If you respond to a HARO request (with a deadline over 3 days long) in the last 6 hours, you'll achieve a better conversion rate.

That's the conclusion of this article about the state of HARO in 2022 (https://redline.digital/state-of-haro/).

This goes against the conventional wisdom of answering as soon as possible.

One caveat I noticed; this data is only for Q4 in 2022.

Is there something in this? The authors don't comment, but here's a theory:

◻ Short-dated requests are always monitored. If enough responses come in that match the brief the requester stops looking.

◻ Long-dated requests are more "set and forget". When the requester does sit down to look through the responses, they start from the top i.e. the latest responses.

Is this an outlier in the data or is there something to answering longer-dated requests near the deadline?