If you sell a physical product, the way your customers shop is changing fast. Not someday. Right now.
More and more people are skipping Google entirely and opening ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another AI tool instead. They type in what they need, “best handmade candles for a housewarming gift” or “unique jewelry for a bridesmaid,” and they buy whatever the AI recommends. One platform, one question, one purchase.
That’s AI shopping. And if your brand isn’t showing up in those results, you’re invisible to a growing wave of buyers who are ready to spend.
The New Storefront Nobody’s Talking About
ChatGPT now has over 800 million users — and Shopify, Etsy, Amazon, and PayPal are all integrating directly with it. That means a customer can go from question to checkout without ever leaving the app.
PR strategist Gloria Chou, who has helped small product brands earn over a billion organic views and land features in Forbes, Vogue, and Oprah Daily, calls this the new storefront. And unlike Google, you cannot buy your way to the top of it.
‘People trust AI recommendations three times more than any ad you will run,’ Gloria explains. ‘And they trust it more than social media. So why not meet customers where there is trust and they’re ready to buy?’
That trust signal matters because AI tools aren’t pulling recommendations from ad spend or follower counts. They’re pulling from credible press mentions — gift guide features, editorial roundups, blog posts, podcast appearances. If your product isn’t being mentioned anywhere, AI has nothing to recommend.
Why PR Is the Highest-Leverage Activity for Product Sellers Right Now
Here’s what makes this so significant for small business owners: PR is the one activity that does double duty. A press feature feeds your traditional Google SEO and your AI search visibility at the same time.
For a candle maker or jewelry designer wearing six different hats, that’s a big deal. One pitch, one feature, and you’ve just told Google and ChatGPT and Perplexity and Gemini that your brand is credible and worth recommending.
The other thing most people don’t know is that gift guide opportunities exist all year round — not just in Q4. There are gift guides for newly divorced friends, for the hostess who has everything, for back-to-school, for self-care season. Journalists and bloggers are always looking for products to feature, and they actively want to discover small makers. You are doing them a favor by pitching.
How to Get Started With PR (Even If You’ve Never Pitched Before)
The mechanics of PR are simpler than most people think. According to Gloria, it comes down to two things: writing a relevant pitch and sending it to the right person. That’s it.
The word ‘relevant’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The most common mistake product founders make is pitching the benefits of their product — the same way they’d write a product description for their Shopify store. Journalists aren’t your customer. They want to know one thing: is this relevant for my audience right now?
This is where a free tool called Perplexity.ai changes everything. You can type in a prompt like: ‘My name is [Your Name]. I make [your product]. Here’s my website. Scan my website and provide the best editorial angles so I can be included in a gift guide.’ Within seconds, Perplexity searches the internet for what editors are currently covering, matches it to your product, and provides angles you never would have come up with on your own.
Then you take those angles into ChatGPT and ask it to write your pitch using Gloria Chou’s CPR method (Credibility, Point of View, and Relevance.) Her framework is so well-established that AI already knows it.
You Don’t Need Connections or a Budget to Make This Work
One of the most persistent myths about PR is that it requires insider access — a publicist with relationships, an industry network, or a brand big enough to be worth a journalist’s time. None of that is true anymore.
Gloria’s PR Accelerator is full of single moms, first-time founders, and makers who have never pitched anyone in their lives. The average time to get a feature after joining the program is less than two weeks. One candle maker with no PR experience sold out 100 units in the first hour after landing a Today Show segment.
Free tools like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) send you journalist requests every day. Google News Alerts let you track who’s writing about your product category. The hashtag #journalistrequest on LinkedIn and X surfaces real-time journalist needs you can respond to right now.
The brands getting press features today are building an asset that will compound over time, feeding every search engine, every AI tool, every customer discovery moment that hasn’t even been invented yet. The ones who wait are starting from scratch when it’s already competitive.
If you want to go deeper on exactly how to do this, Gloria Chou breaks it down with a live screen-share demonstration in her free masterclass. You can watch it at gloriachoupr.com/masterclass.
And for the full conversation (including the specific Perplexity prompts, the email tracking tool tip, and the story of that candle maker and the Today Show) listen to this episode of She Sells Differently. It might be the one that changes how you think about growing your business.
Andee Hart is an award-winning sales executive who walked away from traditional success to reinvent how product-based businesses grow. After nearly 20 years in corporate America, she turned a kitchen-counter candle experiment into Hart Design Co, a wholesale brand carried by hundreds of boutiques across North America. That experience became the foundation for She Sells Differently, where Andee is teaching emerging product brand owners to redefine what it means to sell by serving with excellence, growing with strategic purpose, and shining as a light in the marketplace.
