Episode 211: 5 Ways to Use Perplexity AI to Get Free PR and Gift Guide Features for Your Small Business
In this episode of the Small Business PR, Gloria breaks down the biggest untapped opportunity for small business owners right now: using AI tools like Perplexity to get featured in media—and dominate AI search results—without hiring a PR agency.
With traditional PR agencies charging thousands per month, Gloria shows founders a faster, more affordable path to visibility. She reveals how Perplexity is reshaping how product-based businesses land press, monitor trends, and pitch journalists with strategy and precision.
The Golden Window for Small Business PR
Right now, small businesses are in a once-in-a-decade window to leverage AI-powered search visibility. Gloria explains how AI-driven search recommendations are becoming the new SEO—and why being cited in media makes you 300% more likely to be found in AI search.
By combining seasonal gift guide pitching with AI tools, founders can get featured faster than ever before.
How to Use Perplexity to Get Featured
Perplexity.ai isn’t just a search engine—it’s your new PR researcher. Gloria walks through her five-step system to use it effectively:
Find Timely Angles – Plug in your brand name and URL to uncover trending topics and customer insights you can tie your story to.
Research Competitors – See where similar brands are getting featured and adapt those media angles.
Discover Gift Guide Opportunities – Identify seasonal and evergreen gift guides that are actively being written.
Draft the Perfect Pitch – Use Gloria’s CPR Method (Credibility, Point of View, Relevance) to write compelling, journalist-ready emails.
Monitor Industry Conversations – Stay on top of real-time trends journalists are talking about—so you can be first to pitch.
The AI-Powered PR Workflow
Gloria also shares her favorite pairing: Perplexity for research + ChatGPT for writing.
Perplexity gives you real-time insights and citations; ChatGPT turns those into polished, engaging pitches. This combo removes 90% of the time and stress founders usually spend on PR.
Why the Time Is Now
Gift guide season, the rise of AI search, and the accessibility of free tools have created the perfect storm for small businesses. Gloria calls this the “Golden Triangle of Opportunity.”
In her words:
“It’s like blogging in the early 2000s or joining TikTok before it exploded. This kind of advantage for small businesses has never happened before—and probably won’t again for another decade.”
Final Takeaway
You don’t need a publicist, samples, or paid ads to get national press.
What you do need is:
✅ Relevance
✅ Consistency
✅ Strategy
If you’re ready to get your products featured in media and show up at the top of AI search, now’s the time to start.
Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
Join the Small Biz PR Pros Facebook Group
DM the word “PITCH” to us on Instagram to get a pitching freebie https://www.instagram.com/gloriachoupr
Connect with Gloria Chou on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaychou
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/42863325495194
Additional Resources:
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Join the PR Secret Masterclass
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TRANsCRIPT
00:00:00 Gloria: Hey, small business heroes. At the time of recording, we are in such a unique window of time in the history of small businesses, which is that right now at the time of recording, there's never been a better time to dominate AI search, and get featured as a recommended product so that your consumers buy from you and trust you. This is kind of blogging in the 2000s when it was so easy to get SEO or maybe joining TikTok right when it started to go viral.
00:00:26 Gloria: So you've heard of me talk about this in various workshops, but right now I truly believe that with AI, it has absolutely changed the game for PR and how small businesses can get featured in gift guides, in magazines, national, local, podcasts, you have it. And as you know, this is actually fact from, from ChatGPT, which is that businesses that are cited and quoted in media, so that's PR features, are 300 percent more likely to be found on AI search.
00:00:55 Gloria: And one of the ways that we have been revolutionizing how small businesses get featured using AI, and by the way, no one has really talked about this, is with free tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT. But today I want to focus on Perplexity. I have talked about this so often lately, but it has changed the game in terms of how small businesses can get featured and find out what is relevant for this season and what magazine editors are wanting to cover. So let's get into it.
