Standing Out When Everyone's Pitching with the Same AI Tools
About 18 months ago, the hardest part of getting media coverage was producing a polished, well-structured pitch. You needed to understand news angles, write tight, personalise to the journalist, and know instinctively what made a story worth telling. Most small business owners couldn't do all of that at once, which is why so few of them got coverage.
Now, any business owner with a ChatGPT subscription can generate a structurally sound, grammatically clean media pitch in under five minutes. The barrier to looking professional has essentially disappeared.
That sounds like good news. In some ways it is. But for Australian journalists — whose inboxes have absorbed this shift in real time — the picture is more complicated. And understanding it changes how you should approach your PR strategy entirely.
What Journalists Are Actually Dealing With Right Now
Speak to any Australian journalist or editor today — whether they're at The Guardian, a trade title, or a regional publication — and you'll hear a version of the same observation: the volume of pitches has risen sharply, but the proportion that are genuinely useful has not.
What's changed isn't quality in the traditional sense. AI-assisted pitches are often well-formatted, free of typos, and structurally logical. What's missing is specificity and genuine skin in the game. Journalists can tell when a pitch has been generated by someone who has thought hard about the angle, versus someone who has asked a tool to "write a media pitch about my business." The result looks similar. The feel is completely different.
Australian media is also dealing with continued consolidation and shrinking editorial teams. Reporters are managing more beats with fewer resources. A pitch that doesn't immediately answer "why now, why me, why my readers" doesn't get a second reading. The margin for a mediocre pitch to survive on polish alone has narrowed to almost nothing.
The implication for small businesses isn't that AI PR tools have become useless — far from it. But using them as a content generator rather than a thinking partner actively works against you.
What Does a Journalist Actually Want From a Pitch?
The answer has always been the same, but it matters more now than it ever has: specificity that only you can provide.
A journalist covering a retail story doesn't need another generic comment about "the challenging economic environment facing Australian businesses." They need someone who can tell them that their Geelong hardware store has seen a 23 per cent drop in weekend foot traffic since a new competitor opened nearby, has tried three different promotional responses, and has a clear view on what's actually working. That's a story. No AI tool can generate it from scratch, because it doesn't exist unless you've lived it.
This is what experienced PR practitioners have always called the "so what" test. Passing it requires genuine, hard-won knowledge — the kind that comes from actually running a business, making mistakes, and holding real opinions. AI can help you package that expertise. It cannot create it.
The businesses getting consistent media coverage right now are not the ones with the most sophisticated AI prompts. They're the ones who have developed a clear point of view on their industry and made themselves easy to find and easy to quote.
Specificity Is the New Currency of Media Relations
One practical shift that follows from this: stop trying to be relevant to everyone, and get relentlessly specific about your area of expertise.
The AI-generated pitch tends towards breadth because generalist claims are easier to produce. But editors don't need a source who can comment on "the future of retail." They need someone who can speak authoritatively to, say, the pressure on independent pharmacies since changes to PBS dispensing fees, or the real impact of short-term rental regulation on occupancy rates for small operators in coastal Queensland.
Developing that specific expertise positioning takes time, but it pays off consistently. A useful exercise — which takes about 45 minutes and needs no AI at all — is to map out the three or four specific questions your industry is wrestling with right now, the genuine opinion you hold on each, and the specific evidence from your own experience that backs it up. That map becomes the foundation of every pitch, every LinkedIn post, and every response to a journalist inquiry for the next quarter.
Once you have that map, AI becomes genuinely useful. You can use Claude (around $22 AUD per month on the Pro plan) or ChatGPT (similar pricing) to help you structure your thinking into different pitch formats, test whether your angle is sufficiently newsworthy, or adapt a single core insight for different publications. But the raw material has to come from you.
A prompt that works for this:
"I'm a [role] with [X years] experience in [industry]. I believe [your specific opinion]. Here's the evidence from my own business: [2-3 specific examples]. Help me structure this as a news angle for a journalist covering [beat]. Don't add any claims I haven't mentioned — only use what I've given you."
That last instruction matters. Without it, AI tools will helpfully fill gaps in your pitch with plausible-sounding assertions that may not be true.
Why Do Most AI-Assisted PR Campaigns Fail to Build Relationships?
Because they're optimised for output, not for connection.
Most AI-assisted PR advice focuses on generating more pitches, faster. The problem is that volume is exactly the wrong strategy in a market where journalists are already overwhelmed. What actually builds consistent media coverage over time is becoming a reliable, trusted source. That's a relationship, and it's built incrementally.
Practically, this means a few things. Engage with journalists' published work before you pitch them — comment thoughtfully on their articles, share them with genuine context, or reach out to acknowledge a good piece without asking for anything. This isn't manipulative; it's how professional relationships in any field are built.
