I posted on r/SideProject asking if indie sites are invisible on AI search. The comments were more useful than I expected.
I'm a product manager who's been building indie tools on the side. I noticed that when I ask ChatGPT or Perplexity about tools in my category, my products don't show up — even though I have decent Google traffic. Wasn't sure if this was a me problem or a broader thing.
So I posted a question on Reddit: "Anyone else invisible on AI search even with good Google rankings?"
859 views, 7 comments. Not huge, but the replies were specific enough to be useful.
What I actually learned from the thread:
One commenter had gone through this systematically. They said on-site fixes (schema, robots.txt, homepage copy) helped less than expected. What actually moved the needle: getting mentioned in places the models pull from — AlternativeTo, G2, Capterra, and Reddit threads where the tool came up organically.
The timeline they reported: Perplexity started citing them within about 3 weeks after those mentions. ChatGPT took closer to 2 months.
Another commenter explained the mechanism: ChatGPT and Perplexity aren't just using live search results — they blend training data with retrieval. If your homepage is vague or marketing-heavy without clear explanatory text, the models skip you.
The thing I didn't expect:
Nobody had a systematic way to track this. Everyone was doing it manually — running the same prompts across platforms, recording results in spreadsheets. The tools that exist either only cover Perplexity (because it has citable sources you can audit) or just tell you whether you appeared, not why.
What I'm testing now:
I'm building a lightweight AI visibility teardown for indie sites. Not a full SaaS — starting with manual delivery. You submit your URL, I send back a short breakdown: what AI tools likely understand about your site, what trust signals are missing, which pages to create first.
Doing the first few for free to see if the format is actually useful.
Two genuine questions for this community:
Have you tested whether your indie project shows up when someone asks an AI assistant about tools in your category?
If you found out you were invisible, what would a useful diagnosis look like?
This is a very real problem, and the Reddit comments point to the sharper category: AI visibility is not just SEO with a new dashboard.
The useful diagnosis is probably less “do I appear?” and more “what does the model understand, trust, and repeat about my product?” That includes homepage clarity, third-party mentions, comparison pages, review-site presence, Reddit context, and whether the product has enough clean language for AI systems to confidently place it in a category.
Starting manual is smart because the first few reports will teach you what founders actually care about. Most indie founders probably do not need a giant GEO platform yet. They need a clear teardown that says: here is why AI tools ignore you, here is what they think you do, and here are the first 3 surfaces to fix.
The naming/category frame matters here too. “AI visibility teardown” is clear for the service, but if this becomes a repeatable product, the brand should feel like signal intelligence rather than another SEO audit. Exirra .com would fit that direction well because the product is really about finding and improving the signals AI systems use to understand a company.
That feels like a stronger long-term lane than “AI search audit.”
The "signal intelligence" framing is sharper than anything I've been using. "AI search audit" immediately gets filed next to SEO tools, which is exactly the wrong category — the problem isn't search ranking, it's whether the model has enough clean signal to represent the product accurately at all.
The Exirra suggestion is interesting — are you building in this direction, or was that a naming thought? Genuinely curious whether you're working on something adjacent or have run into this problem from a different angle.
Fair question.
I’m not building in the category directly. I mainly work around naming, positioning, and outbound for early-stage founders, so I spend a lot of time looking at where products are being framed too narrowly.
What stood out here is that the problem feels much bigger than “AI search rankings.” It is closer to understanding what signals models trust enough to confidently describe and recommend a company.
That is why Exirra came to mind. I own Exirra.com, and it felt directionally aligned with the broader “signal intelligence” layer you seem to be circling around.
Not pushing a rename right now. I just think the category framing itself is stronger than most GEO/AI visibility products I’ve seen so far.