Week 8 building a free video tool suite: 12 tools live, 44 Copilot AI citations, and what I learned about AI search visibility

Eight weeks ago I launched VidClean, a free browser-based video and audio tool suite. No account, no watermark, files deleted 15 minutes after download. Here's what happened this week.
The numbers

35 clicks, 164 impressions, 21.3% CTR on Google (28 days)
~17 visitors/day average, up from 10 at launch
12 tools live, original goal was 12 by July 1, hit it 51 days early
ChatGPT sending consistent referrals since week 4
44 Microsoft Copilot citations in 3 months (found this in Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance tab, didn't even know this existed until this week)

The Copilot discovery
This was the most interesting thing I found this week. I've been tracking ChatGPT referrals in Vercel but hadn't checked Bing Webmaster Tools. Turns out there's an AI Performance section that shows exactly which queries Copilot is citing your site for. Mine were "silence remover from video" (15 citations), "remove silence from video" (11 citations), and "desligar video" (12 citations, that's Portuguese, which I have zero Portuguese pages for).
If you have a site and haven't checked this yet, worth logging in. Free data on AI citation queries that you can't get anywhere else.
What I did on day one that I think helped:

Added llms.txt and llms-full.txt
Explicitly allowed GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot in robots.txt
Added FAQPage schema with specific, quotable answers on every tool page
Made tool descriptions concrete ("removes gaps below -35dB lasting 0.5 seconds or more") rather than vague marketing copy

Whether llms.txt is actually causal is genuinely debatable. Got pushback on this in a Reddit thread yesterday and it's fair. Could be the Reddit posts driving the AI visibility. Hard to isolate.
What's next

Keep doing outreach (sent first 3 listicle emails yesterday)
4 more tools: Flip/Mirror, Reverse, Loop, Add Music
Pro tier at $7-9/month when I hit 100 daily users

Currently at 17/day so that's probably September if the trajectory holds.
Happy to answer questions about the stack, AI search optimization, or the iLovePDF playbook in general.
vidclean.net