Frequently Asked Questions

PitchBud writes your release, finds real journalists who cover your beat, and pitches them personally from your own inbox. Plus, one click distributes your release automatically to the channels that actually move the needle: IndexNow (Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Naver, Seznam), the Google Indexing API, a permanent Internet Archive snapshot, and the WebSub hub that feeds aggregators like Feedly and Inoreader. Once you have 5+ releases live, your newsroom gets registered with Google News Publisher Center so every future release surfaces in news.google.com searches.

Wire services syndicate to pages that journalists almost never read — Yahoo Finance mirror feeds, AP automated republish, regional TV station websites. PitchBud skips that theater and pitches the actual humans on your beat: Substack writers, niche trade reporters, and podcast hosts who openly take pitches. We send from your own inbox, never via a shared IP, so deliverability stays clean.

After you publish a release, PitchBud autopilot runs a fresh journalist scan every Monday for up to 30 days. It only scans when your queue is clear — meaning you have worked through (sent, replied, or skipped) all the journalists from the previous batch. After 30 days the autopilot pauses automatically, and you get a weekly digest email summarising new journalists found and any editorial pickups detected. You can pause or resume autopilot per release from the Journalists tab. Available on Starter and up.

Yes. In Settings (Opportunities → Profile) you can configure a sender persona — a name, title, company, and optional signature footer. When a persona is active, PitchBud frames pitches in third-person about your company ("X launched…") rather than first-person, which is the correct voice for a PR coordinator pitching on behalf of a founder. The persona email populates the From field suggestion in your email client, and you can toggle the footer on or off without re-drafting existing pitches.

Yes. PitchBud runs an automated editorial check when you click Publish. It verifies a minimum word count, a valid contact email or phone, no placeholder text, and that the headline is not all-caps or misleadingly short. It also runs a quick AI pass to flag spam, deceptive health claims, or content that would embarrass a wire service. If anything is flagged as a blocker, the publish is held and the specific issue is shown so you can fix it before resubmitting.

Yes. When you trigger a journalist scan on a release, you can narrow it to one or more venue types: media outlets, Substack writers, newsletters, blogs, or podcasts. Leave all types selected for the widest pool, or pick just one to focus on a specific channel. Your selection does not permanently change any default — just click Scan again to change the mix.

Yes. In Settings (Opportunities → Profile) you can enable the 'Email-only contacts' filter. When on, journalists who only have a contact-form link are hidden from your journalist list — only rows with a known email address are shown. Toggle it off at any time to see the full list; no underlying data is deleted.

Yes — all paid plans can be billed monthly or annually. Annual billing is 10 payments for 12 months, which works out to two months free. You can switch from monthly to annual at any time from your account billing page, and the change takes effect immediately.

Yes. From the release editor you can upload a cover image or paste in a video URL — the video embeds automatically on your newsroom page. Images and video appear in the published release and can help journalists visualize the story. Book authors whose release is created via the SelfPublishing.pro integration get the book cover attached automatically.

Yes. On the Opportunities → Profile page, paste a URL to your website bio, LinkedIn page, or press-mentions page into the "Generate from URL" field and click Generate. PitchBud reads the page and drafts a plain-text expertise summary you can edit before saving. A clear profile improves the quality of HARO and Qwoted match scoring.

Each Starter+ account gets a private email address in the format opps+[token]@pitchbud.io. Set up a filter in Gmail, Outlook, or any mail client to forward incoming HARO, Qwoted, Featured, or SourceBottle digest emails to that address automatically. PitchBud parses arriving digests and scores them against your expertise profile — no manual paste required.

Yes. Each journalist row has a Do-Not-Contact option. Mark them as personal DNC and they will be filtered out of every future scan for your account only. If a journalist has explicitly asked not to be contacted by anyone, you can set the scope to global, which removes them from all PitchBud users future scans as well. Your Do-Not-Contact list is visible and editable under Settings (Opportunities → Profile).

Yes. The Launch PR Pack is a one-time $99 purchase that gives you one AI-drafted press release, a public newsroom page with full distribution signals, and up to 25 personalized journalist pitches — the same outreach depth as the Starter plan, but for a single launch with no ongoing commitment. The credit applies to your next new release and is consumed when you use it. Buy the Launch Pack from the pricing section on the homepage.

No — pitches go from your own inbox. PitchBud drafts a personalized subject and body for each journalist and queues them in your Journalists tab. You review each pitch, optionally edit it in your email client via the "Open in email" button, and hit Send yourself. We never send automatically on your behalf. Distribution to search indexes (IndexNow, Google Indexing API, Wayback, WebSub) does run automatically when you publish.

The journalist cap depends on your plan: Free has no outreach, Starter surfaces up to 25 per scan, Pro up to 100, and Studio up to 500. In practice a single scan typically returns 15–40 verified matches per beat. Each journalist is verified as currently active and their most recent piece is fetched so the pitch generator can reference their actual byline work.

HARO originally shut down after Cision acquired it, then Cision's replacement Connectively closed in late 2024. HARO has since been revived by Featured.com and continues as a source-request email service. PitchBud supports digests from HARO/Featured, Qwoted, Help a B2B Writer, and SourceBottle. Sign up directly with each service you want, then paste the daily digest into PitchBud — we score every query against your expertise profile and draft expert responses for the strongest matches.

Yes. Every pitch opens in a modal showing the subject and body. The body is editable in your email client after you click "Open in email" — make any tweaks you want before hitting Send. We never auto-send.

Once you publish a release, click "Check now" in the Coverage tab. PitchBud searches the web for your headline in quotes and for distinctive phrases from your subtitle, then fetches each candidate page and verifies it actually mentions your brand or quotes the headline (false positives get filtered out). Hits get recorded as real editorial pickups — your own newsroom and any free-syndication networks are excluded. Available on every plan including Free.

A scan takes 1–3 minutes per beat (our AI searches the web and verifies each journalist). Pitches take ~10 seconds each (we read the journalist's recent piece and draft a personalized opener). Both run in the background — you can leave the tab open or come back.

About 25% of the journalists we surface have a publicly listed email address. For the rest, PitchBud provides a copy-pitch button and a link to their contact or pitch-submission page — you paste the pitch into their form and submit yourself. Either way, you are always the last click before the message goes out.

Free ($0, 1 release/month with full distribution to Bing/Yandex/Google Indexing API/Wayback/WebSub). Starter $29 (4 releases × 25 personalized journalist pitches, HARO/Qwoted/Featured digest matching with private auto-ingest address). Pro $79 (10 releases × 100 pitches, all 6 venue types unlocked, cross-release contact history). Studio $199 (unlimited releases × 500 pitches per scan, maximum journalist-cache depth, for agencies). Annual is 10× monthly — 2 months free. Cancel anytime.

No. PitchBud's thesis is that paid wires are dying SEO theater. If you genuinely need SEC-disclosure-grade distribution, buy PR Newswire directly. For every other use case, what we do is materially better.

No. We never sell your data, never send pitches from a shared IP, and never share draft releases with third parties before you publish. Pitches go from your own inbox via MAILTO — your domain reputation, your relationship.