Everyone wants to be the answer an AI gives. Almost nobody knows where those answers actually come from.
Brett Farmiloe does, because he owns the pipeline. He is the CEO of HARO and the founder of Featured, which also owns Connectively — 75,000 journalists, 2,500 publishers, and every pitch that moves between them. His first AI citation report measured 22,000 citations across 405 audits, and the result reorders what most businesses are doing about AI visibility.
64% of AI citations came from earned media — editorial coverage, not your own website. And 34% came from sites with a domain authority under 40: the mom-and-pop blogs, the page-seven results, the outlets no PR agency puts on a media list. A third of what AI engines cite is sitting wide open, and almost nobody is competing for it.
He also has the number nobody wants to hear: 86% of brands aren't mentioned for the prompts and queries they most want to be mentioned for. Most brands are invisible.
The other half of this is how not to get filtered out. Brett runs every pitch entering HARO through an AI detector. 21% are 100% AI-generated. On the other side, 35% of journalists one-click opt out of anything AI-written. His line: dictate your real experience and let a model polish it and that's AI-assisted, which is fine. Have the model read the queries and submit for you and that's spam. A journalist's inbox, he says, is the best-trained AI detector there is.
Also in here: how he bought HARO after it was switched off, and had it live again 22 days later.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Most brands are invisible
0:57 They shut HARO down. He bought it.
3:17 64% of AI citations come from earned media
5:34 How do you buy a brand that's already switched off?
11:03 Helpful, authentic, relevant, on time
12:41 Your first move this week: run a GEO audit
14:54 21% of pitches are pure AI. 35% of journalists opt out.
20:36 Why page two through ten suddenly matters
25:38 Zapier
34:33 Thirty creators for every journalist
48:03 High School Reach
48:39 Surviving the next model update
53:50 The skill he's telling his own kids to build
FROM THIS EPISODE
Featured: https://featured.com
HARO: https://helpareporter.com
Connectively: https://connectively.us
Brett Farmiloe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettfarmiloe
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High School Reach, see any high school's real college outcomes: https://highschoolreach.com/yt
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#AIvisibility #GEO #AIsearch #PublicRelations #HARO #Podcast
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