DEV Community: Stefan Vasile

The Solo AI SEO SaaS Distribution Playbook (What I Stole From Postiz, Peekaboo and Distribb)

Stefan Vasile — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:04:49 +0000

$20k MRR as a solo developer is not a marketing budget problem.
It is a distribution discipline problem.

I spent the last few weeks reverse-engineering three founders who figured this out in the AI SEO / AI visibility space:

↳ Nevo David grew Postiz (open-source social scheduler) to ~$17K MRR by treating GitHub as a landing page.
↳ John Rice grew Peekaboo AI (AI search visibility tracker) past $20K MRR by posting the same direct pitch hundreds of times on X.
↳ Borja Obeso built Distribb into an AI SEO tool by wrapping every SEO tactic into a Claude Skill people share.

They sell different products. Their playbooks overlap more than you'd think.

Here is the combined distribution engine I would run for Fulcru, and what you should steal if you are building any AI/SaaS product in 2026.

1. Build in public aggressively

Nevo's blunt advice: developers rarely pay, but they amplify. John Rice's entire X strategy is a masterclass in public building.

What to share:

↳ Exact MRR and user counts.
↳ Token costs and API performance.
↳ Feature launches and UI iterations.
↳ The one question you answered this week that moved the product.
↳ The question you got wrong.

People do not buy products from press releases. They buy from founders they watched figure it out.

For Fulcru, this looks like:

"We ran our own visibility report this week. Result: Fulcru is named in 0 of 12 buyer questions for AI visibility trackers. Here is the exact list of pages we need to get onto."

That is not a brag. That is a story with a number.

2. Post the same pitch repeatedly

John Rice posts multiple times per day. The formula is simple:

Short problem statement + immediate solution + direct link.

No placeholders. Always attach a visual (dashboard screenshot, metric, or video clip).

Examples for Fulcru:

↳ "Most founders have no idea if ChatGPT recommends them. Fulcru tracks your brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Try it free: https://fulcru.app"
↳ "Just crossed [X] visibility reports generated. Still early. Would love feedback on the new GSC integration: https://fulcru.app"
↳ "Who here has a SaaS that needs to show up in AI answers? Drop your site and I'll tell you if ChatGPT names you. I'll go first. Fulcru: https://fulcru.app"

Consistency beats polish. The 50th post is not spam. It is the one someone finally sees.

3. Treat your free tool as the funnel

Peekaboo's homepage is not a brochure. It is a lead magnet.

Every piece of organic traffic lands on a free AI visibility report wizard. The wizard captures an email, shows real value, and only then presents pricing.

This is the funnel:

Organic traffic → Landing page → Free report wizard → Free dashboard snapshot → Upgrade prompt → Stripe trial → App

For Fulcru, the free report already exists. The job is to make every post, article and comment point to it.

Your call to action is never "read more". It is "run the free report".

4. Open source your distribution edge

Nevo's core insight: in a market where AI can generate code, code is commoditized. What matters is reach and trust.

Postiz is open source because GitHub functions as a landing page, a SEO signal, a developer community and a trust validator all at once.

Fulcru already has a Claude Skill and an MCP server. These are not features. They are distribution assets.

What to do:

↳ Make the Fulcru Skill standalone and free (no account, no API key).
↳ List it in every skill directory and awesome-* repo.
↳ Make the MCP server easy to install with one command.
↳ Treat the README as a landing page: one gif, one sentence, one install command.
↳ Seed GitHub issues with good-first-issue labels.

Developers self-host. Agencies and enterprises pay for the hosted version. That is the open-source revenue logic.

5. Launch everywhere at once

Nevo's launch sequence concentrates traffic into the same 7-day window:

↳ Show HN linking to the repo or product.
↳ /r/selfhosted, /r/saas, /r/marketing, /r/SEO, wherever the product fits.
↳ Dev.to, Medium, HackerNoon long-form articles.
↳ X threads and LinkedIn posts.
↳ Niche newsletters and Slack communities.

The concentrated velocity moves algorithms and human attention.

For Fulcru, the launch angle is not "new feature". It is "we dogfooded our own product and here is what we learned about AI search visibility".

6. Turn every SEO tactic into a shareable article

Distribb's entire content strategy is: take a complex SEO workflow, show how to automate it with Claude, and end with a soft product pitch.

The articles are useful enough to stand alone. The product is the punchline.

