The next big battlefield for newsletter platforms is AI chatbots.
In a competitive market, platforms like Beehiiv, Substack, and Ghost have been duking it out to win over creators with new features like social feeds, videos, and podcasting. Ultimately, the platform that most seamlessly integrates with writers’ daily workflows may win the day. Lately, that means finding ways to work with ChatGPT and Claude.
Beehiiv exclusively told Business Insider that it’s rolling out a new feature on Tuesday for paid users that allows them to use chatbots to automate publishing tasks like adding meta descriptions to images, tagging posts, and tweaking the look of a newsletter page using text prompts, among other tasks.
Here are a few other use cases Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk proposed:
Asking a chatbot to create new Beehiiv story templates, styled to a writer’s brand, based on their best-performing postsBuilding an annual Beehiiv reader survey to learn more about what a writer’s audience is looking forWriting SEO-friendly descriptions and titles for a Beehiiv user’s podcasts
The tool, built via a model context protocol, or MCP, is an expansion of an earlier feature Beehiiv set up for writers to pull data on their readership and story performance into AI tools like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity for daily reports and other analysis.
Competitor Substack is testing its own chatbot connector, its CEO told Sources’ Alex Heath last month.
AI power users can spend all day in Claude
Beehiiv’s new toolkit is tailored to users like Jaan Juurikas, a Beehiiv writer who’s made AI central to his workflow as he writes his electric-vehicle newsletter, EVwire.
Juurikas, who has amassed around 14,000 subscribers, trained Claude to research, draft, and structure articles in his style. The approach has helped him and his small team double their publishing output in recent days, he said.
“It’ll create a draft that sometimes is like 90% ready,” Juurikas said of Claude. “If you do it well with AI and you train it with your voice, then it actually does a lot of heavy lifting.”
Beehiiv, which also offers podcasting and webinar features, wants to “win on product and user experience rather than fighting the trends of more people and consumers using LLMs,” Denk, its CEO, told Business Insider. It’s up to the writer where they want to spend their time, he said.
Brandon Smithwrick, another Beehiiv user who writes the content-strategy newsletter, Content to Commas, prefers to do his drafting in Notion, for example. He’s using Beehiiv’s MCP tool to generate reports on who reads his articles and which content performs the best. He asks the AI to assign a letter grade to articles.
Courtesy of Brandon Smithwrick.
“I don’t want to give all my writing totally to Claude,” he said, noting that his edge in an AI-loaded internet is his ability to come up with new ideas.
Newsletter writers will have to strike a balance between using AI to improve workflow efficiency and continuing to produce something unique. While a real AI diehard could use tools like Beehiiv’s connector to automate essentially all areas of production, including writing, it may not help them keep readers paying.
“People will stop trying to create AI-generated content if it’s not landing,” Denk said. “It has to solve a real consumer problem, and the quality has to be good.”
“The subscribers will ultimately vote with their feet and with their dollars of who they want to support,” he added.
