Episode 206: Best AI Tools for Small Business PR in 2025: ChatGPT, Claude & Perplexity Explained
In this episode of the Gloria Chou PR Podcast, I share why right now is the golden window of opportunity for small businesses to land press, boost SEO, and get discovered on AI search before the competition.
We’re in what I call the holy trifecta—gift guide season, the rise of AI-driven product recommendations, and the explosion of free, easy-to-use AI tools that make PR faster than ever.
If you’re a product-based founder who wants to ride this wave and finally get featured without expensive agencies or endless hours of pitching, this episode breaks it all down.
The Holy Trifecta: Why This Window Won’t Last
Gift guides are evergreen. AI search is exploding. And AI tools have lowered the barrier to entry for small businesses. Put these three forces together, and you have the most powerful PR opportunity in years
The 3 AI Tools I Use Every Day for PR
Forget shiny-object overload. I go deep with just three:
Perplexity → my go-to research brain for real-time insights, competitor analysis, and gift guide discovery
Claude → my authentic marketing brain for writing compelling emails, captions, and sales pages in my own voice
ChatGPT → my Swiss army knife for synthesis, quick pitches, charts, and repurposing
Why Perplexity Is a PR Game-Changer
Instead of staring at a blank screen, Perplexity gives you instant angles journalists actually care about—pop culture, trends, and consumer insights. It even shows you where your competitors have been featured so you can pitch smarter.
Claude: Your Marketing Brain That Writes Like You
Claude helps me write polarizing, authentic emails that spark real conversation—something my old $3,000/month CMO couldn’t do. With “project knowledge,” you can train it to sound exactly like you and even use it as a personal assistant for email and calendar management.
ChatGPT: The Swiss Army Knife Every Founder Needs
From reworking pitches into journalist-friendly copy to summarizing books and podcasts into action steps, ChatGPT saves hours every week. It’s not fancy—it’s functional.
The Final Takeaway
AI is no longer optional for small business PR—it’s your ticket to getting featured, building SEO, and staying ahead of the curve.
What you need is:
✅ A simple, streamlined AI tech stack
✅ The right angles that tie into trends and gift guides
✅ Consistency before the golden window closes
If you’ve been waiting for the “right time” to start pitching, this is it.
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. Welcome back to Small Business PR where we make PR and marketing super accessible for the everyday small business hero. AI, AI, AI. Now, although I am a small business PR coach, I have been asked so much from my audience about AI. And I really believe that right now at the time of recording, we have hit a golden opportunity window where as never happened in the history of business that three things are coming together, which is gift guide season and also the fact that we are turning more and more towards AI search to get product and shopping recommendations, and also the fact that there are free, easy-to-use AI tools to help you get featured faster than ever.
00:00:39 Gloria that's what I mean. It's the holy trifecta. There has never been an opportunity like this to get featured, but also build that SEO as people and consumers are looking for factual, accurate recommendations on what to buy. We usually take ChatGPT as fact. For example, if you're having a debate with your spouse, you look on ChatGPT, you show them the answer, you take it as fact, right?
00:00:59 Gloria And so as consumers are looking towards AI for answers and what products they should buy, how do you dominate that? Well, with PR, businesses that are quoted in media, so that's podcasts, gift guides, articles, they are 300 % more likely to get featured in AI search and to be recommended. And no one's really talking about this. And I think that this is the golden, wild, wild west, where when you started blogging in the 2000s, or when you just got on Instagram before everyone else did, now it's super impossible to break through. But we really are in this closing window of opportunity. And so there has never been a better time for small businesses to get featured.
00:01:36 Gloria I just did a podcast episode about how to leverage that. But for today, I want to zoom out a little bit and tell you about my AI tech stack. Now I've tried and used and consumed so many hours of video footage on YouTube learning about AI. And I really think that simple is best. And the reason why is because so many of these AI things are adding brand new features, sometimes most of the time for free, that are overlapping with some of the tools you may already be working. And I think a lot of the reason why there has been such a high bar for learning AI is that there's so many of these AI bro marketers saying, you need to buy my prompt engineering course, or there's the right way to prompt. And I think that's bullshit, honestly.