For Fulcru, the article list writes itself:

↳ "8 AI Search Visibility Tactics Automated With Claude"
↳ "Claude Just Killed Slow AEO (Automated Newsjacking)"
↳ "How to Get Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity: The Fulcru Playbook"
↳ "Why Your Brand Is Invisible in AI Answers (And How to Fix It)"
↳ "The Distribution Playbook for AI SEO SaaS"

Each article ends with the free report. Not the paid plan. The free report.

7. Own Reddit and the AI answer layer

Reddit is now a top retrieval source for AI assistants. A helpful answer on a relevant subreddit can become a citation source for ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The rule is: give value first, mention the product only when it is genuinely relevant.

For Fulcru, target:

↳ /r/SEO
↳ /r/saas
↳ /r/marketing
↳ /r/GrowthHacking
↳ /r/GEO_AI_SEO
↳ /r/GenerativeSEOstrategy

Good engagement:

"We faced the same problem. We built a small internal tool to track whether ChatGPT mentions our brand. It turned into Fulcru. Happy to share the free report if anyone wants to check their own visibility."

Bad engagement:

"Try Fulcru, the best AI visibility tool."

One gets upvoted. The other gets banned.

8. Make the product its own marketing proof

The most important distribution move for Fulcru is the dogfood rule: if Fulcru is not named when someone asks ChatGPT for an AI visibility tracker, the product disproves itself.

Every listing, article and backlink is a bet. The tracking number is the scoreboard.

Run the Fulcru report weekly. Share the number in public. Show the gap closing.

This is the ultimate build-in-public story: a product that measures its own marketing success.

90-Day Action Checklist

Week 1–2: Set up the distribution foundation

[ ] Write a razor-sharp X bio with a link to the free report.
[ ] Set up a LinkedIn company page and founder page.
[ ] Publish the Fulcru Skill to ClawHub and awesome-claude-skills.
[ ] Submit the MCP server to mcp.so, Smithery, Glama and PulseMCP.
[ ] Ensure the homepage wizard is the primary CTA everywhere.

Week 3–4: Launch content and community

[ ] Publish one long-form article per week on the Fulcru blog.
[ ] Cross-post each article to Dev.to, Medium and HackerNoon.
[ ] Post one direct pitch per day on X.
[ ] Reply meaningfully in 5 relevant Reddit threads per week.
[ ] Start a Discord or community hub for users and contributors.

Week 5–8: Accelerate with public metrics

[ ] Share weekly MRR, report count and visibility metrics on X.
[ ] Run a Show HN or Product Hunt launch tied to a major content asset.
[ ] Pitch 3 listicles that currently rank for AI visibility tracker queries.
[ ] Publish a founder story: "How we dogfooded our own AI visibility tool".

Week 9–12: Optimize and repeat

[ ] Track which posts and articles drive free report signups.
[ ] Double down on the top 2 formats.
[ ] Automate the weekly report and share it publicly.
[ ] Launch an affiliate or partner program for agencies.

Distribution is not a department. It is a product loop.

The same week you ship a feature, you ship the story about why you shipped it. The same week you fix a bug, you share the lesson. The same week you move your own visibility number, you show the screenshot.

That is the playbook. Steal it.

[Your Name]

Want to see which questions ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity already answer with your competitor's name? Run the free Fulcru visibility report at fulcru.app.

8 Fulcru Features That Automate Getting Cited by AI

Stefan Vasile — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:04:03 +0000

If you want your brand to show up in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answers but

↳ You don't know which questions matter
↳ Your competitors appear in every AI answer
↳ You can't spend every week manually prompting models and checking sources

Then here are 8 Fulcru features that automate the work.

Fulcru is an AI visibility tracker. It runs your buyer questions against ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, records whether your brand gets named, ranks you against competitors, attributes the sources AI retrieves, and tells you exactly what page to publish next.

Here's how each feature works.

1. Free AI Visibility Report

Fulcru starts with a free report. You enter your brand, your website and one competitor.

The report returns:

↳ The buyer questions where AI names your competitor instead of you.
↳ The specific sources AI retrieves for those answers.
↳ The one page you should publish to close the biggest gap.

No card required. The report is the entry point because it answers the question every founder has: "Am I even in the conversation?"

2. Competitor Heatmap

The competitor heatmap shows who wins which questions.

Every row is a buyer question. Every column is a competitor. The color tells you who owns the answer.

↳ Dark spots are questions you are losing.
↳ Light spots are questions you already win.
↳ Patterns show which competitor is weakest where.

