Featured

The job is changing for comms and PR teams. Writing a good pitch used to be what set you apart. Now enter AI, where 100 well-written pitches can land in a reporter’s inbox in the time it used to take you to write one. Good writing still matters, but now it’s expected. Nobody’s picking up a sloppy pitch, but nobody’s picking up a perfect one because it’s perfect, either. So reporters are sorting on something else. On Wednesday, Brett Farmiloe dives into how reporters have split into two camps on AI-written pitches: one filters them out on sight, the other doesn’t care how it got written as long as the right person is behind it. Both camps end up rewarding the same thing: a specific, credentialed person who answered the question the reporter actually asked. That’s the part of the job that got harder. The win comes from picking the right person on your side of the org for that specific query and getting them to say something only they could say. Bring your questions to this live session on Wednesday, October 28 at 12pm ET. If you can't make it live, register and I'll send the recording your way! Link to grab your spot in the comments!

New in Featured: Find independent bookstores, built for authors and book publicists. Independent bookstores are built around author events, book clubs, and community programming. Finding the right ones to pitch has meant working through directories one store at a time. Find Bookstores fixes that. Type a place or a genre into the Featured chat, such as "Bookstores in Texas that host author signings" and each result shows: → The store's name, city, and state → A short description of what it is known for → A link to its website or events page → An email address when Featured has one on file Then ask Featured to draft the pitch. Available on every plan, including Free. Start at featured.com.

New in Featured: local TV stations, built for newsjacking. When a story breaks in your client's beat, the local news desk wants a local angle and someone on camera the same day. Now you can go from the story to the desk in one chat: → Newsjacking flags the breaking stories where your client fits, by beat and city market → Ask for the TV stations in the client's market, such as "Find TV stations in the New York market" → Draft the pitch to the news desk from a station card Featured's database covers 1,757 U.S. TV stations, with newsroom contacts for 470 of them across 195 markets. Available on every plan, including Free. Start at Featured.com.

Today, we launched Find Substacks on Featured, with 38,746 Substack publications now searchable in one place. Instead of scrolling Substack for the right newsletter, just type the topic you want to reach. For example: “Find Substacks that cover B2B marketing.” Featured returns a card for every matching publication, including: - Subscriber count - Follower count - Year started - Whether the writer’s DMs are open (with the link) - Social accounts Found one worth pitching? Click Draft Pitch, edit it, and follow the DM link to send it. Then download the list as a CSV for next time. Search 38,746 Substacks and start pitching the newsletters your audience already trusts → Featured.com

Brett Farmiloe goes live with The Marcomm Grind on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 12pm ET, on how pitching works in 2026. Register: themarcommgrind.com/events

Most pitches to journalists are decided in the first ten seconds. Our founder Brett Farmiloe sat down with The Marcomm Grind to talk about how to actually get featured in the media, and the first ten seconds come down to one thing: relevance. Everything else gets sorted after that. "In the first ten seconds a reporter is answering one question, which is whether you are relevant." Once you clear that bar, the job is to be easy to use. Not background, not context, not a company history. "One good quote they can lift without editing beats four paragraphs of context they have to mine." The pace we see work is fifteen to twenty pitches a month and one or two placements from it. Consistency is the whole game. Read the full Q&A in the comments 👇

76% of domains cited by AI appeared only once. That number changes what a PR workflow has to look like. In Featured’s AI Citation Report, the top 100 domains accounted for about 25% of citations. Everything else was scattered across thousands of sites, and three out of four of those sites showed up exactly one time. The old playbook of building a repeatable relationship with the same handful of outlets doesn’t map onto how AI engines source answers. On a Spin Sucks fireside chat with Gini Dietrich this week, Brett Farmiloe described the shift this way: “The rewards are less from the one big hit and more from the breadth of different sites that you could actually be cited on.” Three takeaways from the conversation for PR teams heading into Q4: 1. Audit by engine, not just by brand. Licensing deals mean a source cited heavily in ChatGPT can be absent from Perplexity or Claude. You can be winning in one and invisible in another. 2. Rebuild SOPs around one-and-done placements. Monday is batch A, Tuesday is batch B. If breadth is the output, the process has to be built to produce it. 3. Keep a human check on measurement. Tools give you a baseline, but AI answers vary by model, time of day and session. The most reliable signal Brett has found is still “how did you hear about us?” on a sales call. Full episode linked in the comments 👇

A third of what AI engines cite is sitting wide open, and almost nobody is competing for it. Our first AI Citation Report looked at 22,881 citations across 405 GEO audits. Two numbers stood out. 64.5% of citations went to editorial coverage. Not the brand’s own website. Someone else writing about them. 34.5% went to sites with a domain authority under 40. The niche blogs, the trade newsletters, the page-seven results. The outlets no PR agency puts on a media list. Our founder and CEO, Brett Farmiloe, put it this way on The Nick Standlea Show: “This is the third that is wide open. These are not the ones that are landing on your media list for the PR agency that you’re hiring that’s focused on getting you to those tier ones and getting you the nice placements” The mechanism is simple. Google ranked a directory and let the user choose. An AI engine reads a handful of sources and writes one answer. If your brand shows up in enough of those sources, you are in the answer. And a third of them are sites a small business can actually reach. The catch is consistency. Month one is easy. Month three is where most PR efforts go quiet, and that is exactly when the next model update lands. Full episode linked in the comments 👇

Today, we launched Find Awards on Featured, with 4,596 business awards and recognition opportunities now searchable in one place. Instead of starting with an award name, start with the kind of recognition a business is looking for. For example: “Find free-to-enter US awards for fintech companies that recognize product innovation, with deadlines in the next six months.” Featured searches for relevant opportunities and returns the details needed to evaluate them, including: • Award and category • Deadline • Entry fee • Eligibility • Sponsor • Previous winners • Link to apply Search broadly or get highly specific. Add criteria like industry, location, budget, business function, recognition type, and deadline to narrow the results. Search 4,596 awards so see which ones you qualify for → Featured.com

Great Featured tutorial, Bridget!