00:02:15 Gloria You can just start tapping the microphone button and start talking to ChatGPT and ask, how can you help me do XYZ? Can you do XYZ? Do I need to give you XYZ things for you to create XYZ outputs. If you don't know something, don't have to learn how to use it. Just start. And I think for so long, especially members in my community, a lot of them are women who are a little bit older or not super tech savvy. The reason why they have not been able to leverage AI in a way that the big companies have and save so much time.
00:02:45 Gloria And by the way, we are the ones that are strapped for time, We are small businesses wearing all the hats. We need AI to be able to free us so that we can focus on the higher strategic things, whether it's business development, partnerships, creative strategic direction, that's what AI helped me do. I went from a team of seven feeling so burnt out before my wedding to a team of three part-time, and I'm three times more profitable. I work 10 hours less. Now, I still sound like myself. I still produce amazing content, and it's because I've trained my AI. So let me tell you a little bit about my tech stack.
00:03:16 Gloria the three that I use every single day, and again, I do know all about the shiny object syndrome, Every day we are targeted with get this software and then this one, and this is the best. Well, you know what? I really think that the more you pile on, the less that you get to train the ones that you do have. And the success with AI is really sticking to one that then you can train and make it so robust that it sounds like you. That's how you can get the best benefits of AI.
00:03:41 Gloria it's really about going deep and not just dabbling in everything because AI depends on you to give it context, to give it stuff to train it. The three things I use every day is ChatGPT and Claude by Anthropic and perplexity.ai. Let me start with Perplexity. It is my new favorite tool. It's what we have been using in our PR program because it's the best for real time information gathering, insights, citations with links back to the citations. I've used it to plan my trip in Thailand to compare hotels. It scrapes all the TripAdvisor reviews about what's good and bad in each hotel. I use it like my new Google and it's replaced my Google in many ways.
00:04:20 Gloria It really synthesizes all of the real-time information. And from a PR perspective, it's been absolutely game-changing because before, you would have to learn how to write a pitch, maybe brainstorm what are the best angles. And obviously, in my PR program, I gave you all of that. But now Perplexity does it for you where you can literally say, "hey, I make an XYZ product. This is my website. Go through my website. Think about what are the best trends and consumer insights I can tie my brand or product to for it to be compelling to get into a gift guide or a shopping roundup." Boom. In less than five seconds, it gives you all of the relevant angles.
00:04:54 Gloria When you couple that with the daily PR opportunities that I'm sending to our members in our program, they get featured right away because no longer do you have to start from scratch. There's no staring at a blank screen anymore thinking about, well, is this relevant or not? No, Perplexity tells you what's relevant. And what is news if it's not relevant, Journalists do not want your benefits and features. They want to know why it ties into the bigger trend, the pop culture zeitgeist, what consumers are looking for, and Perplexity does that for you.
00:05:22 Gloria I always tell my PR program members, start with Perplexity, give it a simple prompt. It can also analyze your competitors and you can give it a prompt like, this is my competitor, this is a brand I want to emulate, they're doing super well, they're maybe doing three times our revenue, we want to be like them one day, can you tell me all of the places they've been featured in the media? And then boom, it gives you a list. So it's so good to cross compare what kind of gift guides, magazines, outlets would be suitable for your brand or product.
00:05:51 Gloria Because if you make let's say and Apartment Therapy doesn't publish anything that's in the more luxury tier of pricing, then you know it's probably not for you, Or if you make something that's a perfect stocking stuffer, you want to know what are the magazines and outlets. And then it'll actually give you a list as well. A lot of these gift guides, remember, their evergreen. every year they publish the same ones. They just refresh the items in that gift guide.
00:06:16 Gloria So you can ask Perplexity, what are the gift guides that Vogue or Allure or Apartment Therapy publishes that would be suitable for my product? And then can get that title of the gift guide and just pitch it back with that same response. whether it's for home to court gifts or whether it's quirky gifts or whether it's personalized gifts, now you know all the different buckets you can pitch for. We had someone use this and get onto 12 different gift guides in one season. That's right, one season. And it goes to show that it's not a one and done.
00:06:46 Gloria You can get featured once, twice, three times, 10 times, and just right on the SEO wave. And now with everyone going to AI search, AI algorithms want to prioritize products and brands that are featured in media. And the stat and the quote is, by the way, it says from Perplexity, this is backed by Perplexity, that products that are featured and quoted in media are 300% more likely to be found on AI search.