This turns AI visibility from a feeling into a grid. You stop guessing and start picking the gaps that are winnable.

3. Source Attribution

AI answers are not guesses. Models retrieve pages and write answers from them.

Fulcru's source attribution shows you the exact URLs the models are leaning on.

↳ Listicles that recommend your competitors.
↳ Comparison pages you need to be on.
↳ Reddit threads that keep showing up.
↳ Industry resource pages that define the category.

If you know the source, you know the target. The source is the citation. The citation is the game.

4. AI Prompt Generator

Most teams track the wrong questions. They track keywords, not buyer conversations.

Fulcru's prompt generator builds questions the way people actually ask AI assistants.

↳ Commercial and specific.
↳ Brand-free, so you see who wins when the buyer doesn't know you exist.
↳ Mixed intent: comparisons, alternatives, recommendations, problem-first.

You get a question set that measures real buying intent, not search volume theater.

5. Content Briefs

Once Fulcru finds the gap, it writes the brief.

The brief is not generic SEO advice. It is a page built to be cited by AI.

↳ Answer-first structure in the first 100 words.
↳ Comparison tables models can quote directly.
↳ Honest competitor mentions, including where they win.
↳ Specific claims, real numbers, no fabrications.

The goal is not to rank. The goal is to be the passage an AI model lifts into its answer.

6. Before/After Delta

Publishing is the start. The question is whether the answer changed.

Fulcru re-runs the same question set after you publish and compares the results.

↳ Before: named in 0 of 12 questions.
↳ After: named in 4 of 12 questions.
↳ Which source moved.
↳ Which competitor still owns the answer.

This is the only honest way to report AI visibility. Everything else is a vanity metric.

7. Search Console + AI Visibility

Google traffic and AI visibility are not the same thing, but they overlap.

Fulcru connects Search Console so you can see both in one place.

↳ Which pages already get clicks.
↳ Which questions you are losing in AI answers.
↳ Whether the page you publish for AI also starts ranking in Google.

The combo tells you where the quick wins are. Some pages serve both search engines and AI models.

8. Ask AI Agent

Fulcru has an agent you can talk to.

Ask it why you are losing a specific question. It will:

↳ Pull the competitor answers.
↳ Show the sources AI retrieves.
↳ Recommend the exact page to publish.
↳ Draft the outline for you.

This is not a chatbot that reads your docs. It is a visibility agent that investigates your market and tells you what to do.

The Fulcru loop

The features above are not random tools. They are one loop:

Find the questions you lose.
See who wins and where AI gets the answer.
Write the page that closes the gap.
Publish it.
Measure whether the answer changed.
Repeat.

That loop is what turns AI search from a black box into a growth channel.

Most teams stop at monitoring. They have a dashboard that tells them they are behind. Fulcru tells you why you are behind and what to publish to catch up.

If you want to run the first step for free, the visibility report is at fulcru.app.

[Your Name]

Want to see which questions ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity already answer with your competitor's name? Run the free Fulcru visibility report at fulcru.app.

8 AI Search Visibility Tactics Automated With Claude

Stefan Vasile — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:03:17 +0000

📢 If you want your brand to show up when ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity recommend products in your category, but
↳ You have no idea which questions AI answers name your competitors
↳ Your "SEO content" never gets quoted by AI assistants
↳ You can't spend every week reverse-engineering what models actually retrieve

Then here are 8 AI search visibility (AEO) tactics you can turn into repeatable AI workflows.

And automate with Claude, Codex or Cursor with one Fulcru Skill.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop 25%, and AI chatbots will become the default discovery layer for B2B buyers. The brands that get named inside those answers are the ones that will own the funnel.

You're probably stuck in this workflow:

↳ Write a blog post.
↳ Keyword-optimize it.
↳ Build a few backlinks.
↳ Wait 90 days.
↳ Still get ignored by ChatGPT.

The problem is that AI assistants do not browse the web the way Google used to. When someone asks "what is the best X for Y", the model runs a search, retrieves a handful of pages, and writes its answer from those sources. If your brand is not on the pages it retrieves, in a form it can lift, you are invisible.

A better workflow starts by finding proof of AI citation intent:

↳ A question your buyer asks when they don't know your brand exists.
↳ A competitor that already appears in the answer.
↳ A page AI keeps retrieving for that question.
↳ A gap in that page you can honestly close.
↳ A format models prefer to quote (lists, comparison tables, short definitions).

Then you give the model a reason to cite you.

