How to Use AI to Quickly Generate a List of Publications You Can Pitch

Let's face it—researching potential writing clients can feel like trying to find your glasses when they're sitting right on top of your head. It's tedious, time-consuming, and sometimes ridiculously frustrating. You're expected to figure out who accepts pitches or letters of intent (LOIs), discover what they're really looking for, decipher payment mysteries, and guess if they'd fancy your amazing photos (not to mention figuring out who to send your pitch/LOI to).

Luckily, there's a better way. AI tools like ChatGPT are your secret weapon, streamlining the whole process and saving you from endless Google rabbit holes. But here's the big challenge.  Not every publication actually advertises that they're open to pitches or LOIs. So how do you uncover those hidden gems?

Well, nobody said it was going to be easy.  But by using ChatGPT a bit creatively you can help speed up the process.  In a nutshell, you start by asking ChatGPT to list publications related to your niche and then dig a little deeper by checking out their recent articles, social media pages, or editor profiles. You can often pick up subtle hints or discover hidden opportunities this way.

Now, let's take a look at exactly HOW to leverage ChatGPT to build a list of publications you can pitch. And I'm going to share my journey of doing exactly that with you, warts and all.

In other words, it didn't go quite as planned.

How AI Streamlines Your Client Research

AI tools, particularly ChatGPT, are really good at quickly sorting through vast amounts of general data and providing you with useful summaries tailored specifically to your requests. Instead of spending hours scouring websites, job boards, or writer forums, you can now let ChatGPT do the heavy lifting by simply giving it the right prompt.

I say "simply", but creating a good prompt can take a fair bit of work to get right.

Creating an Effective ChatGPT Prompt

When using ChatGPT, clarity in your prompts is key. At a minimum, here’s what you should include:

• Your niche or area of expertise (e.g., health, technology, travel)
• The type of client you're looking for (e.g., online publications, magazines, blogs)
• Details you want included: acceptance of pitches or LOIs, content types desired, payment range, and photo submission requirements (to name a few).

Sample Prompt to Get You Started

So let's get back to our goal ... how to use AI to help us find publications that are open to pitches. Here's an easy-to-use prompt you can directly copy and customize for your own niche:

"Your role is to act as an expert in [INSERT TYPE]. List 10 reputable online publications that regularly publish articles about [YOUR NICHE HERE]. For each publication, indicate if they accept pitches or letters of intent (LOIs), describe briefly the type of content they prefer, include typical payment ranges if available, and specify if they accept or require accompanying photos."

Obviously, you’re going to replace [YOUR NICHE HERE] with your specific topic area, such as health and wellness, technology, parenting, or personal finance.

Here’s my first attempt at using this prompt for the Travel Industry.

Here’s a quick snapshot of two of the ten publications it listed and the information it came up with for me.

You probably spotted it straight away, but it took me awhile to notice. And what is now blindingly obvious is that there is no link to the guidelines or submissions pages.  So I needed to fix that.

Refining Your Prompts for Better Results

Sometimes (like me), you’ll forget to add in important information so your first AI-generated list might not be detailed enough. If this happens, don't worry—simply refine your prompt:

• Ask for more detailed information on payment ranges.
• Request additional specifics on content types or formatting.
• Specify a narrower niche if the original list feels too broad.
• Ask for a link to the submission guidelines.
• Etc.

Here’s an example you can use to refine your prompt:

“Expand on the previous list by including more detail about each publication’s typical payment for a 1,000-word article, the types of topics they're particularly interested in right now, and any recent submission guidelines changes.”

Here’s how I refined my prompt.

Now a sample of the response I got looks like this …

So far, so good. It seems to be working.

Ah-hah. Not so fast.

Next, you need to ask the million dollar question.  How accurate is that information?

A quick link check showed me that 8 out of the 10 links that ChatGPT gave me were … wait for it … either non-existent or not useful in terms of accessing guidelines.  Which is kind of not surprising.  One of the key ways to get what you need from ChatGPT is to give it as much information as you can, as specifically as you can.

So I tried to see if I could get better results by refining the prompt. I tried to be polite. Swearing at an AI is pointless. And besides it would have helped if I had provided more precise instructions instead of expecting ChatGPT to know everything without being told.

ChatGPT went away and came back with the following updates to the list of 10 travel publications.  I’ve laid the results out for you in the table below. And I've included my notes about whether the link takes me to useful information I could use to put together a pitch / LOI for that publication.

From those results, I can only conclude that ChatGPT has done as good of a job as it can, based on what is actually available on each website.  Perhaps that means that the prompt needs to be adjusted to say “don’t return a result if there isn’t a useful page available”. But then you’d have to define what “useful” means so ChatGPT can understand it.

That gets complicated so I decided to try one more prompt refinement.

Surprisingly, yes, ChatGPT did actually find some relevant information.  But when I asked it for its sources, it just kept giving me the same information over and over again, but not sources.  I finally realised that you have to click on the resources button just below its response ...

... and then it will pop up a sidebar with the responses which have been collected from all over the web, social media, forums, etc.

The takeaway for me using a prompt like this is:

• Always, always check the links
• Keep refining the prompts until you get back as much as you can from the websites, themselves
• Then get your AI to go wider and give you its sources so you can check and verify those

Is that process still a pain in the neck?

Yes.

But is it better and faster than having to do everything from scratch?

Absolutely!

Experiment and Get Comfortable!

As you can see, using AI effectively takes practice, so please keep experimenting. The more comfortable you become with crafting clear, detailed (and nosy) prompts, the quicker you'll turn this previously tedious, slow, painful task into a smooth, efficient part of your freelance routine.

Remember, ChatGPT and similar AI tools are there to make your life (a little bit) easier. And with a bit of practice, you’ll spend less time researching and more time pitching—and, importantly, earning!

Happy pitching!

Author's Bio

Trudy Rankin is an online business strategist and content creator who loves writing about quirky or funny experiences that teach life lessons. She helps service-based business owners attract the right leads using smart systems, quizzes, and AI—without adding to their sense of overwhelm. She and her husband live in Melbourne Australia and enjoy renovating campervans and traveling, especially to visit family.