Track whether AI chatbots recommend your product

What to build

A lightweight AI-visibility tracker for solo SaaS founders and marketers: a dashboard that runs a fixed set of category-defining prompts against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on a schedule, parses the responses to detect whether the user's product (and named competitors) is mentioned, and plots mention frequency, ranking position and trend over time.

Solo founders have no way to know if ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity are recommending their product when users ask for alternatives, and checking manually across four assistants on a recurring basis is not sustainable — a freemium tracking dashboard turns that blind spot into a simple, visual metric.

Demand

Solo founders and SaaS marketers who already obsess over SEO rankings want the same visibility into AI-generated answers, and the shift of discovery traffic toward AI assistants makes this urgent now rather than hypothetical.

• r/microsaas (Reddit)Anecdote

  Post titled 'Does AI Tools actually recommend my product? I just realized I have no idea, cant even track it manually' — founder asking others if they've actually checked whether AI tools recommend their product.

• Signal submitterAnecdote

  First-person account from a founder/marketer realizing they have no visibility into whether AI tools recommend their product and no manual way to check.

Stack

• OpenAI API
• Anthropic API
• Google Gemini API
• Perplexity API
• Postgres (via Supabase)
• Next.js
• Cron job runner (e.g. Vercel Cron or Trigger.dev)
• Stripe for freemium billing

Solo + AI difficulty

The MVP (scheduled prompt runner, response parsing for brand/competitor mentions, a dashboard with frequency/position/trend charts) is buildable solo in 2-4 weeks with AI coding help; the hard parts are building a reliable mention-detection parser across inconsistent, non-deterministic model outputs and managing per-query API costs across four providers at scale as free-tier usage grows.

Entry threshold

Buildable by one person using LLM APIs to run scheduled prompts and parse responses for brand mentions; main costs are API call volume and building a clean reporting UI, no licences needed.

Window

6-12 months

Where to find first users

• r/microsaas
• r/SaaS and r/startups
• Product Hunt launch
• Indie Hackers community
• Direct outreach to SaaS founders already paying for SEO/rank-tracking tools

Competitors

• Profound
• Otterly.AI
• AthenaHQ

Counter-signals & risks

• AI assistant outputs are non-deterministic and frequently updated or cached by providers, making 'mention tracking' inherently noisy and potentially unreliable as a product metric.

• Major AI providers may restrict, rate-limit, or prohibit automated systematic querying of their chat products for monitoring/scraping purposes, creating ToS and API-cost risk.

• Incumbent SEO/brand-monitoring tools and emerging 'AI SEO' / GEO (generative engine optimization) players are already expanding into this exact space, eroding differentiation for a new solo entrant.