Building a SaaS? ChatGPT probably recommends your competitor
Go ask it for the best tool in your category. If you're not in the answer the reason is likely not your product.
Surfer put out a study in September. They went through 289,105 pages that AI answers cite. The more of those pages mention a brand the higher it sits in the answer. ChatGPT showed this the strongest. And the mentions that count most are in regular blog posts even though blogs are under a third of what gets cited.
It's a correlation and they say so themselves. But it matches what I see. My team crawled around 70k SaaS blogs recently. In one category a tool had 152 articles linking to it. Its direct competitor had zero.
What bugs me is how people react. They buy mentions from a catalog sorted by DR. ChatGPT has no idea what DR is. It reads the pages it pulls up for that exact question.
For those who did get into those answers, what actually moved it?
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I also would like to know how to get those mentions when the product and site are new. It's hard to get blogs to write about you before you have any traction. Where did people actually start?
@alieksia Anastasiia honestly nobody writes about a new product. I'd skip that part.
Easier way. Ask ChatGPT the thing your customers would ask and look at the pages it links to. You'll see "best X" lists in there. Email the author and ask to be added. One line in a list that already exists is a much easier ask than a whole article.
Some will want money. Some are fine with a swap, you mention them on your blog and they mention you.
What's your product about?
@artem_fedorovich Thank you for the suggestion, I'll try that.
Our product is CoreValues.Guide - self-guided tool that helps people get clear on their core values, spot where their daily life is out of sync with them, and turn that into a concrete actions to close the gap. I'd say it's a structured self-coaching.
@alieksia Anastasiia cool, I like that it doesn't stop at "here are your 5 values".
I looked around a bit for you. The Meaning Movement has an article on values assessments with a table of three free tools. Further down the author says most people take a test, get a list and stop there. That's literally the problem you solve. I'd email Dan who runs it and say exactly that.
Is the tool free?
Buying mentions off a list sorted by DR never made sense to me. If ChatGPT just reads the pages it pulls up for that question, a random high DR site isn't going to do much.
@amanda_mock7Â Amanda same here. DR made sense when the goal was Google rankings. For AI answers the first thing I'd check is whether the page gets pulled up for the question at all. Have you tried it for CourseCove yet? Curious what comes up for course platforms.
Artem's tip works, and I'd add one step before it: measure. Write down the fifteen or so questions your buyers actually ask, put them to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok, and record who gets named and which pages get cited. Do it again every week. Most of the cited pages are lists, reviews and comparison posts, and that tells you where to spend outreach. Without the baseline you can't tell whether anything you did moved it.
@trace_gordon Tracewell agree, baseline first. My team does this for a living and we start the same way. First the pages that get cited then the emails. You work with service businesses right? Do the answers there change a lot from city to city?