Once your friends have all signed up, the next users have to find you on their own, and that mostly happens through Google and AI assistants. This checklist covers the technical side of being findable, in the order I'd do it. I'm Reza from the Serpair team, and this is the list we'd have wanted after our own launch.
Some context first. Serpair started because the team launched a startup and Google didn't rank it. Most founders hit some version of that wall, and YC's Ankit Gupta describes the fix well in How To Get Your First Users: "Finding your first users is more of a search problem than a persuasion problem." So treat findability like any other bug and work through it.
If someone hears about your product and searches its name, you should come up first. Plenty of new products don't, especially when the name is a common word or another company already uses it.
Check it:
Fix it:
WebSite structured data on the home page. Google says this markup is "most important" if you want to state a preference, and you can add an alternateName as a fallback (
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Acme",
"alternateName": ["Acme Invoicing", "acme.com"],
"url": "https://acme.com/"
}
</script>
Organization markup helps Google "disambiguate your organization in search results," which matters when other things share your name (Google docs). The sameAs property links your official profiles so the pieces connect.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Acme",
"url": "https://acme.com",
"logo": "https://acme.com/logo.png",
"description": "Invoicing for freelancers.",
"sameAs": [
"https://x.com/acmehq",
"https://github.com/acmehq",
"https://www.linkedin.com/company/acmehq"
]
}
</script>
Check every sameAs URL by hand. A typo in a handle points Google at someone else.
Now the honest part. Schema is not a shortcut to AI citations. Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD and found no meaningful lift in citations from Google AI Mode or ChatGPT. Those pages were already heavily cited, so the result says less about brand-new sites. Google also says there's "no special schema.org structured data" needed for its AI features, and that structured data should match the visible text (Google docs). Add schema so Google understands who you are, then put the facts that matter in plain visible text.
AI assistants can only cite pages their crawlers can reach. Each company documents its own bots:
A minimal robots.txt that welcomes search crawlers:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://acme.com/sitemap.xml
Then check your CDN or firewall, because robots.txt isn't the only gate. Google lists CDN and hosting settings as something to check, and Perplexity's docs include rules for allowing its bots through Cloudflare and AWS WAF. A quick smoke test from your terminal, using a shortened version of the user agent OpenAI documents:
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" \
-A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot)" \
https://acme.com/
A 403 or a challenge page means something is blocking the bot. Some firewalls also check the real IP ranges, which OpenAI and Perplexity publish, so treat a 200 here as a good sign rather than proof.
Crawlable isn't the same as useful. AI search tools often run several related searches for one question. Google calls this "query fan-out." Then they pull passages from pages that answer a specific part of the question clearly.
AI answers lean on sources the web already trusts. Pew found that Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit were the three most cited sources in Google's AI summaries. You can't buy your way into those, but you can show up honestly:
chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. Some AI visits arrive with no referrer and land in direct traffic, so the count is a floor.
If you'd rather not do step 6 by hand, Serpair tracks your Google rankings and whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini mention you, then turns it into a short list of fixes. It's free to start.
Your friends got you to launch. This checklist helps the next people find you.