NotebookLM is free, polished, and the fastest way to chat with 50 PDFs. Open Notebook is open-source, self-hostable, and the only one of the two you can point at Ollama or your own Anthropic key. I ran both for a month on real marketing research — here's the head-to-head, the dimensions that actually matter, and which one I reach for when.
A practitioner's reference to the twelve question types that cover 95% of survey needs — when to use each, common traps, a comparison table, and one AI prompt that turns a bad question into three better ones.
A practical 5-prompt sequence for designing marketing-research surveys in Perplexity — from locking the research objective to planning the fielding and analysis.
A practical workflow for using Google's NotebookLM as a marketing research analyst — uploading competitor PDFs, G2 review dumps, and analyst reports, then querying them like a real research analyst. Includes the exact setup steps, the 6 prompts that actually return usable research, the Audio Overview trick, and the three gotchas to watch for.