00:07:08 Gloria Someone actually found me on ChatGPT. And if you go on Perplexity and you put who's the number one small business PR coach, I'm often number one. And that's because of all of the PR that I focus on. That's the podcast, that's the backlinks. And I knew that this wave was happening. And now I'm giving you this window of opportunities because this is wide open for you. That's what I use Perplexity for. I start off asking it for PR, what are the trends? Here's my website, scrape my website, what are the best angles, and then it'll give you seven or eight different angles. Then you can even prompt it and say, out of these, give me a comparison chart of what do you think is most likely to get featured.
00:07:46 Gloria Boom, it'll give you a comparison chart with a star rating of all the different angles it just gave you of what they think journalists and editors and magazines are most likely to cover and why. That is absolutely amazing. What you said take hours or days of research, now is objectively handled for you with accuracy because it's scraped the internet. It's looking at trends, it's looking at search volume, it's looking at reports from consumer data. So it's not just you telling the journalist, "Hey, cover my tote bag," or "Hey, feature my candle." You're saying, here's why these types of candles have increased 300% on Etsy or here's why this is relevant because this trend has been a favorite trend of this year.
00:08:26 Gloria And so that's what you always want to lead with. In my CPR pitch, you want to lead with the relevance and Perplexity gives you that. So Perplexity is my favorite new tool. I use it every day, all day. And our PR members in our program have gotten incredible results with it because they're able to tie their products to every season so that they can get a reason to be featured all year round. And that, my friend, is going to help you dominate AI search before the rest of your competition. Because I promise you, 99% of other product businesses aren't even thinking about this.
00:08:56 Gloria the fact that you're listening to this right now, you're given a golden window of opportunity. This is your chance. This is your sign to go for it. And it's never been easier. Perplexity is free. I love it because it's easy to use. It has a great UX. It's simple. You don't have to learn anything. You start prompting it. You can even tap the microphone button and just start talking to it, honestly. Again, don't let the AI bros make you think that you need to learn some prompt engineering course because for what we're doing right now in small business, getting PR, you just have to start. Don't put another layer of distraction or limitation or hardship between you and start leveraging these AI tools. Just start asking it.
00:09:34 Gloria And if you don't know how to use it, you can say, I don't know how to use this. Show me how you can help me. Boom. It'll give you that as well. Just talk to it. Number two is Claude. Claude is owned by Anthropic and it's absolutely superior for writing. So when I used to have a $3,000 a month CMO who could not grow my account, who was writing emails that didn't get any responses. Now I've trained Claude to write such compelling, authentic, vulnerable value aligned emails to who I am, how I see the world, my point of view and my story, that I get 25 responses per email that I write.
00:10:08 Gloria I write very uncomfortable, polarizing, confrontational emails, sometimes talking about my values, my opinions on race, what's happening in America, things that people don't usually want to touch. But then I also write other emails too that are a little bit more lighthearted. But because I've trained it so much on my values, my story, my background, and I do come from a pretty unique background it's able to see through that lens. Now, do I just feed it something and then it spits out the first result and then I click send to all of my subscribers?
00:10:37 Gloria No, I of course have a back and forth chat with it, but it's allowed me to send out way more emails in shorter amount of time, what used to take me hours. And so now when I get a stroke of insight, when I'm traveling with my mom in Spain, when I'm getting inspiration, when I'm jogging with my dog, I just start tapping the microphone button and brain dumping all of my thoughts. I'll give you an example.
00:10:58 Gloria A lot of people read one of the emails that they loved, which is How in the Met, so I live in New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art had a Black dandy exhibit. And it was all about how former slaves and people who are marginalized and enslaved and oppressed use fashion and fine tailoring as a way to bring dignity back. And it was so beautiful, I was so touched. And as you know, I grew up with a Black family. In high school, I lived with my best friend's family.
00:11:24 Gloria They were a black family, single Black mom with four sisters, the daughters, one of them was my best friend. And growing up and being in the intersection of all of these different races and spaces, it really formed my idea and like how I embody diversity. I always say you don't attract diversity, you become diversity. And so naturally, I think subconsciously, I attract a very diverse audience. So when I went to the Met and I was looking at those beautiful, beautiful statues and figurines of the beautiful garments and the history, I was moved to tears.
