Our own AI-visibility score started at 0/100. What 2,150 cited URLs taught us about getting recommended by ChatGPT

Hi IH — I'm Anil, solo and bootstrapped, building Promvia: it checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI answers actually name your product when buyers ask for a recommendation, and what those answers send your site. Launched August 2026, €0 MRR so far, building in public. Disclosure up front: the numbers below come from our own tracking.

The thing worth sharing is a finding, not a feature. We track a fixed set of buyer prompts every week across six answer engines and log every URL the answers cite — about 2,150 cited URLs over 14 days in one niche (software tools). Two things fell out:

1. "Alternatives to X" prompts cite comparison-shaped pages (paths like /vs, /alternatives, /compare — vendor pages and blogs included, not just G2 or Capterra) in 34–43% of citations. "Best X" prompts: 2.8%.

2. When we first counted by directory DOMAIN instead of page shape, the effect looked ~10x smaller. The domain list was a bad proxy. What gets cited is the page type, wherever it lives.

The practical version: a well-structured /alternatives or /vs page on your own domain competes for the same answer slot as a G2 grid. "Get listed on directories" and "build comparison pages" are sold as two tactics; at the citation level they look like one. And the cited pages had almost no organic traffic — winning the SERP and being chosen for an answer are different games.

Caveats, honestly: one niche, two weeks, URL-path labeling rather than rendered pages. Direction solid, magnitudes indicative. We pre-registered a follow-up (vendor-authored vs third-party comparison pages) and will publish it on Sep 7 whatever it says.

We eat our own cooking: Promvia's own domain scored 0 on day one, and we publish our own weekly run live at promvia.app/live so the score is a public number rather than a promise.

Question for people running product sites here: do your /vs or /alternatives pages pull AI citations (or AI referral traffic) out of proportion to their organic traffic? That publisher-side number is the one nobody seems to have.