Here are 8 AI search visibility workflows I would automate 👇

1️⃣ Find the questions where AI names your competitors

Screenshot of Fulcru's Gap Analysis showing the questions where ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name a competitor instead of the user.

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the questions your buyers ask.

For example:

↳ "What is the best CRM for a 3-person real estate team?"
↳ "What are the best alternatives to [competitor]?"
↳ "Which tools track brand visibility in AI search?"

Record the answers and the sources they cite.

Then find the questions where:

↳ Two or more competitors are named.
↳ Your brand is absent.
↳ The buyer intent is close to purchase.
↳ The cited pages are listicles, thin comparisons or generic definitions.

Don't just publish more content.

Show the exact gap in the answer.

Give the model:

↳ The category it is missing.
↳ A specific, honest reason your product fits.
↳ An extractable passage (list, comparison table, short verdict).
↳ Real numbers, named customers and supporting evidence.

The assistant has already decided to recommend products in your category.
You're not creating demand for a citation. You're supplying the missing option.

2️⃣ Reverse-engineer your competitors' AI citations

Using the Fulcru Skill to spy on the pages ChatGPT and Perplexity retrieve for competitor queries.

↳ Add three to five competitors to Fulcru.
↳ Find the questions where they appear and you don't.
↳ Prioritize questions that cite multiple competitors.
↳ Classify how each citation was earned.

Was it:

↳ A listicle?
↳ A comparison page?
↳ A statistics page?
↳ A founder interview?
↳ A product alternatives page?
↳ An expert quote?

Most competitor citations cannot be copied.
But the pattern behind them often can.

If three competitors get cited from industry listicles, get onto those listicles.
If they get cited from original research, create better research.
If they appear in comparison tables, build the most honest comparison table in your space.

The citation tells you what that assistant is willing to retrieve.
Use that evidence before you write.

3️⃣ Replace outdated competitor citations

Claude finds an amazing opportunity for "Citation Replacement" with the Fulcru Skill.

Citation replacement means finding a question where AI still retrieves a dead, outdated or rebranded page, creating a current replacement, and earning the retrieval slot.

The workflow:

↳ Find competitor pages that are 404s, redirects or abandoned.
↳ Check which questions still retrieve them.
↳ See what the original page contained.
↳ Remove irrelevant or low-quality opportunities.
↳ Create a genuinely useful, updated replacement.
↳ Publish it and get it indexed.

Your content now solves a real problem:

"The answer AI is giving still relies on a resource that no longer exists. Here is the updated version."

Don't offer your homepage unless it genuinely replaces the missing source.
The closer your page matches the original reason for the citation, the stronger the pitch.

4️⃣ Build a definitions page AI assistants can lift

Fulcru's Sources page showing the exact page types ChatGPT and Perplexity retrieve for a brand's question set.

Choose a question such as:

↳ "What is [industry term]?"
↳ "How does [topic] work?"
↳ "[topic] vs [topic] explained"
↳ "[topic] best practices 2026"

Then create one definitive page containing:

↳ A direct answer in the first 100 words.
↳ One H2 per natural follow-up question.
↳ A comparison table or list.
↳ Real numbers and named tools.
↳ A visible update date.
↳ Short, quotable takeaways.

These questions are often less competitive than broad commercial terms.
More importantly, the people asking them are frequently buyers in research mode, and assistants are looking for something to quote.

Here's the format we use:

AI Search Visibility: What B2B Marketers Need to Know in 2026

Refresh the page as the space changes.
One strong definitions page can support listicle outreach, Reddit answers, social content and future articles for months.

5️⃣ Answer journalists who already need a source

Journalist outreach works because the demand already exists.

Platforms like Qwoted, HARO and PressPlugs connect experts with reporters actively requesting commentary, examples and data.

↳ Build a focused expert profile.
↳ Monitor requests related to your experience.
↳ Filter by relevance, publication and deadline.
↳ Answer the journalist's question immediately.
↳ Add one specific insight they can quote.
↳ Offer your definitions page as supporting evidence.

Don't turn the response into a product pitch.
Help them finish the story.

If they use your contribution, they may cite your research page or company alongside the quote.
The definitions page makes the pitch stronger because you're bringing them a usable source, not merely asking for coverage.

6️⃣ Use a citation network between AI-optimized pages

Fulcru's Citation Network: Since Fulcru can write and publish pages that assistants actually retrieve, it can orchestrate relevant citations between useful pages.

Every business in the network is already publishing answerable content.
That creates opportunities for relevant citations between useful pages.