Respond quickly when journalists do reach out. A reporter on a tight deadline who gets a fast, useful response from you will call you again. One who gets a three-day turnaround with a heavily PR-polished quote probably won't.
Set up a monitoring system so you never miss when a journalist who covers your industry writes something relevant to your expertise. Google Alerts is free and is the baseline. Mention (from around $41 AUD per month) catches more sources, including social media, and is worth the cost if media coverage is a consistent priority. Neither is complex to set up; both take about 20 minutes to configure properly.
The goal isn't to comment on everything. It's to be strategically visible to the specific journalists who cover your patch, so that when they need a source, you're the name that surfaces first.
Where AI Genuinely Helps — and Where It Works Against You
To be direct about this: AI is excellent at certain tasks in the PR workflow, and actively counterproductive in others.
It helps with structure. If you know what you want to say but struggle to organise a pitch logically, AI tools are fast and effective at producing a clean framework. It helps with volume tasks — adapting a pitch to five different publications, generating follow-up email options, or drafting social posts from a published article. It helps with research — identifying journalist bylines, finding relevant recent coverage, or summarising background on an industry topic you're less familiar with. The prompting framework covered here is a good starting point for getting structured output.
What AI doesn't help with — and often hurts — is the authenticity layer. Pitches that sound like they could have been written by anyone are pitches that don't get picked up. If your AI output is adding phrases like "in today's rapidly evolving landscape" or "as we navigate unprecedented challenges," those are signals that you've lost control of the voice. Journalists recognise that cadence immediately, and it signals that no human being has thought carefully about this pitch.
The other area where AI actively works against you: using it to generate opinions or claims you don't actually hold. If a journalist follows up on an AI-generated assertion and you can't elaborate on it from your own experience, you lose credibility. That's harder to recover from than simply not getting coverage in the first place.
A 90-Day Credibility-Building Framework
Rather than thinking about PR as a series of individual pitches, a more durable strategic frame is to work in 90-day cycles aimed at building your visibility as a trusted expert in a specific area.
In the first month, focus entirely on preparation. Define your three expertise areas, map the journalists who cover those beats (there's a full guide to building an Australian media list for free here), and set up your monitoring system. Don't pitch anything yet. Use AI to help you audit your existing online presence — your website's About page, your LinkedIn profile, and any existing media mentions — to make sure they clearly communicate your specific expertise. If a journalist Googles you today, what do they find? If the answer is "not much," fix that first.
In the second month, start engaging. Respond to relevant journalist inquiries on SourceBottle (free) — not with AI-generated responses, but with specific, personally written answers that draw on real experience. Comment on two or three articles from journalists you want to build a relationship with. Pitch one story idea to one publication, properly personalised to that outlet's audience and the journalist's beat. One well-targeted pitch is worth more than twenty generic ones.
In the third month, build on whatever worked. If your SourceBottle response was picked up, follow up with a personalised note. If your pitch got no response, ask a trusted colleague to read it and give you honest feedback. Most importantly, publish something yourself — whether that's a LinkedIn post, a newsletter edition, or a blog — that demonstrates your specific point of view on a current industry question. That content becomes a credential you can reference in future pitches. It also gives journalists somewhere to look when they're checking whether you know what you're talking about.
The total time investment across 90 days is roughly six to eight hours — spread across three months, that's sustainable for a sole trader or small team without a dedicated marketing function.
The Traps Worth Avoiding
The most common mistake is using AI to generate pitches and sending them without personalisation. A journalist who receives an email that could have been addressed to anyone — and frequently has been — recognises it immediately. Volume without relevance is worse than no outreach at all because it trains journalists to filter you out permanently.
The second trap is pitching before your credibility foundation is visible online. If a journalist receives an interesting pitch and Googles the sender, only to find a thin LinkedIn profile and a website with no specific detail about your expertise, they'll hesitate. Build the foundation first, pitch second.
The third trap is trying to newsjack every relevant story. The temptation — especially with AI making reactive pitches faster — is to comment on every breaking story in your general vicinity. Journalists notice when sources are always available with an opinion on everything. Being selective and specific builds far more credibility than being omnipresent and generic.
Key Takeaways
The AI pitch flood has changed journalists' inboxes, but not what actually works: genuine expertise, specific angles, and trusted relationships.
Specificity is more valuable than polish. AI can help you structure and format your thinking, but it cannot generate the hard-won expertise that makes a pitch worth reading.
Relationship-building is a long-term investment that compounds. Volume-based AI pitching is a short-term tactic that erodes trust with the people you most need onside.
Use AI for structure, adaptation, and research. Keep it away from opinions, claims, and anything that's supposed to sound like you.
A 90-day credibility-building cycle — preparation, engagement, publication — is more effective and more sustainable than episodic pitching.