Cision is the dominant PR software platform — PR Newswire, Brandwatch, CisionOne. Owned by Platinum Equity since 2020. Vocus, PRWeb, and HARO inside the lineage.
A March 2013 note on Peter Shankman's departure from Vocus, three years after he sold HARO to the firm. The exit ended Shankman's day-to-day involvement with the press-source connection system he built in 2008.
The 10 HARO alternatives operating in 2026, after Cision shut HARO/Connectively down: Qwoted, Featured.com, Source of Sources, Help a B2B Writer, Muck Rack, SourceBottle, ProfNet, and more. Pricing, journalist quality, use cases.
A new marketing era begins. Its name is AI Communications — the discipline of becoming the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, where more than a third of U.S. consumers now begin product research.
Peter Shankman built Help A Reporter Out (HARO) in 2008 — the single piece of infrastructure that connected the global press to the world's sources for sixteen years. Cision shut it down in 2024. Nothing has replaced it at the same scale.
The sixteen-year evolution from Vocus social media monitoring in 2010 to AI Communications measurement in 2026 — what each era contributed, what stayed constant, and why Citation Share measurement is the new foundational measurement question.