A year after bringing HARO back from the dead, Featured did it again. On June 2, the brand it revived was Connectively — the platform Cision quietly shut down at the end of 2024 — and the relaunch was tied to something bigger: Featured's pivot into what it's calling the AI co-pilot for PR.
It's a big swing, and it's worth paying attention to. Not because every reposition deserves a blog post, but because this one is a useful lens on where PR tech is actually heading — and where it isn't.
Here's what happened, what we think it means, and where we're placing our bets.
A quick recap of how we got here
Connectively didn't start as its own product. It started as HARO.
In 2023, Cision rebranded Help A Reporter Out as Connectively and in April 2024 turned it into a paid SaaS — searchable query feed, pitch tracking, the usual "let's productize the email list" playbook. The pitch was reasonable on paper. In practice, longtime HARO users bounced. The new interface was heavier, the workflow felt foreign, and the magic of HARO — three emails a day, low friction, high trust — got buried under platform UX.
It didn't last long. On December 9, 2024, Cision discontinued Connectively to focus on CisionOne, and the brand went dark.
What most of the PR world missed: when Featured acquired HARO in April 2025, it picked up the Connectively name in the same deal. Featured spent the next year resurrecting HARO and growing it back into the dominant journalist-request platform. Now they're pulling the same move with Connectively — except this time it's the whole company moving into the brand.
What actually happened on June 2
Featured migrated its platform — all 100,000+ users, 2,500 publishers, every opportunity, profile, subscription, and workflow — onto Connectively.us. For existing customers, the company said the only things changing were the name, the logo, and the URL.
But the bigger move sitting underneath the migration is the pivot: Featured is now positioning itself as an AI co-pilot for PR. One interface that surfaces journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking opportunities, awards, and generative engine optimization (GEO) opportunities — with more categories on the roadmap.
"We've spent the last four and a half years building a platform that connects subject matter experts with publishers, and that experience deserves to be preserved as Featured evolves into the AI co-pilot for PR," said Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured. "Connectively is the right home for it — a brand we already own, with real equity left to activate, and a clear path forward of its own."
The real signal: PR is going agent-native
Strip away the brand mechanics and the AI co-pilot framing, and the underlying read is hard to argue with: PR workflows are being rebuilt around AI, and the legacy "open a query inbox + spreadsheet + CRM + browser tabs" stack is on borrowed time.
That's directionally correct. The interesting question isn't whether PR gets reorganized around AI. It's where the value accrues when it does.
There are basically two bets on the table.
Bet one: the closed co-pilot. One destination app. One AI assistant. One interface to find every kind of opportunity. That's Featured's bet, and there's a real audience for it — especially mainstream PR teams who want fewer tools, not more.
Bet two: the open substrate. PR work happens inside the tools power users already live in — Claude Code, Codex, OCPlatform, ChatGPT, custom agents — and the platform layer becomes infrastructure: media data, monitoring, execution primitives, skill packs that any agent can call.
Both are real strategies. We just think the second one ages better.
The reason is simple. As frontier models get smarter, the wrapper-and-workflow layer keeps getting compressed. The durable value moves to what the agent can actually do — proprietary data, real-time signal, verifiable execution. Co-pilot UIs are a fine on-ramp, but they're a tough place to build a moat when every agent your customers use is racing to be the front door themselves.
What to watch now that it's live
A few honest questions worth asking of any platform consolidating this much under one roof:
Migration without disruption. The promise was name, logo, URL. The test is whether subscriptions, saved opportunities, and pitch histories really carried over without surprise. If you're an existing user and haven't sanity-checked your account yet, do it.
Two brands, clear lanes. HARO and Connectively now live under the same parent. The opportunity is a clean split of purpose. The risk is overlap and user confusion about which tool is for what.
Does "co-pilot" mean signal or just more surface area? Expanding from journalist requests into podcasts, bylines, speaking, awards, and GEO is ambitious. The win is fewer tabs. The thing to verify is whether the recommendations are actually relevant — or whether co-pilot becomes a polite word for bigger feed.
None of those are deal-breakers. They're the right questions to ask, and the answers will tell you a lot about whether the relaunch is a rename or a real platform shift.
How to play it as a PR pro
A few moves worth making this week:
Update your profile everywhere. HARO, Connectively, Featured, every other platform you're on. Specific bios and clean credentials win in both human curation and AI matching.
Stop being 100% reactive. If your PR program is purely answering queries, the expansion into podcasts, bylines, speaking, and GEO is a nudge to broaden the surface area you're playing on.
Take GEO seriously. "Show up in AI answers" is moving from buzzword to actual budget line. Start thinking about how your brand surfaces in LLM responses now, not after your competitors do.
Keep your stack diversified. No single platform should be your entire PR plan. Layer in real-time monitoring, direct outreach, and tools that fit your workflow — not the other way around.
Where we're placing our bet
We've spent the last two years watching this market go through every shape — HARO discontinued, Connectively launched, Connectively discontinued, HARO revived, Featured rebuilt, and now Featured becoming Connectively again with an AI layer wrapped around it. The labels keep changing. The underlying job keeps not changing: help great experts and great companies land in the right press, on the right beat, at the right moment.
What is changing is how that job gets done. The teams winning right now aren't the ones with the most polished destination app. They're the ones whose workflows already run inside AI tools — and who have access to better-than-public media intelligence to feed those workflows.
That's the lane we're building in.
Medialyst is the media intelligence layer — proprietary journalist data, real-time press monitoring, and the verified media lists that make outreach actually convert. It's the substrate, not the chat box.
NewsJack.sh is our open-source PR skill pack for AI agents — drop it into Claude Code, Codex, or any agent stack and your existing workflow can find, evaluate, and pitch real press opportunities without ever leaving the tool you already work in.
If Featured's bet is that the future of PR is one closed AI app, ours is the opposite: open agents, open workflows, and better data under the hood. Both can be right at the same time — but we're going to keep building toward the one we think wins.
