing the biggest outlet instead of the trade publication their actual buyers read. A named quote in the right trade title does more for a B2B company than an unread mention in a famous one.
Why does being quoted matter more in the AI era?
Because quotes live inside earned coverage, and earned coverage is what AI assistants repeat. Muck Rack's May 2026 study of more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini found that earned media makes up 84% of all AI citations. Paid and advertorial content makes up 0.3%.
Every time a journalist quotes you, an independent publication has put your name, your role and your claims on a page that AI systems treat as evidence. Stack up enough of those and assistants start naming you unprompted, which is the same mechanism behind getting cited by ChatGPT. A founder who is quoted monthly in their trade press is building AI visibility whether they think about it or not.
The direct answer, for anyone who read this far
How do founders get quoted in major publications? By treating it as a routine, not a lottery. Pick the five to ten journalists who cover your beat. Watch the free request platforms, HARO and Qwoted first, for fifteen minutes a day. Reply fast, under 200 words, with one credential, a quotable answer and a real number. Never pitch off-beat and never pitch your product. Do it for a quarter and you become the source reporters return to, and the coverage that builds is the kind Google rewards and AI assistants cite. This is exactly what our founder visibility work does on a founder's behalf: White Ocean Media practices authority marketing for the AI era, and a founder who is quotable, reachable and specific is the raw material it is built from.