00:11:53 Gloria And in the middle of the museum where there's so many people, I literally opened up Claude and I started, I tapped the microphone button and I just started talking to it. I told her about how I was feeling, how I was overcome with emotion, how it made me realize so many things. And then it spit out a perfect email that was so beautiful and it weaved such good narrative storytelling. And so that is really the beauty of Claude. I use it for email. I use it for marketing. I rewrote one person's sales page in the program in one hour that she couldn't do in over eight hours. It is my go-to writing tool.
00:12:26 Gloria Now, I still use ChatGPT for general responses for an email or something that's a little bit more cut and dry, but Claude is by far superior for authentic marketing, captions, emails, something that can really embody your tone. And here's the thing about how to train it. You don't have to do a whole workbook. You don't have to take another class. You can in your daily life, as you're scrolling through Instagram, your emails, blogs, looking at even signs that you see, start taking photos and screenshots and put it in an iCloud album called AI Content I Like. And then the ones that you like, put it in there and the screenshots of emails and captions and words and spacing that you don't like, take a screenshot and put it in an iCloud photo album called Content That I Don't Like.
00:13:10 Gloria And then you start to have a repository of all of this content that then you can feed into Claude, into project knowledge. Claude is great because there's different projects and under each project, there is project knowledge where you can literally copy and paste things from the internet. You can upload screenshots. You can take transcripts of your phone calls, of your coaching calls. You can take transcripts of other people's coaching calls that really resonated with you from a values point of view, whatever that is. And then that individual project will hold that space for all of the training.
00:13:39 Gloria I have three different projects. I have one for social media captions. I have one for email newsletter, and then I have one for SEO blogs, because I'm also trying to increase my SEO with blogging. Now, SEO has really been helped by the fact that I've gotten so many PR features, but now I'm trying to do the reverse, which is now trying to do more blogs. So just to tell you that Claude is amazing. It's what I use for captions, writing, and you can easily just start taking content you already consume, whether you're scrolling, whether you're on the toilet, guilty as charged, doom scrolling on the toilet or doom scrolling at night.
00:14:11 Gloria Start taking screenshots of captions, words, carousel posts, emails, blogs, websites that you like and don't like and start organizing it into an album, and then you can train your AI very easily. The great thing about Claude2 is that when you upgrade, and by the way, you should upgrade because it kind of runs out of memory, but for me, I get the plan that's 100 bucks a month. It's not cheap, but because I use it all day every day with my team, I find it to be very worthwhile. What you can do is you can connect it to your Gmail, you can connect it to your calendar, you can connect it to your Google Drive and Canva, and you can literally ask it, hey, tell me my schedule today, or hey, go through my inbox on Gmail and tell me what are the emails that I haven't responded to. Tell me the emails that are important from potential customers. Tell me about emails that are XYZ.
00:14:56 Gloria it also becomes your own personal assistant. And these are native integrations that you don't really need to have a tech background to do. And you can literally use it and start monitoring your emails, checking your calendar. If you can't make it to an appointment, it drafts that email. You can copy and paste it and send it on Gmail. Right now at the time of recording, Claude can't automatically send emails with your Gmail. So that's more of an agentic thing. You're going to have to use make or something else to do it automatically, but it'll go through your calendar and emails and you can say, Hey, I can't make this call. I'm currently on a meeting, draft an email and tell this person I can't make it. Boom, copy and paste and send.
00:15:33 Gloria It's a really good way for you to just ease your daily life, simplify, it monitors your schedule, and it just takes that heavy burden of all the little things that you're doing every day. Make it easier so that you can focus on what you do best, which is creating, which is strategic thinking, which is pitching for PR, coming up with new exciting offers, speaking. That's what I mean by the $10,000 an hour tasks that us as CEOs need to be doing. And AI has just made it so much easier for us to be able to do that so that we can delegate some of the other things that are really, let's be honest, not so great and doesn't bring me joy to AI because AI is doing that for me. You know what I mean?
00:16:11 Gloria Now let's get to ChatGPT. A lot of people are like, well, why do you use ChatGPT? You have Claude, you have Perplexity. Well, to be honest, maybe I don't even need to use it. I just use it because it's only $20 a month. ChatGPT is the Swiss army knife. It is the jack of all trades. Whereas Claude is my marketing brain and Perplexity is my research brain and insights. ChatGPT is my everyday Swiss army knife. I equate it as a pasta maker. You put in this like big lumpy piece of dough, you feed it, it comes out the other side, whatever shape. So it's really good for information synthesis.