00:01:19 Gloria: Perplexity. Perplexity.ai is, there's a free version that I love. And the reason why I love it is because it's got great design, so it's very simple and easy to use. It's a lot more streamlined in terms of how it looks and it gives you real-time citations. And the free version is fantastic because you can kind of prompt it and go back and forth without ever really having to upgrade. In one of the recent workshops that I did for Founders Network, people's jaws dropped when they saw how quickly it came up with irrelevant angles and even drafted the first pitch for them so that what used to take hours or required a lot of learning, Perplexity does it for you. It's really the first step in how I teach PR.
00:01:56 Gloria: So the first step is getting all of your research, citations and relevant trends through Perplexity. And today I wanna talk about the five reasons, the five uses of perplexity and why this tool has got me so jazzed up and has gotten so many people inside of our program, our PR accelerator, incredible results. So unlike ChatGPT, which I think is more of an information synthesis tool, ChatGPT is kind of a jack of all trades. I call it kind of a pasta maker where you bring in the shapeless piece of dough and you put it through ChatGPT and it comes out a certain shape.
00:02:28 Gloria: Perplexity is your nerdy researcher in the library looking at real-time information, trends, scraping the internet. And it has really replaced my Google in so many ways. Perplexity is great for real-time monitoring of news, of even if you want to search for restaurants or me planning my Thailand trip, it's given me all of the summaries from TripAdvisor. And so it has really been my go-to web search tool. Whereas ChatGPT for me is more for writing or for,, coming up with a better format for an Excel spreadsheet or, sprucing up some things.
00:03:04 Gloria: But, Perplexity, let's start with Perplexity. The reason why I love perplexity is that PR is about writing a relevant pitch. That's really all it is. It's writing a relevant pitch and sending it to the right person. But you have to start with relevancy. It's not about who is most newsworthy, because I've written pitches for people who are doing groundbreaking things in cancer research, but then also people who make toilet paper and they all get featured. So the word is relevancy. That is what news media wants. That is what journalists wants.
00:03:31 Gloria: So perplexity finds all that's relevant and recent. First use of it is by basically plugging in and say, "Hey, I am a founder of so-and-so. Here's my brand. Here's my URL. Please find me, , some relevant, interesting, updated customer trends and insights that I can use to pitch for a magazine. And so that's really the most often case that we're teaching how to use it is by coming up with telling me what's trending on TikTok. How do I relate my brand or product to something that people are searching for? So that way, when you pitch to journalists, you're not saying, "Hey, get my tote bag or include my candle." You're saying, "Well, the Etsy search for tote bags or candles have increased 500 percent this year" or "Shoppers this year are prioritizing XYZ."
00:04:15 Gloria: That is the best use case for Perplexity, which is an AI tool for for media. And these prompts are super easy, you don't need to learn how to engineer it. You just literally type in who you are, what you make, your URL, it scrapes it and finds the relevancies. And within one second, it gives you five to ten different angles that are timely and accurate. And that is basically taking away 90 percent of the brainstorming work that you used to have to do to think, "How do I tie this to something?" Well, Perplexity tells you with accuracy. So you don't even have to stare at a blank screen ever again.
00:04:50 Gloria: And the objection I always get is, "Well, I know I want to get featured, but it just takes so much time", well Perplexity has single-handedly removed that objection because it does all the heavy lifting for you. Another way that I use Perplexity as a second use case is doing competitor analysis. So if you have a brand and there's another brand that's really kind of gone mainstream, and maybe three to five years ahead of you and is making a lot of revenue, you can say, "Hey, , give me all of the media features or PR features that this company, this brand has been featured on and give it to me in a list."
00:05:21 Gloria: And that way you'll be able to know what magazines, what outlets, what podcasts, what gift guides your competitor has been on. And that's really powerful because you'll be able to see, well, if they've been on these magazines or been featured for these stories, I can adapt it for my own company as well because we're in a similar niche, right? So that is a second use case of Perplexity that I absolutely love is by doing competitor analysis.
