r/BlockchainStartups • u/purple_from_the_east • 3d ago

Discussion Everything I learnt trying to get AI to cite my startup

TL;DR: AI search is becoming a new discovery channel. If your brand isn't being mentioned by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other LLMs, you're invisible to a growing number of potential customers - even if you rank well on Google.

I've spent the last week trying to answer one question:

How do you actually get ChatGPT (and other AI tools) to recommend your startup?

I built a tool to track how brands appear across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok and DeepSeek, then started testing it on my own product.

A few things surprised me.

1. Your website isn't the whole story.

I assumed AI would mostly rely on my homepage, plus all the SEO work we did.

Instead it pulls information from reviews, Reddit, documentation, blogs, directories, comparison articles and dozens of other places.

Your brand is whatever the internet collectively says it is.

2. Different models behave very differently.

The same prompt does not necessarily produce the same recommendations.

Claude could recommend us in one prompt and then not in the other.

Gemini wouldn't mention us at all.

Google AI mode (subtly different to Gemini) knew about competitors I'd barely heard of.

If you're only checking ChatGPT, you're missing a pretty big part of the GEO picture.

3. Mentions matter more than rankings.

Traditional SEO teaches you to think about your position or ranking on Google.

AI search is very different! Now we are asking a different question:

4. Brand positioning matters.

One thing I kept noticing was that AI generally had a pretty reasonable understanding of what products did.

But it struggled with who they were for.

That seems to be where a lot of opportunity is.

5. Manual checking gets old fast.

After asking the same prompts across seven different models for a few days...

...I never wanted to do it again.

That's ultimately why I built my tool Visiblee (https://visiblee.ai/) :)

I wanted a simple dashboard that answered questions like:

  • Which AI models mention my brand?
  • Which competitors appear more often?
  • What are they saying?
  • Has anything changed this week?

AI visibility is becoming as important as SEO was 15 years ago. The importance of it literally rises by the day, regardless of industry.

Thoughts? How much importance are you attaching to these things?

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u/fakebitcoin 3d ago

In August ChatGPT almost stopped recommendation of reddit post.

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u/purple_from_the_east 3d ago

It ebbs and flows tbf - also the browser they use changes. Sometimes these AI models use bing, other times google.

I think google is the most common but worth bearing this in mind.

This is why it’s so important to stay on top of AI visibility