The Fulcru workflow:

↳ Writes and publishes an AEO page through the connected CMS.
↳ Finds related pages from other network businesses.
↳ Suggests citations where they help the reader.
↳ Checks topical relevance and surrounding context.
↳ Tracks the citations given and received.

No unrelated placements.
No sitewide partner pages.
No exact-match anchor-text spam.
No forced "link to me and I'll link to you" pairs.

Assistants explicitly value citations that come from trustworthy, contextually relevant sources, so editorial choice and relevance have to remain intact.

Automate the discovery and coordination.
Keep the citation natural.

7️⃣ Find citations pointing to outdated resources

A citation doesn't need to return a 404 to be broken in practice.

Sometimes it points to:

↳ A discontinued product.
↳ An acquired company.
↳ An abandoned report.
↳ A page that redirects to the homepage.
↳ Advice that hasn't been updated in years.

Monitor competitor websites, rebrands, acquisitions and discontinued tools.
When a resource becomes outdated:

↳ Find every question where it is still retrieved.
↳ Create or identify a current replacement.
↳ Explain exactly what changed.
↳ Offer the updated resource.

The old source still works technically.
It just stopped helping the reader.
That gives the assistant a reason to retrieve something better.

8️⃣ Reclaim unlinked mentions and assets

I asked Claude to use Fulcru to find websites mentioning me but not linking to me.

Search for websites already using:

↳ Your brand name.
↳ Your founder's name.
↳ A proprietary statistic.
↳ A chart from your research.
↳ A screenshot of your product.
↳ A quote from your team.

Then check whether they cited the original page.

If they didn't:

↳ Identify the author or editor.
↳ Show them the exact mention or asset.
↳ Give them the correct source URL.
↳ Ask for attribution so readers can verify it.

This is warmer than normal cold outreach.
They already know your work.
You're asking them to complete the citation.

Doing this manually is a lot of work, so we automated it inside the Fulcru AI Visibility Skill:

↳ Define the trigger.
↳ Choose the research sources.
↳ Add qualification rules.
↳ Create the required citable asset.
↳ Find and verify the right contact.
↳ Draft personalized outreach.
↳ Queue it for approval.
↳ Track replies and follow-ups.

Build systems that continually find reasons for AI assistants to cite you.

The Skill researches the opportunities, creates and publishes the assets, finds the contacts, prepares the outreach and coordinates relevant citations across the network.

You review the opportunities worth pursuing.

Automate your AI search visibility workflows with Fulcru.

Thanks for reading! 🙏

[Your Name]

Want to see which questions ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity already answer with your competitor's name? Run the free Fulcru visibility report at fulcru.app.

Claude Just Killed Slow AEO (Automated AI Search Visibility)

Stefan Vasile — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:02:31 +0000

How to leverage breaking news and trending topics to get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity in 24 hours. Automated with Claude.

📢 If you want to be the brand AI assistants recommend, but
↳ Your AEO workflow takes months to move the number
↳ You can't keep up with every new AI model launch, Google update or industry shift

Then here's how to leverage breaking news for AI search visibility to rank in answers within 24 hours. Automated with the Fulcru Claude Skill.

You're probably stuck in this workflow:

↳ Pick a keyword.
↳ Write the same article as everyone else.
↳ Beg for backlinks.
↳ Wait 90 days and hope Google cares.

That still works.

But it ignores the shortest citation window on the internet:

The first hours after news breaks.

Claude Code routine running the AEO news playbook with the Fulcru Skill.

Here's how to get cited by AI assistants with news-driven AEO 👇

1️⃣ Create a /news section on your site.

↳ Every story needs an original home on a domain you own.

2️⃣ Install the Fulcru Skill in Claude.

↳ Run /news-writer with your website or niche.
↳ It finds fresh stories using real-time web search and tracks what AI assistants are already being asked about the topic.
↳ Groups duplicate coverage and picks the best angles for your buyer.

3️⃣ Turn it into a scheduled task in Claude Cowork.

↳ Run it every morning.
↳ Or every few hours if your industry moves quickly.
↳ Claude can run Skills on a schedule, even when your laptop is closed.

4️⃣ Publish before the answer gets crowded.

↳ Ground the article in one or two real sources.
↳ Then add what every generic recap misses: what the news means for your buyer.

5️⃣ Turn one story into five sources.

↳ The original /news article.
↳ A LinkedIn post.
↳ A Medium version.
↳ A YouTube breakdown.
↳ A useful Reddit or community answer.

