Featured.com

Featured.com, legally Terkel, Inc., doing business as Featured, is a Scottsdale, Arizona technology company that connects subject-matter experts with journalists, publishers and, increasingly, public relations professionals. Founded in January 2022 under the name Terkel by founder and chief executive Brett Farmiloe, the platform built its business on question-and-answer content: experts submit answers to questions posed by publishers, and those answers are assembled into ready-to-publish articles. The company acquired the premium Featured.com domain and rebranded in July 2023, then transformed its scale in April 2025 by acquiring Help A Reporter Out (HARO) from Cision and reviving the service. It also owns Connectively, the platform brand under which its expert-matching product was relaunched, and now positions itself as an AI co-pilot for public relations.

From Terkel to Featured

Featured launched in January 2022 as Terkel, a name it carried for its first eighteen months. On July 28, 2023, the company announced it had rebranded from Terkel to Featured after acquiring the premium domain name Featured.com. Farmiloe explained the logic in terms of communication: the new name immediately conveyed what the product did for marketers, and owning the one-word domain was expected to help onboard publishers and grow brand awareness organically. The seller, Gerard Michael of DNPost, publicly welcomed the sale to a company whose business matched the functional meaning of the name. The legal entity remained Terkel, Inc., and the company's address has been listed at 7014 East Camelback Road, Suite B100A, in Scottsdale.

The founder's background

Brett Farmiloe came to Featured from a decade running Markitors, a digital marketing agency for small businesses that he has said served more than 500 small-business clients over ten years; he sold that agency at the end of 2021 to focus full time on Featured. His earlier venture, Pursue the Passion, involved interviewing hundreds of people about purpose and fulfilment in their work. The problem Featured was built to solve came directly from the agency years: small businesses had an abundance of knowledge to share but no practical route to visibility, while publishers needed credible expert content. Farmiloe has written widely on marketing, brand trust and the future of work, contributing to outlets including Inc. and Fast Company, and his bylines have appeared in more than a hundred publications.

How the platform works

The original Featured model is a structured exchange. Publishers and media outlets pose questions or content needs; subject-matter experts in the community submit answers; and Featured uses in-house technology and editorial processes to assemble the responses into full-length Q&A articles that publishers can run. For experts and the businesses behind them, the appeal is earned visibility — a quoted contribution in an established publication rather than an advertisement. For publishers, the appeal is capacity: instead of fielding pitches, selecting quotes and building an article from scratch, they receive ready-to-publish content drawing on vetted expert knowledge. Farmiloe has framed the mission as bringing more knowledge online and improving the information everyone can access.

Growth in the Terkel and early Featured years

By the July 2023 rebrand, the company reported nearly 300,000 answers submitted, about 15,000 experts and more than 750 paying users. Its user base already included marketers from companies such as Google, American Express, Zapier, Airbnb and Fiverr, and its publisher side included Fast Company, American Express and more than 500 media destinations. The company said it had published more than 5,000 articles for brands through its publishing partners, generating organic search traffic and social visibility for them. By the time of the HARO acquisition in April 2025, the reported figures had grown to a community of over 50,000 experts and more than 1 million answers submitted, powering articles across a network of more than 2,500 media outlets. Subsequent company descriptions have put its user base at more than 100,000 users supporting those 2,500 publishers.

Acquiring and reviving HARO

Featured's defining deal came in April 2025. Cision, which had owned Help A Reporter Out since 2014, had retired the brand in 2024, folding it into its Connectively platform and then announcing that Connectively itself would be permanently discontinued on December 9, 2024. On April 15, 2025, Cision announced the sale of the HARO platform to Featured.com, and on April 16 Featured announced it was reviving the service, backed by a group of investors including Great North Ventures. The website was relaunched immediately, and users began receiving emails again on April 22, 2025. The deal amount was not disclosed.

Farmiloe positioned the revival around the moment: as AI-generated content flooded the internet, journalists needed credible human sources more than ever, and Featured's goal was to preserve what made HARO effective while modernising it. HARO would remain free for journalists and sources, supported by newsletter advertising, and return to its original format of email digests delivered up to three times a day. Featured's own descriptions of the revived service cite a community of more than 800,000 sources and more than 75,000 journalists, and the company later reported that HARO had sent more than 100 million emails in its first year back.

Connectively and the platform business

Featured also owns the Connectively name, which carries complicated history: Cision had used it for the platform version of HARO in 2024 before shutting it down. Featured revived Connectively as the home of its own platform — the system it had operated for more than four years connecting experts with publishers — relaunched on June 2 as a journalist request platform with a live feed of reporter requests as they are approved, plus search and filtering, tools to commission expert content, pitch bylined articles, find podcast guest opportunities and identify journalists covering a user's field. The company has said Connectively connects an expert with a publisher every six seconds. Keeping HARO as the free email service and Connectively as the searchable platform gives Featured two complementary front doors into the same underlying expert network.

The AI co-pilot for PR

In its most recent repositioning, Featured has presented itself as an AI co-pilot for public relations: a single AI-guided platform through which communications professionals and experts can find media opportunities, draft pitches and pursue coverage across journalist requests, podcast bookings, bylined articles, speaking engagements, awards and generative engine optimisation. Farmiloe has described public relations as coming down to finding the right opportunity, saying the right thing and reaching the right person at the right time, and the co-pilot is designed around those three tasks, using purpose-built AI agents to monitor requests, research opportunities and prepare draft responses, with outreach sendable through connected Gmail or Outlook inboxes. A later addition, the GEO Audit, shows brands which publications AI search engines cite and which outlets to pitch, offered on a freemium, usage-based model with paid tiers advertised from $29 a month for Lite and $79 a month for Pro when billed annually.

Audience and significance

Featured serves both sides of the earned-media transaction. Its expert side includes founders, marketers and subject specialists — many from small businesses without public relations representation — seeking quoted exposure. Its publisher side includes more than 2,500 outlets filling content gaps with expert-led articles. Its expansion into AI labs and expert data, reflected in Farmiloe's writing on how expert-generated data shapes AI training and evaluation, signals a third audience for the same network. From a Scottsdale startup launched in 2022 as Terkel, Featured has grown — through a premium-domain rebrand, the rescue of one of public relations' best-known brands and a pivot toward AI-assisted PR — into one of the central marketplaces where journalists and experts find each other.