Stop rewriting your homepage, and find out which pages ChatGPT reads when a buyer asks your question, because that list is your to-do list. Then do five things in order: measure, make your site readable, get onto those pages, get real reviews, and measure again.
Here is that order for one person with a product to run. If you want the reasons first, there is a separate page on why ChatGPT doesn’t recommend you.
The order of work
- Measure, about an hour. Write five questions a buyer would really type. Ask each three times, on ChatGPT and at least one other AI. Write down who gets named and which pages get cited. The by-hand method is free, and so is our check.
- Remove what blocks reading, an afternoon at most. Check robots.txt lets AI crawlers in. Check your words are in the HTML, not loaded afterwards. Say in the first sentence what the product is, who it is for and what it costs.
- Get onto the pages from step 1. Not every list. The three to ten that actually appear in the citations. Pitch them with a real reason, and follow up twice. How to do this.
- Ask real customers for reviews. Use the review site that showed up in step 1. In one experiment a rating edge under 0.1 stars was enough to flip a tie between products.
- Measure again at day 30, 60 and 90. Same questions, same runs. Count how often you are named. Answers move even when nothing changed.
Step 3 is where the time goes, and it is the step that matters most. For US software questions, 72.7 percent of the sources AI engines cited were earned media, and in Ahrefs’ count “best X” lists alone were 43.8 percent of the page types ChatGPT cited (vendor study, correlational).
What to skip for now
- A special file. llms.txt is fine, and it will not get you named.
- Directory blasts. In a study of 9,978 AI answers, ChatGPT and Gemini rarely cited directories.
- Rewriting everything “for AI”. Most content tricks tested in research did little. Plain facts with numbers help. Keyword stuffing does not.
- A dashboard. A spreadsheet will do until you are doing the work above.
- Fake accounts, bought reviews, hidden text. They are not honest, and we would not sell them to you either.
If you have no customers yet
Then this is not your problem yet. AIs mostly repeat what other people say about you, and nobody has said anything. Get your first ten customers from the places they already are. Do step 2 now, because it is quick. Come back to the rest after that.
When it is worth paying someone
You have real customers, you have measured a gap, and you do not have the hours. That is the case we built this for.
| You have | Do this | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Curiosity | Free check: 75 answers from 5 AIs, by email within 2 working days | $0 |
| Hours, but no plan | Audit: 375 answers and the exact pages to get onto | $149 once, $99 for the founding 20 |
| Money, but no hours | Project: 25 lists and sites pitched, 3 pages written, 2 review profiles, re-checks | $799 once |
| Hours and a plan | This page | $0 |
Honest limits: I started this in October 2026. There are no paying customers yet, and my own product was named in 0 of 422 answers as of November 4 2026. I am running the same method on myself, in public, and the visibility log will show whether they work. If it stays at zero, it says so.
Questions
What should a solo founder do first if ChatGPT never mentions their product?
Measure it properly. Ask five real buyer questions three times each, write down who gets named and which pages get cited. That list of cited pages is your to-do list, and it takes about an hour.
How long until ChatGPT mentions my product?
I do not know, and I am wary of anyone with a confident number. It depends on how soon the pages it cites add you. Measure again at about 30, 60 and 90 days and expect it to move slowly, if at all.
Can I pay ChatGPT to mention my product?
No. OpenAI says its ads do not change the organic answer. You can buy ads, and they stop the day you stop paying.
Do I need a tracking tool?
Not at the start. A spreadsheet and an hour a month is enough for one person. A tracker tells you the same thing with nicer charts, and someone still has to do the work.
Should I hire someone?
Only if you have real customers and no hours. If you have a few hours a week and can write a polite email, you can do most of this yourself.