6️⃣ Point every version back to the original article.

↳ Your website remains the canonical source.
↳ The other platforms give AI assistants and search engines more places to discover and verify the story.

7️⃣ Use the page to earn citations while the story is hot.

↳ The journalist playbook inside the Skill finds reporters already asking for expert input on the topic.
↳ Give them a quotable take, verified facts and your breaking-news page as the source to cite.
↳ Meanwhile, the Skill matches related news articles published by other businesses in its network.
↳ It coordinates relevant, in-article citations between them in a natural editorial way.
↳ No random link swaps. No unrelated placements. Just contextual citations between useful stories, the kind AI assistants are designed to value.

8️⃣ Watch what gets picked up.

↳ If ChatGPT or Perplexity start retrieving the page, update it and add internal links.
↳ If an AI Overview appears, answer the follow-up questions before your competitors do.

Breaking stories give you two things mature keywords rarely offer:

Fresh demand.
Very little useful content.

That's how you newsjack a query before larger sites fill the results and give AI assistants a fresh source to cite.

The window closes quickly.
That's the opportunity.

We built this workflow into Fulcru, try it here today.

Thanks for reading!

[Your Name]

Want to see which questions ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity already answer with your competitor's name? Run the free Fulcru visibility report at fulcru.app.

NEW: Google's AI Mode now cites Google more than almost anyone else. Here is what it does to your br

Stefan Vasile — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:01:45 +0000

New research from Profound measured how often Google AI Mode cites Google itself. The number moved 8.4x in eleven weeks.

It explains a lot of what we have been watching across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity all year.

It also lines up with what our own tracking keeps showing inside Fulcru (fulcru.app): the pages AI quotes are almost never the pages brands spend their money on.

Let's break it all down.

Quick context. Profound is an AI search analytics company. Their research team, with analyst Davis McCain, published this on 14 July 2026. Named analyst, stated window, stated sample. That matters, because most numbers in this category have none of the three.

1. What they actually measured

Between 15 April and 30 June 2026, Profound tracked citation share inside Google AI Mode across more than 32 million instances of google.com/searchviewer.

In that window, citations pointing back to google.com grew 8.4x.

That makes google.com the number two most cited domain in AI Mode. Not a publisher. Not Reddit. Google.

2. The part everyone skips: which Google pages

The growth is not general search results. It comes almost entirely from two surfaces:

↳ Google Business Profiles
↳ Product Knowledge Panels

Both are structured cards Google hosts and controls, showing hours, photos, reviews, specs and prices.

So the citation resolves inside Google. The user reads your hours, your reviews and your price without ever reaching your site.

Your Business Profile is now your landing page, whether you treat it as one or not.

3. A second study, different method, same curve

SE Ranking ran a separate analysis published in February 2026: 68,313 keywords, 1,321,398 AI Mode citations.

↳ June 2025: google.com appeared in 5.7% of AI Mode answers
↳ February 2026: 17.42%
↳ Google was the most cited domain in 19 of the 20 niches tracked

The only exception was careers, where Indeed was cited about three times more often.

Two vendors, two methods, one direction. That is the definition of a trend rather than a headline.

4. Where it bites hardest

The shift is not spread evenly. It concentrates where Google's own cards hold the richest data.

↳ Travel: 53.18% of citations go to Google
↳ Entertainment and hobbies: 48.74%
↳ Real estate: 30.54%
↳ Insurance: 6.48%
↳ Finance: 5.13%

Profound names the same verticals from the other side: hospitality, home services, restaurants, real estate and healthcare.

If you sell locally, this is already your reality. If you sell finance or insurance, you still have room.

5. Why this is structural, not a phase

Ask why a model would prefer a Google card to your page.

↳ The card has uniform fields the model can quote with confidence
↳ It is always fresh, because Google owns the database
↳ It never returns a 403 to a crawler
↳ Your page might be paywalled, badly marked up, or blocking the bot outright

A model optimising for a reliable answer takes the reliable source. Structural advantages compound, which is exactly what the curve from 5.7% to 17.42% to 8.4x shows.

6. What our own data says about the rest of the answer

Google's cards take the top of the answer. The rest still goes somewhere, and it is not your homepage.

We track 601 sources feeding answers in our own category. The biggest are reddit.com, youtube.com, semrush.com, ahrefs.com and linkedin.com.

Not one of them is a company homepage.