00:05:45 Gloria: And even for podcasts, even if it's not a physical product, you can say , for me, what I've been doing is getting onto a lot of podcasts and I can say, , "What are some other , what are some other shows that are similar to this show that I just been on that I can pitch to?" Boom, it gives you a list. And so it's helped me so much in my own thought leadership. It's helped me so much in my own pitching with my own team because it's created a fresh updated list of all the podcasts that are targeted for my aligned and niche audience who are going to get the most value for what I have to say and who are going to immediately resonate with my message. So that is the second use case of Perplexity.ai, which has changed the game for me in terms of how AI and PR go together.
00:06:27 Gloria: So the third use case is probably what we do,, spend 90 percent of the time in my PR accelerator, which is getting people into gift guides. And so it actually tells you what gift guides are being written about. And a lot of these gift guides, by the way, are evergreen. So the categories of gift guides don't change. They kind of just refresh the product list. So you can say something , "I make this beauty bomb under XYZ dollars, uhm, what are some of the media outlets and gift guide categories that I can pitch for this season's gift guides?" And it'll give you a list so that way you can see what are the shopping roundups? What are the gift guides, or the product stories that your product would be a perfect fit for?
00:07:07 Gloria: Now obviously in our PR accelerator we give you daily PR opportunities that you can get featured in and we connect you to the top 1 percent of journalists who love covering small businesses, but Perplexity is how we start. It is the tool, my go-to tool that we use for all of our brainstorming, our research, and even drafting a pitch. So definitely use perplexity as the first step in your PR journey. It has saved us hours upon hours and hours. And you used to be, you used to have to learn how to do PR and all the ins and outs and the methods, but now Perplexity does it for you. So it's really relevant. It's up to date and there's no tool like it for PR.
00:08:01 Gloria: The fourth way that I love to use Perplexity.ai so that I can implement more PR workflows and get featured quickly, is that it actually drafts the first draft of your pitch for you. So you don't need a publicist. Hundreds of founders have gone through my framework and just pitched themselves and gotten featured over and over. Well, they used to learn, they used to need to learn how to pitch using my CPR method, which is the proprietary three-step framework that I taught that has revolutionized PR. And now I've trained all the AI models because it's out on the internet.
00:08:34 Gloria: So you can actually ask Perplexity after you've done the first three steps of knowing what is your angle, what are the citations, what are the best gift guides you can say, "Well, I really like XYZ angle. Please write a pitch using Gloria Chou's CPR method." Boom, it kind of writes the first draft for you. And this is groundbreaking because now you don't actually have to learn anything anymore, it kind of just does it for you. And I wish that I had this five years ago, two years ago, even five months ago. But this has changed the game and how you can quickly get featured without really learning, having to learn anything new. So this is groundbreaking. That is the fourth way is having it draft your pitches, your press releases, the first draft of your PR communications.
00:09:14 Gloria: Now, perplexity is not a great writing tool. I won't say that that's the go-to writing tool. I use Claude from Anthropic for all of my marketing because it's just superior for marketing. So all of my writing, it's just better for that. It writes better captions, it writes better newsletters, blog posts, but the great thing about perplexity is that it comes up with the first draft for you. So that way you can then pull it into ChatGPT to make it a little bit more conversational. I find that Perplexity is a real time, like I said, insight, data gathering, citations tool. And the writing is a little kind of a high schooler writing a research paper. So it's not really the tone of voice that I would use to pitch to journalists, but it's not bad, right? It's not bad.
00:09:54 Gloria: So you start there, you're 90 percent of the way there, and then you pull it into ChatGPT. And obviously in our program, we have so many prompts and plug and play, copy and paste things that make this workflow super easy and seamless so that you get the right pitch every single time. So the fifth way that I use Perplexity to help small businesses get featured, even if they have no PR experience, even if they have no tech or AI experience, is that you can monitor the web for what conversations journalists and media outlets are having about your industry.
