# 13 of the 14 tools AI recommends in my category are on the same list. I am not on it. > Source: > Published: 2026-07-28 09:03:29+00:00 I build a tool that checks whether AI assistants name your product. So I pointed it at my own category and let it run for a week. 39 different buyer questions. 44 recorded answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, all live web searches rather than training data. For every answer I stored three things: which products got named, which pages the answer was built from, and whether I was in it. I was named zero times. Not once, in any answer, by any assistant. This is what I found when I went looking for the reason, and the reason turned out to be much more boring and much more fixable than I expected. Counting every mention across those 44 answers: | Tool | Times named | |---|---| | Profound | 25 | | Otterly | 22 | | Peec AI | 20 | | Semrush | 18 | | Surfer SEO | 10 | | Frase | 10 | | SE Ranking | 9 | | Ahrefs Brand Radar | 9 | | AthenaHQ | 8 | | Scrunch | 7 | | Rankscale | 7 | | ZipTie | 6 | | Writesonic | 6 | | Nightwatch | 6 | | My product | 0 | My first instinct was the comfortable one: those are bigger companies. It is a nice theory and the data kills it. Otterly starts at 29 dollars a month. Rankscale starts at 20. ZipTie and AthenaHQ are not enterprises either. Several of them are smaller operations than mine. So it is not size. Something else decides this. Every answer also stores its sources, so I counted which domains the assistants were actually reading. One name kept coming back that was not a competitor: rankability.com, cited in 8 of my 44 answers. I opened the page. It is an article called "22 Best AI Search Rank Tracking & Visibility Tools". A list. Then I did the comparison that took ten minutes and changed my plan for the quarter. I put the 14 tools that get named next to the 22 tools on that list. Thirteen of my fourteen are on it. Profound, Otterly, Peec AI, Semrush, Surfer, SE Ranking, Ahrefs Brand Radar, AthenaHQ, Scrunch, Rankscale, ZipTie, Writesonic, Nightwatch. All there. My product is not on the list, and my product is named zero times. I do not get to call that proof of causation from one list and 44 answers. But it is the strongest pattern in the data by a distance, and it points somewhere I can act on, which is more than any theory about being small was ever going to do. One name breaks the pattern: Frase. Named 10 times, and not on that list at all. So I went back to the source counts, and there it was: frase.io is itself cited as a source in 11 of the 44 answers. More often than the list that names everyone else. Frase did not get into the shortlist by being included in someone's roundup. It got in by being the page the assistant reads. That is the second route, and it is the harder one, but it means the wall is not one door. You can be on the lists that assistants read, or you can be the thing they read. Frase spent years building the second one. While I had the data open, the full picture of my category's sources, across 44 answers: That last line is the one I had to sit with. I had a whole afternoon planned around directory submissions, based on advice I had read everywhere. In my category, by my own measurement, they are close to irrelevant. Reddit is 61%. I am writing that up separately because it deserves its own argument, but it is worth saying here: I had the plan backwards, and the only reason I know is that I measured instead of assuming. Nothing clever. The data points at three things and they are all unglamorous. Get onto the lists that my category's answers are actually built from, which means the specific roundups I can name from my own citation counts rather than a generic directory push. Not by emailing "please add me", which gets ignored, but by giving those editors the one thing none of them have: this measurement. They all write about AI visibility and none of them measure it. Be useful on Reddit, because it is 61% and everything else is a rounding error next to it. Keep publishing, but stop expecting my own pages to do the work alone. tryprofound.com being cited 15 times proves an assistant will happily quote a vendor's own site. It also proves it does that after the vendor is already in the conversation. My pages are not wasted, they are just early. You can do a rough version by hand today, and I would rather you did that than take my word for any of it. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the exact question your buyer types. Write down every product named. Then open the sources each assistant cites and look for the one page that keeps appearing. Check whether the products getting named are on it. Check whether you are. If it comes back the way mine did, at least you will know what you are up against, and it will not be "we are too small". The automated version is what I build: [glotier.com](https://glotier.com). The check is free, no card and no account. It asks the three assistants your buyer questions, shows you who got named instead of you, and lists every source page behind each answer. I would have preferred to launch with a better number than zero. It is the honest one, and it turned out to be the useful one.