I built a free tool that tells you if ChatGPT recommends your product

Software buying is quietly moving off the search results page.

Instead of typing a query and scanning ten links, more and more people just ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "what's the best tool for X" and act on the three names it gives back. There's no page 2. If your product isn't one of those names, you don't exist for that buyer, and you'll never see it in your analytics. No impression, no click, no trace.

I kept running into founders (including me) who had no idea whether this was happening to them. So this week I shipped a small free thing on directree to answer exactly that question: is ChatGPT recommending your SaaS?

You paste your domain. It sends three real buyer questions to a live model with web search on, reads the raw answers, and shows you whether your brand is actually named, in how many of the three, and which competitors got recommended instead. No account, no charge.

The honest part matters here, and it's where I nearly shipped it wrong.

The first version was basically a lead-gen trick. It leaned on questions that already mentioned the brand, so almost everyone scored high. Great for conversions, useless as a signal, and completely against the whole reason directree exists (we're the "no fake precision scores" directory). If a tool tells you you're crushing AI search when you're not, it's lying to you.

So I tore that out. Now the questions are brand-free category questions, and detection is binary: your name is in the raw AI answer or it isn't. I tested it against a made-up brand to be sure it would honestly return "not visible" instead of inventing a flattering number. It did. That felt like the right bar.

The one that stung: I asked it "best note-taking tools" and it named Notion, Evernote, OneNote and Google Keep on its own. Notion showed up. A brand nobody's heard of did not. That's the real game now, and most founders are invisible in it without knowing.

I also wired the tool into the actual fix. When you see you're missing, there's a clear next step: a free, honest, structured listing gives answer engines a machine-readable source they can cite, plus a do-follow backlink. It's not magic and I don't pretend it is. But "consistent facts across third-party sources" is genuinely what these engines pull from, and a directory listing is one concrete way to add that.

Small tool, but it's the kind of thing I like building: it teaches you something true in a minute, even if you never list with us.