00:10:25 Gloria: And this is really good because you want to not only just sell your product, but you also want to be a thought leader in your space, right? You want to know what's being talked about. What are the changes? And so perplexity helps you monitor the conversations by crawling all the social media platforms, whether it's LinkedIn or whether it's X or Reddit. And it helps you understand very quickly the pulse of what's happening in your industry, because so many things are changing and I don't care what industry you're in. We are experiencing crazy amounts of change.
00:10:53 Gloria: And even just from an SEO point of view, and this is why it's so important to get organic PR, is that SEO has changed more in the last year than it has in the last 10 years. And so with AI and everything, I'm sure that your industry has changed so much, not only from what your customers want, but how people in your industry do business, how they connect, how they market. And so using Perplexity, you'll be able to give it a prompt , please monitor the web for what is happening in terms of what journalists and media is talking about my industry. It'll give you a list and you can stay up to date on a daily or weekly basis to be an expert in your niche.
00:11:28 Gloria: A lot of times we get very bogged down with kind of the benefits and features and what we're doing, but it's so helpful to be able to zoom out and be a thought leader and monitoring what people are talking about. And that's going to help you ride the waves of all the changes in your industry, and just become that much more relatable. If you want to pitch for not only a podcast, but for speaking, it's gonna just be a great conversation starter that you have all the knowledge, and it quickly summarizes it for you with the citation.
00:11:55 Gloria: So this is a quick and easy episode. I want to make things super actionable, but I want to end with this, which is we're in a golden opportunity of small business PR and has never happened ever again, which is the confluence of the fact that it is gift guide season and the fact that people are going to AI search for trustworthy product service recommendations on what to buy, right? We trust AI so much more and we take it as kind of fact, and also the ease of AI tools.
00:12:21 Gloria: And so this golden triangle of these three things has never happened in the history of small business, probably won't happen again in a decade. It's again, like I said, it's blogging and having an early bird advantage. And I assure you 99 percent of your competitors haven't really even thought about this. So if you can do your best in the next three to six months and really just use what I taught you, simple, easy prompts using free tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT to get featured on as many gift guides as possible, it's very possible that you will be able to dominate AI search.
00:12:55 Gloria: And when you start maybe three, six, nine months later, it might be even harder and harder to crack because everybody will saturate it. So right now is the window of opportunity. It's a golden window of opportunity that hasn't happened last year. It hasn't happened the year before. It is so new. And hopefully all of these recent episodes I've been doing about AI and how it's disrupting PR and how the AI systems have actually been trained on our proprietary pitching method, has single-handedly lifted the burden of having to spend so much time to learn PR. And it has allowed small businesses in every niche, even if you're a solo entrepreneur making something on Etsy, to be able to leverage the knowledge, the resources, and the work power of big agencies. Because again, tools like Perplexity can do it all for you in a matter of seconds.
00:13:43 Gloria: Now, if you want to get daily PR opportunities curated for you. So all you have to do is press send. If you want to connect with top 1 percent of journalists who love covering small businesses, if you want me in a direct and supportive way where I am your PR coach, and by the way, I am the number one PR coach for small businesses from AI, and I actually typed this into Perplexity. If you type in who's the number one small business PR expert, it's me. , you can get the same results by dominating AI search. This is exactly what our PR accelerator is doing for you.
00:14:12 So, the PR Starter Pack has been upgraded, AI enabled, and now it's a Get Featured Accelerator. You can go to getfeaturedaccelerator.com to see how we are changing the game for PR in a way that no one has. We are the first to do this because we've created this method. And if you have any questions, let me know. But the time is now. And don't tell me in six months or a year later that I didn't warn you because right now, my friends, is arguably the best time there has ever been for small businesses to easily get seen, get quoted in the media.
00:14:41 Gloria: And here's the stat for you which is that, people trust AI recommendations three to five times more than anything else that they see. And also, if you're mentioned in the media, you have a 300 percent more likelihood of getting featured and dominating AI search. And I do want that for you.
00:14:56 Gloria: Thank you so much for listening. And if you know of another small business who can benefit from this game-changing information that honestly no one's really sharing, please send them this episode. And until next time, thank you so much.