Everyone who tried my product asked for the same thing
I built SEO Ladders to help founders rank on Google.
Then something kept happening. Almost everyone who tried it asked me the same question — never in the same words, but always the same idea:
"Does ChatGPT actually recommend me?"
"Can I see if AI mentions my brand?"
"Google's great, but my customers ask AI now."
I had a roadmap. AI visibility wasn't on it. I told myself it was a "nice to have."
Then I sat down with someone who was about to join me as a cofounder. One meeting. He gave me the exact same feedback — then told me he was too busy to commit to the product, and walked.
That one stung.
But it also made the pattern impossible to ignore. It wasn't one loud tester. Everyone who looked closely saw the same gap. They were all pointing at the same hole in my product — and I was the only one not listening.
So I stopped building my own ideas and built theirs.
I added AI visibility tracking. It checks whether AI actually recommends you — across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overview — and shows you:
→ the % of AI answers that mention you
→ where you rank when you are mentioned
→ the prompts you're missing from
→ what to change to get cited
I ran it on my own site first. 42% visibility. Humbling — but at least now I can see the number instead of guessing.
Here's the lesson I keep re-learning as a solo founder:
The best features are almost never my ideas. They're the ones people won't stop pointing at. My job isn't to be the visionary. It's to listen better and ship faster.
This was my last big build for a while. Now comes the part I'm worse at — marketing, fixing what people hit, and improving on feedback (again).
If you've ever wondered whether AI recommends you, you can try SEO Ladders free for 7 days and run it on your own site: seoladders.com. I'd genuinely love to hear what you find out — that feedback is the most useful thing you could give me right now.
And I'm curious: what's a feature you resisted building, then finally caved on — and was it the right call?
This resonates hard. I just lived the smaller version of your story: I checked my analytics last week and found ~18% of my traffic comes from ChatGPT and Copilot recommending my tool — completely unprompted, I never submitted it anywhere for that. So your "does AI actually recommend me?" question isn't a nice-to-have, it's the thing I'm now realizing I have zero visibility into. I can see the traffic arriving in GA4, but I have no idea which prompts trigger the recommendation or where I rank in the answers. That's exactly the gap your tool fills.
On your question — the feature I resisted: I was convinced people wanted more free usage in my tool. They didn't. What they actually kept hitting was a friction point in onboarding I'd been ignoring (turned out my setup screens were silently breaking for some users). I kept "planning" to look at it. The day I finally fixed it was the day I stopped guessing. Same lesson as yours: the thing people keep pointing at isn't a distraction from the roadmap — it is the roadmap.
Going to run SEO Ladders on my own site out of genuine curiosity now, because "42% visibility, humbling but measurable" is exactly the kind of number I wish I had. Will report back what I find.
Good luck with the marketing stretch — that's the part I'm bad at too.
great, just let me know it goes and you can also join a new discord community I created for seoladders users to discuss anything you have in mind as well. The link is in the footer of the page.
try it out and let me know the outcome as well.
The repeating pattern always wins. Every time I've dismissed something as noise, it turned out to be the core.
Validating BillWatch right now -- a federal bill tracker for small businesses. Same pattern you described: built broad search across all bills in Congress, every tester comes back with "I just want alerts for the specific bills that could affect my type of business -- not 10,000 options."
We haven't shipped that yet. But the signal is too consistent to ignore, and it jumped to priority one after the third person said it unprompted.
Your version of this is the hard-earned version: listening faster is the whole job. Most of us need the pattern to hit us three or four times before we stop defending what we built.
yeah I agree and it's something that I think it's natural... sometimes defending what we built is good because we know our roadmap but then certain user request also tends to make alot of sense to add to your roadmap as well.
The thing I'd be careful with is that repeated feature requests don't always point to the feature people want.
Sometimes they point to the decision they're trying to make.
The risk is not building AI visibility. The risk is assuming everyone asking for it is buying the same outcome from it.
I wouldn't make that call casually in-thread because it changes what SEO Ladders is actually selling, not just what it tracks.
yeah I think I agree with you in some aspects but SEO Ladders AI Visibility is something I have wanted to integrate from day one and was part of my todos but yeah their requests just confirmed it for me...
as you said it's not all requested features that needs to built, and I agree with that.
That makes sense.
The thing I'd be careful with is that once AI visibility ships, the important question stops being whether users wanted it and starts being what decision they're actually using it to make.
That's the part I'd be hesitant to unpack casually in a thread because it can end up changing what SEO Ladders is really selling.
If useful, drop your email and I'll send the tighter version in a way you can actually use.