DEV Community: Neha Singh

Buyers now ask AI what to buy. Is your brand in the answer?

Neha Singh — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 14:24:59 +0000

A growing number of buyers ask an AI assistant which tool to pick, and the assistant answers with three or four names. If your brand is one of them, you make the shortlist. If it is not, you may never know, because nobody clicked and nobody bounced. This post explains the problem, what decides who is named, and how Citeably, the tool we build, approaches it.

The shift: no page two

A few years ago a buyer typed a few words into Google and scanned ten links. Now many ask an assistant: what is the best tool for X for a small team? The answer is a short paragraph that names a few brands. There is no second page.

A brand that is not named is simply absent, and no report shows it.

The problem is that you cannot see it

Most teams do not know what these assistants say about them. Three things make it hard to see:

Answers differ by assistant. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude often name different brands for the same question.
Answers change from run to run. Ask the same question twice and the list can change, so one check is a snapshot, not a verdict.
Your analytics cannot show it. Rank trackers measure links on a results page, not whether you were named inside a written answer.

What decides who gets named

Assistants build an answer from the pages and sources they can read, plus what they learned in training. In practice three things matter:

Can they find you? Crawlable pages, a sitemap, text readable without JavaScript, and AI crawlers not blocked by accident.
Can they tell what you are? A plain description of what you do, who it is for, and how you differ from the names that already appear.
Are you mentioned elsewhere? Reviews, comparisons and community threads the assistants already lean on when they list options.

What nobody can promise

Fixing these does not guarantee you will be named. But a brand that fails all three is easy to leave out, and a brand that cannot see the answers cannot fix anything.

How Citeably approaches it

We built Citeably to see this without doing it by hand. It does four things.

It asks the questions your buyers ask. You enter your site, it writes buyer-style questions about your category without your brand name, and asks them to assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
It shows what was said, not just a score: the actual answers, which brands were named, how often you were, and the reasons the assistants gave for picking others. Those reasons are the claims a page has to make, truthfully, to be in the same answer.
It turns that into a short fix list that starts with what it saw, such as a blocked crawler or an unclear homepage, with the first step spelled out. It can also generate files to paste into your site, such as an llms.txt, structured data and an FAQ. The free check includes the first fix.
It lets you re-check, and only calls a change real when it is bigger than the normal run-to-run swing. It never claims your change caused it.

What is free and what is not

The check itself is free and needs no signup. Paid plans add weekly tracking and, for agencies, white-label client reports.

A real example

We used it on a real product, Testimoni, a testimonial tool. Asked eight buyer questions on each of three assistants, it was named in 2 of 24 answers (8%), both from Perplexity, for the more specific questions. We published the number, the plan and a progress log, and we will update it at each re-check. It is in this blog under Testimoni is named in 2 of 24 AI answers.

What Citeably does not do

We would rather say this plainly than oversell:

It cannot promise you will be named. Nobody honestly can.
It cannot tell you that a change caused a result. It can show what changed and what the numbers did.
A single check is a small sample. Treat it as a starting point and look at the trend.

Frequently asked questions

Is this the same as SEO?

They share groundwork, such as crawlable, clear pages, but the goal and the measure differ. SEO is about ranking in a list of links; AI visibility is about being named inside an answer.

Do I need a paid plan to start?

No. The free check shows the answers, who was named and why, and the first fix, with no signup.

Who is Citeably for?

Small teams and agencies who want to know whether AI assistants name their brand or their clients, and what to fix first.

Run the free check on your own site: citeably.app

Disclosure: I built Citeably, the tool mentioned here.

Your Best Customer Praise Is Scattered Across the Internet. Here's How to Put It to Work.

Neha Singh — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 13:44:12 +0000

A 5-minute read for founders who want social proof without a sales-heavy "collect testimonials" project.

Open your own X mentions, your LinkedIn notifications, your Product Hunt launch comments, your App Store reviews.

Somewhere in there, real customers have already said real, specific, flattering things about your product. "This saved me an afternoon." "I switched from the other tool and haven't looked back." "Finally, something that just works."

Now open your website. How much of that is on it?

For most small teams the honest answer is: almost none. The praise is scattered, buried in feeds, and owned by someone else's platform, while your landing page leans on generic copy like "loved by teams everywhere."

That gap is what Testimoni is built to close.

The problem with the usual testimonial playbook

The standard advice is to email customers, ask for a testimonial, wait, chase, then copy the reply into a page. It works, but it has three problems:

It's slow. You wait days for replies, and most customers never answer.
It misses the praise you already have. The best quotes are often the ones people volunteered, in public, without being asked.
It breaks easily. Screenshots go stale, quotes get retyped wrong, and the "wall of love" page quietly stops being updated.

Step one: turn existing praise into a testimonial in about 30 seconds

With Testimoni, you paste the URL of a tweet or LinkedIn post (or drop a screenshot of a DM or email), and it becomes an attributed testimonial in your library. It can also pull reviews in from places like the App Store, Google Play, the Chrome Web Store, Shopify and Product Hunt.

You approve what goes public, so nothing shows up on your site that you haven't looked at.

Step two: show it on your site with one line of code

Every workspace gets a hosted Wall of Love page you can link from your bio, and a one-line embed for your own site. The embed uses Shadow DOM isolation, so it won't fight with your site's CSS, and there are five layouts to choose from: Grid, Masonry, Carousel, List and Marquee.

Step three: keep collecting, without chasing

When you do want fresh testimonials, Testimoni gives you a collection form you can share as a link, embed, iframe, email template or QR code. Text, star ratings and video testimonials are supported, and everything lands in one inbox for one-click approval.

Want to see what people are saying before you do anything?

Testimoni also has a free Customer Voice scan. Paste your website and it searches X, Reddit and LinkedIn for public mentions, then sorts them into praise, complaints, feature requests, questions and competitor mentions. The scan is free. If you want the full list with sources, the Quick Scan unlocks every mention for a one-time $9, and the Deep Report ($19) adds the reasons customers choose you, your strongest social proof, the competitors people mention, and a CSV export.

It's a useful, slightly uncomfortable exercise even if you never become a customer: you see how your product is described when you're not in the room.

What it costs

Free forever: 10 testimonials, 1 collection form, 1 widget, a hosted Wall of Love page and the one-line embed. No credit card.
Pro, $19/month, flat: unlimited testimonials, forms and widgets, all five layouts, video testimonials, custom branding and no watermark. It also includes the AI features: an "Ask My Wall" chatbot that answers visitor questions using only your real testimonials, a Wall Score that audits how strong your proof is, and one-click tweet drafts from any quote.

One price, no per-seat fees, cancel any time.

Who it's for

Testimoni is best for SaaS founders, indie hackers, coaches, agencies and small D2C brands: people who have real customers saying good things somewhere, and no tidy way to show it.

It's probably not for you if you need an enterprise review-management platform with approval chains and CRM integrations. It's deliberately focused on one job: getting real praise onto your site, fast.

A simple way to try it today

Open your X mentions and pick the three nicest posts about your product.
Paste each URL into Testimoni.
Approve them, then embed the wall on your homepage or pricing page.

That takes about ten minutes, and your page stops relying on claims and starts showing customers.

Start free at testimoni.io →

Or run the free Customer Voice scan on your own site: testimoni.io/tools/customer-voice

Originally published at testimoni.io/blog.