PR Hunters Guide: How to Use It for PR and SEO

In my seemingly endless quest to review and evaluate every HARO-like PR, outreach, and networking tool, I've come today to PR Hunters.

This one is a bit of an interesting case, so I wanted to talk about it.

Let's get right to it!

What is PR Hunters?

First up, I need to clarify what, specifically, I'm talking about. That's because when you search for PR Hunters, you're going to find a bunch of results:

• PR Hunters is not "Hunter PR," which is an integrated marketing firm with offices in New York, LA, and London. While you're certainly free to retain the services of a PR firm instead of using something like Connectively, it's not really the same scope or scale of service.
• PR Hunters is not "Hunter-PR," also known as HPR, which is a PR firm dedicated specifically to golf, spa, hospitality, and event marketing. If you happen to own and manage a golf course, spa, or event space, I'm sure you can get some good use out of HPR, but it's also not what I'm talking about.

No, PR Hunters is "PR Hunters" specifically.

It's found at https://www.prhunters.com/ and is part of a set of services also including Asset Hunters and Keyword Guru. I'm not going to dig into either of those two services, but the short version is that Keyword Guru is a real-time keyword suggestion tool using Google autocomplete scraping, and Asset Hunters appears to mostly just be a domain name search.

There's a reason I need to clarify this. Unfortunately, they're kind of a frustratingly generically-named tool, so there's a lot of competition for the name, and Google's modern algorithm hasn't identified them as large or meaningful enough to prioritize, so you have a lot of junk results of people just using the term "PR hunters" for unrelated reasons.

What unrelated reasons? Well, the term "PR hunter" also applies to an exploitable loophole in immigration policies for various countries around the world. People will enroll in schools that give out student visas and then just keep their enrollment going without ever really graduating while seeking PR - that is, Permanent Residence - in the country. The PR acronym can also mean things in various video games, further muddling the results.

So, what I'm actually talking about is a small-scale, automated tool meant for the people hunting for PR opportunities.

Let's talk about what PR Hunters is and does.

What does PR Hunters Do?

PR Hunters is a pretty simple tool. It works a bit like HARO. You sign up for a free or paid plan, and you choose the topics you're an expert in and set some keyword alerts. Then, you get daily emails with PR opportunities from journalists looking for your kind of expertise.

Once you have it set up, using it is very simple. All you need to do is read those daily emails, and if something catches your eye, just respond to it. You'll be connected with the journalist and can work out whatever interview or Q&A session you need to satisfy their request. They write their story, quote and cite you, and you're good to go.

Functionally this sounds a lot like HARO/Connectively, but there are a few big here differences. The biggest difference is the sourcing of the PR opportunities, but since that's a fairly important detail, I'm going to cover it later.

What about pricing? PR Hunters has three plans.

The first is the free plan, and it works exactly as I described above. You sign up, pick topics, pick keywords for alerts, and get daily emails. That's it; everything else is left to you. There's no dashboard for tracking requests, no augmented features, nothing like that.

The second is the Freelancer/SME plan, which is a mere $5 per month. It's the same as the free plan, except instead of daily emails, you get instant emails as soon as their platform identifies a PR request that fits your needs. They also give you a guided setup (though I'm not sure what guidance you really need for a platform as simple as this) and 48-hour support turnaround times. Note that if you pay for a premium plan, you no longer get daily digests; it's immediate alerts only from then on out.

Interestingly I've found evidence floating around that PR Hunters used to be way more expensive - to the tune of 25 euros per month - but I don't know if that's a previous price with a recent reduction or if it was just a scraper identifying an incorrect price. The price I've listed above is reflective of what their website currently says.

The third is their Enterprise plan, which has "bespoke functionality," but they don't tell you what that is. They also don't tell you what their pricing is. I'm not signing up for it (for reasons I'll get to in a moment), so I can't really tell you either. If you happen to know, please drop me a line and tell me about it!

And that's it! That's PR Hunters in a nutshell.

Where PR Hunters Gets Their Opportunities

Above, I mentioned that I was going to go into a little greater detail about where PR Hunters gets their opportunities, so here it is: Twitter.

According to B2SaaS, PR Hunters is basically a scraper integrating Twitter and Mailchimp; it watches Twitter across various hashtags and keywords, as well as monitoring known journalist accounts. When it finds opportunities that pass its spam checks and seem valid, it filters them according to keyword and interest category, puts them into the relevant email list, and sends out those daily digests or immediate alerts.

The filtering uses its own internal NLP algorithms to identify and categorize journalist opportunities. They also filter out spammy journalist accounts, fake "opportunities," and so on.

