Reactive PR
Journalists file source requests and chase breaking stories every hour. Reactive PR puts your expert inside those stories fast enough to earn the editorial link.
Overview
A reporter on deadline doesn't want a pitch. They want a source: a relevant title, a sharp opinion and a reply inside the hour. Reactive PR is the discipline of being that source, again and again.
We watch HARO (relaunched by Featured.com in April 2025), Featured, Qwoted, Source of Sources and X throughout the working day, alongside news cycles our clients can credibly join. When a match appears, we draft the comment and send it inside the journalist's window. The reward is coverage, with a link, in outlets that don't sell space.
Reactive work runs alongside expert commentary and data-led campaigns in every engagement, and the mix follows the news calendar.
How fast do you respond to journalist requests?
Same working day, and usually within a couple of hours for high-value requests. Speed matters more than polish here, so at kickoff we agree who can be quoted and on which topics. If you'd like to see quotes before they go out, we build in a quick check, but it's optional.
Service detail
Most journalist requests close within a day, and popular ones fill up within hours. A reporter collecting comments takes the first few usable ones and stops reading. Being brilliant at 5 p.m. loses to being good at 10 a.m.
That makes reactive PR an operations problem before it's a writing problem. Alerts, prepared positions on recurring themes and a clear agreement at kickoff on who can be quoted cut response time from days to minutes.
Two streams feed the reactive calendar. The first is source requests from HARO and the other journalist request services, filtered against the topics your business can speak to. The second is the news itself: rate decisions, earnings, regulation, recalls, seasonal data releases and anything else your business has a credible view on.
Planned moments get comments prepared in advance. Unplanned ones get a rapid same-day draft.
Journalists cut fluff and keep substance. A comment that survives editing usually has four traits:
Three tight sentences beat three paragraphs. We write to the reporter's word count, and the attribution line carries the link back to your site.
Reactive PR suits brands whose subject matter appears in the press weekly: finance, technology, health, property, consumer spending and employment. It works less well for narrow B2B niches with little coverage to react to, and those campaigns lean on data-led work instead.
One caveat: reactive links usually point to your homepage or an expert profile, so they support the whole site more than a single commercial page. When deep-page links matter, we blend in other routes.
Reactive placements count toward the same monthly minimums as every route: at least 5 editorial links on Starter, 10 on Growth and 20 on Scale. Each arrives in your live report with the URL, a screenshot and the page it links to. The package summary has the per-link math.
Managed delivery
You don't need to find journalists, write pitches or chase live URLs. Send the website, and the team handles the research, writing and pitching.
We list the subjects your business can speak on with authority and filter requests and news against that list.
HARO, Featured, Qwoted, Source of Sources and journalist requests on X are checked throughout the working day.
We write the comment and file it inside the journalist's window.
Each placement is confirmed live, screenshotted, and logged against your monthly minimum.
Questions
Same working day, and usually within a couple of hours for high-value requests. Speed matters more than polish here, so at kickoff we agree who can be quoted and on which topics. If you'd like to see quotes before they go out, we build in a quick check, but it's optional.
No. We draft every comment ourselves, using your website and anything your team has already published. Nobody on your side needs to write or pitch. Someone only gets pulled in directly if a journalist asks for a live interview on the record.
Reactive volume moves with the news, so we don't promise a fixed reactive number. What's fixed is your package minimum across all routes: 5, 10 or 20 editorial links depending on tier. In a busy news month reactive can carry most of that; in a quiet one, the other routes make up the difference.
Request-driven and newsjacking coverage has landed our clients in outlets including Forbes, the New York Post, Yahoo Finance and the Mirror. We can't promise a specific publication, because no agency controls an editor's decision. Treat any vendor claiming otherwise with caution.
Start here
Email info@seobacklinks.com with your website, and we'll show you the kinds of stories we'd react to first.