We published our own number two days ago, unedited: 34 buyer questions, three engines, zero mentions of us. The tool that measures it is ours, which is exactly why we published it.

https://x.com/stfvsl/status/2082191782876475609

7. What to actually do this week

If you sell locally. Fix the card before you touch the site. Complete every field, replace stale photos, answer the reviews. The card is what the model quotes and what the buyer reads.

If you sell products. Product structured data is now a visibility lever, not a nice to have. The Knowledge Panel quotes your feed.

Everyone else. Count first. Run the buyer questions in your category across every engine and write down who gets named. You cannot fix a gap you have not measured.

The free report at fulcru.app does that in about two minutes, no card, no account.

If you want your agent to run the whole loop instead:

npx skills add gsmmediaro/fulcru

That is the free skill. It finds the questions you lose, writes the page that closes the widest gap, and re-runs the same questions afterwards so you see whether the number moved. Repo: https://github.com/gsmmediaro/fulcru

The shape of the change

The old model was: index, rank, click.

The new model is: crawl, quote, decide.

Google just took the quote step in house for local and product queries. Everywhere it has not, the quote comes from Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Either way, the page you are proudest of is not in the room.

If you want the prompt set we use to measure this per category, reply "COUNT" and I will send it over.

Run Your Own AI Visibility Audit in 20 Minutes (No Tool Needed)

Stefan Vasile — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:00:59 +0000

Your buyers stopped Googling. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity "what's the best tool for X", and the model names three brands. If you're not one of them, you never enter the conversation. No click, no visit, no chance to pitch.

Most founders don't know where they stand. They assume they're in the answer because they rank on Google. Those are two different games now.

This is the exact audit I run before I write a single page. It takes about 20 minutes, needs no software, and it works for any brand in any category. Copy it.

What you need

↳ ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity open in three tabs. Free accounts are fine.
↳ A blank doc with four columns: Question, Who got named, Sources cited, You in it? (yes/no).
↳ One competitor you lose to. You already know who it is.

That's the whole kit.

Step 1: Write the questions your buyer actually asks

Not keywords. Questions. The way a real person types into a chat box when they don't know your brand exists yet.

Aim for 10 to 12. Mix the intent:

↳ Recommendation: "What's the best [category] tool for [specific buyer]?"
↳ Alternatives: "What are the best alternatives to [competitor]?"
↳ Comparison: "[Competitor A] vs [Competitor B], which is better for [use case]?"
↳ Problem-first: "How do I [the job your product does] without [the pain]?"

The rule: your brand name never appears in the question. You want to see who the model picks when the buyer has no idea you exist. That is the honest test.

Step 2: Run every question through all three models

Paste each question into ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. For each answer, fill your four columns:

↳ Which brands got named, in order.
↳ Which sources the model cited or linked (Perplexity shows these clearly, ChatGPT shows them when it searches, Gemini links some).
↳ Whether your brand made the list. Yes or no. No partial credit.

Run the same question twice if you have time. Models are not deterministic. A brand named on the first run can vanish on the second, and that instability is itself a signal that no one owns the answer yet.

Step 3: Score yourself honestly

Count it up. If you got named in 2 of 12 questions, your AI visibility is 17%. Write the real number down. This is your baseline, and it is the only number that matters until it moves.

Now look at the pattern, not the score:

↳ Which questions do you lose every single time?
↳ Which competitor shows up in the most answers?
↳ Are the questions you lose close to purchase, or just curiosity?

Losing a "what is [term]" question matters less than losing "best [category] tool for [your exact buyer]." Rank your losses by how close the buyer is to paying.

Step 4: Read the sources, because that's the whole game

This is the step everyone skips, and it's the one that pays.

AI answers are not opinions. The model runs a search, pulls a handful of pages, and writes its answer from them. So look at what it pulled. You'll see the same shapes again and again:

↳ A listicle: "11 best [category] tools in 2026." Your competitor is on it. You aren't.
↳ A comparison page pitting two rivals against each other. Neither is you.
↳ A Reddit thread where someone asked your exact question two years ago.
↳ A category definition page that quietly decides which brands count.

Those pages are the citation. The citation is the ranking. If you know which pages the model reads, you know exactly where you need to appear. You're not guessing at content anymore. You have a target list.

Step 5: Pick one gap and close it

Don't try to win everything. Take the single question that is closest to purchase and that you lose every time. Then give the model a reason to name you.