This is a significant difference between PR Hunters and platforms like Qwoted and SourceBottle. For most of the other HARO-like platforms, experts register for the site to get opportunities, and journalists register for the site to give them out. PR Hunters doesn't have any way for journalists to sign up; it's solely a service for publishers and people seeking link and quote opportunities.

One interesting note is that they also apparently started scraping HARO for opportunities as well - it's something mentioned in a news post on their subreddit - but obviously, that isn't going to be valid since Connectively died.

Should You Use PR Hunters?

Honestly? I think probably not, and I'll tell you why. However, since there's a free plan (and the paid plan is just $5), there's not really much harm in signing up and trying it out for yourself.

So, let's go over the various red flags and reasons why you might not want to use PR Hunters.

They don't have a unique source for opportunities. Most HARO-like platforms rely on building a roster of journalists who post their opportunities through the platform. That means when you sign up for a service like Qwoted, Featured, SourceBottle, or any of the others, you're getting access to journalist opportunities you probably aren't going to find anywhere else. Oh, sure, the journalist might be using several of those platforms (since they're always free for journalists), or they might be asking publicly as well, but most of the time, that's not the case.

For PR Hunters, it's all sourced from Twitter. There's no obfuscation about where they get it, either. They don't say "sourced from multiple social media sites" or from "proprietary sources" or anything like that. Nope, just Twitter.

It's also noteworthy that I'm saying "Twitter" here instead of X. Elon doing his big name change - and systematically stripping Twitter of a lot of the features and services that made it useful - has driven off a lot of valuable users. What you're left with are a lot of foreign users who don't have many alternatives and a lot of spam, bots, and scams.

While PR Hunters does claim to filter out a lot of the spam, I have to wonder how effective they are with it.

They don't have an active web presence. How often do you sign up with a service that hasn't received updates in over a year? How about two years?

How about six years?

Sure, sometimes a service can be set-and-forget and doesn't really need the attention, but even still, a bit of activity is a good thing. I've recommended my share of WordPress plugins that haven't been touched in a few years, but for something that requires active integration with an actively changing platform like X, it sure feels a lot like being abandoned.

Not only does PR Hunters have a dated-feeling website, but their official Subreddit is dead. It was made in 2016, and its most recent post was in 2017, every post has no more than 5 upvotes and zero comments, it has a whopping 9 members; it's nothing. I get that they wanted to foster a community, but they very much didn't actually do that.

Even the various websites and lists that mention them as a service are barely anything. There are a handful of "PR tool list" articles that put 1-2 sentences for the tool in their list, and there are a few equally old Reddit threads with off-handed mentions of the service that are, in some cases, from their CEO.

I will say that seven years ago, Ahrefs posted on Reddit asking for SEO tool recommendations, and they seemed to like PR Hunters at the time. But that's a very load-bearing "at the time."

None of this necessarily reflects on the service itself, but it really strikes me as something that has been abandoned because it didn't take off, and the only reason it's still up is that a few lingering subscribers are giving them $5 a month and they don't want to cut off the free money.

There are basically no real reviews out there. Other than the aforementioned single sentence of praise from an Ahrefs rep seven years ago, there's broadly nothing out there. There's a single anonymous review on G2, and that's about it.

For that matter, if you visit their parent brand - Hyperbase.co - they also have no web presence at all. Moreover, they have a couple of testimonials, one of which is from Joe Youngblood, who I believe is their CEO and the owner of the PRHunters and Hyperbase subreddits. (The Hyperbase subreddit is even more dire than the PRHunters one, btw; it might as well not exist.) They made Hyperbase to unify their tools under one brand and implement Single Sign-On, and as far as I can tell, that's it. They don't even have a customized favicon, it's just the WordPress logo. I mean, the picture of their staff on their About Us page is a stock photo! Pretty funny.

Interestingly, their Hyperbase pricing page has free and Freelancer plans for their tools but doesn't have the Enterprise option. It almost makes me wonder what would happen if you tried to reach out and sign up.

Their other services don't do much. Truth be told, their Keyword Guru service didn't even work when I tried it, and I really don't see the point of the domain search when every single registrar has one that works exactly the same way but with more and better information attached.

A Final Verdict

Truthfully, even if you feel like it would be valuable to get PR opportunities from Twitter/X, there are better ways to do it. Modern social listening apps are going to be way more powerful and don't have to be filtered through your email. Plus, you can customize them a lot more. You can also use them on other social networks since X is on its way out.

If you're morbidly curious, feel free to sign up for the free plan. I'm actually interested to know if it even still works. Truth be told, I didn't even bother signing up for it myself. There are too many red flags, and I'm already testing a dozen other PR and outreach platforms, so one more email is just not going to be worthwhile to me.

I'm certainly happy to hear about your experiences (within the last year, please) if you want to leave a comment, though!