00:16:42 Gloria For example, put this in a chart, organize these spreadsheets, tell me and analyze my data from this Airtable. Tell me what trends are happening from this spreadsheet. Write an email for me that's pretty straightforward. It's good for writing and simple writing. So for pitch writing, I actually start with perplexity and have it come up with the draft of an email using the prompt that I just gave you and then coming up with the relevant angles. And then I stop there and then I put it into ChatGPT to finish writing it to journalists because the writing from Perplexity is a little bit like school paper.
00:17:14 Gloria It's a little bit formal and it's not how I would write to journalists. So that's why I would pull it into ChatGPT and say, Hey, can you make this more conversational, but no less compelling for a journalist because I want to pitch and get my product featured. Boom. It'll give you that. And it'll come up with different subject lines. I also use ChatGPT to summarize podcasts. So I'm like, Hey, I don't have time to read this book. Watch this YouTube video or listen to podcasts, yes, we are really at that stage where our attention span is like zero. Can you summarize the key action points from this book that I can start taking action and implement a plan.
00:17:47 Gloria And I've done so much just learning from authors that maybe I don't have time to read a whole book or listen to the 40 minute podcast, but I wanna know the highlights and the actionable tips. Those are the reasons why I use ChatGPT. So I still use it, but I think now that you know how I use those three, you can see where it fits in what you do. But I use those three every day. Claude is also great for coming up with infographics and easy to use charts too. ChatGPT does as well, but for infographics and charts and things that SEO really likes because they want easy to read charts in your blogs, I've been using Claude to come up with just very simple black and white charts.
00:18:24 Gloria Now in terms of images, if you make something you want to make a product photo, I have heard of Google Gemini Nano Bananas. So that is what I have been hearing from my people that is the best image creators. Now, for me, I don't make a physical product, so the product photo is not as important. For me, it's mostly about words. But if you want to juxtapose your skincare line or your candle against the backdrop, try Nano Bananas. I heard that it's really good. there you have it. My tech stack, why this is a golden opportunity that won't come again anytime soon, arguably the best time all year to do PR. You're killing 10 birds with one stone. You are definitely first movers advantage to get found on AI search, if you get featured in gift guides. It's the most powerful thing you can do to set yourself up for years of success.
00:19:08 Gloria don't tell me I didn't warn you. It's kind of like blogging in 2000 when it was so easy to get SEO. Now it's super crowded. This is your window right here, right now. If you want to learn more, go to my Instagram, you can DM me and we can have a chat about it. I'm @GloriaChouPR, that's @GloriaChou PR. I share very openly about my healing journey with my mom, my psychedelics assisted therapy, all of the generational trauma I dealt with, called out a lot of bullshit online. I'm pretty bold about that with my values.
00:19:38 Gloria So just warning you pretty unfiltered there and also about daily PR things too. And then you can watch my free PR masterclass at gloriachoupr.com/masterclass about how to use these AI tools, how to get featured, because I truly believe now with the ease of use and the fact that so many things are free, like Perplexity free version. Great. There's no excuse for you not to get featured. It has never been easier.
00:20:01 Gloria And inside our PR program, we actually curate the internet for all the best gift guide opportunities by scanning all of the blogs and newsletters from product journalists, delivering them straight to our members inbox. Some of them get featured within 24 hours and you don't even have to write a pitch from scratch. You can just click reply and then ChatGPT just spits it out for you. And no, it's okay if you use AI. Journalists don't care for a gift guide feature. They're writing the article, not you. You're not writing an op-ed. You're not writing a long lifestyle commentary.
00:20:30 Gloria you can absolutely use ChatGPT to respond to these 24-hour feature opportunities that I'm curating for our members. If you know anyone, any small businesses that would benefit from this episode, please share it with them. It's the only way that this is found. And until next time.
00:20:46 Gloria Hey, small business hero, did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes, the New York Times, Marie Claire, PopSugar, and so many more, even if you are not yet launched or if you don't have any connections? That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR secrets masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought after industry expert.
00:21:14 Gloria Now, if you want to land your first press feature, get on a podcast, secure a VIP speaking gig, or just reach out to that very intimidating editor, this class will show you exactly how to do it. Register now at gloriachaupr.com/masterclass. That's gloriachou, C-H-O-U, pr.com/masterclass. So you can get featured in 30 days without spending a penny on ads or agencies. Best of all, this is completely free. So get in there and let's get you featured.