The Source-Request Landscape in 2026: What's Actually Live

If you run earned media for a brand (or five), the source-request world looks nothing like it did a year ago. The names got shuffled, a few obituaries were written too early, and at least one product you remember now does the opposite of what it used to. Operators keep pitching into channels that no longer take pitches, or skipping ones that quietly came back.

Here is the current map: what's live, what's gated, and what's gone.

The Cision reshuffle (the part everyone gets wrong)

Most of the confusion traces to one set of moves by Cision in mid-2026:

• The original Connectively (their HARO successor) was shut down.
• The former Featured inbound product, the pay-to-pitch board where you post a question and experts respond, was renamed Connectively. So when someone says "Connectively" today, they mean that board, not the old one.
• The Featured.com name was repurposed for a brand-new outbound product: an AI chatbot that aggregates requests from HARO, Qwoted, and Connectively to help you pitch.

So "Featured" still exists as a name, but it points at something completely different now. If you are trying to post a research brief or a source request, Featured.com is not where it goes. It has no inbound source-request side anymore.

What's live for reverse-pitching right now

Two channels are worth your time today:

• MentionMatch (formerly Help a B2B Writer). An open submission board. You post the request, sources respond, and the response link is permitted, so replies route straight back to you.
• Connectively (the former Featured board). A post-a-question, experts-respond service. It is linkless by design: it flags competitive redirects, so you keep the request on the board and pull responses from there.

The same request needs different handling on each. MentionMatch wants the discrete listing fields and accepts your reply path. Connectively wants the question on the board and nothing that looks like an outbound redirect.

HARO is back (despite the headlines)

HARO was widely written off as defunct. It is not. It is operating again. A lot of "HARO is dead" advice is now simply wrong, and copy across the web still says it sunsetted. If you retired HARO on that basis, it is worth a second look.

The catch for newer domains is the posting bar. HARO and Qwoted both apply a domain-authority threshold a young site will not clear yet. That makes them a Phase 2 channel: real and valuable, but not open to every brand on day one. Build the domain first, then add them.

What it means if you run this for a living

1. Post where responses actually route. A request on the wrong board, or with the wrong reply path, strands every response that comes back. Match the format to the channel.
2. Keep reply discipline. When more than one request is live at once, you need a way to tell which response belongs to which story. Lose that, and good quotes get attached to the wrong piece or dropped.
3. Treat the landscape as a map, not a memory. It changed twice in a year. The brands that win earned media work the channels that are live this quarter, not the ones they bookmarked in 2024.

The source-request world is smaller and stranger than it was, but it is not closed. MentionMatch and Connectively are open now, HARO is back for domains that clear the bar, and Featured moved to the other side of the table. Pitch accordingly.