That usually means one page that does four things:

↳ Answers the question directly in the first 100 words, before any preamble.
↳ Includes a comparison table or a clean list the model can lift word for word.
↳ Names competitors honestly, including where they beat you. Models trust sources that admit trade-offs.
↳ Uses real numbers and specific claims, no vague superlatives.

The goal is not to rank on Google. The goal is to be the passage a model copies into its answer. Write for the lift, not the click.

Step 6: Re-run the same questions after you publish

Wait a week or two for the page to get indexed and crawled, then run your exact 12 questions again. Compare to your baseline.

↳ Before: named in 2 of 12.
↳ After: named in 5 of 12.
↳ Which source moved. Which competitor still owns the rest.

This before-and-after is the only honest way to report AI visibility. A dashboard that shows a score without a delta is a vanity metric. The delta is the proof.

Want the whole loop to run itself?

The audit above is real work. Twelve questions across three models, twice each, is 72 prompts, plus reading every source by hand. Doing it once is fine. Doing it every week for a moving target is a job.

That's what I built Fulcru for. There's a free Fulcru Skill you can drop into Claude, Codex or Cursor that runs this exact loop: it generates the buyer questions, runs them across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, records who got named, pulls the sources, and hands you the one page to publish next. Then it re-measures after you ship. The free visibility report at fulcru.app does the first pass for you, no card required.

One more thing worth flagging early. Step 4 keeps landing on the same truth: the brands AI names are the ones cited by pages the model trusts, and a lot of those citations come from third-party sites you don't own. Earning those placements by hand is slow. We're opening early access to a backlink and citation marketplace inside Fulcru that matches your pages with relevant, real sites the models already read. It's not live for everyone yet. If that's the part you care about, run the free report and you'll be first to hear when it opens.

Run the audit today. Even the manual version tells you something you didn't know this morning: whether the AI knows your name.

Want to see which questions ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity already answer with your competitor's name? Run the free Fulcru visibility report at fulcru.app.

Why ChatGPT Cites Reddit and Listicles Instead of Your Homepage

Stefan Vasile — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:59:55 +0000

You wrote a great homepage. Clear headline, real proof, a clean pitch. Then you asked ChatGPT to recommend the best tool in your category, and it named three competitors from a listicle you've never heard of. Your homepage, the best page you own, didn't get a mention.

This is not a bug. It's how the models decide who to name. Once you see the pattern, you can use it.

Your homepage is the one page AI trusts least

Think about what a homepage is. It's you, talking about you, with every reason to make yourself sound like the best option. The model knows this. So when it needs a source it can quote to a stranger, it reaches for pages that look neutral: a third party comparing options, a forum where real users argue, a listicle that ranks ten tools and has no stake in which one wins.

The models are tuned to cite what looks trustworthy and independent. A self-promotional page fails that test by definition. This is why brands with beautiful sites still lose the answer. They optimized the one page the model discounts most.

The four page types that actually get cited

Run the audit from the last article and read the sources, and you'll see the same shapes over and over. These are the pages models pull from:

1. Listicles

"11 best [category] tools in 2026." The model loves these because they're pre-formatted answers. It can lift the list almost whole. If your competitors are on three listicles and you're on none, the model has three reasons to name them and zero to name you.

2. Comparison pages

"[Tool A] vs [Tool B]." Buyers in research mode search these, and so do models when the question is a head-to-head. Notice which comparisons exist in your space and which ones leave you out.

3. Community threads

Reddit, Hacker News, niche forums. A two-year-old thread where someone asked your exact question still gets retrieved today, because it reads as honest, unpaid opinion. Models weight this heavily. It's also why you can't fake it. A thread full of obvious shills gets ignored.

4. Category and definition pages

"What is [category]?" and "[topic] explained." These quietly define which brands count as part of the category. Get named as an example on the definitive one and you inherit its authority every time the model reads it.

So how do you get onto pages you don't own?

This is the real work of AI visibility, and it splits into three honest plays.

Publish the pages you can own

Some of those four types you can build yourself. Your own comparison page, done honestly, including where competitors beat you, is a page a model will cite because it admits trade-offs. Your own category definition page, answer-first and updated, can become the one the model reads. Build those. They're the pages that keep paying for months.

Earn the third-party mentions

The listicles, the roundups, the "best tools" posts on other people's sites are the placements you can't publish yourself. You earn them. That means finding the writers who already rank for your category, giving them a genuine reason to add you, real numbers, a clear angle, a product that fits their list, and asking. It's slow, personal work, closer to PR than to link building.

Be genuinely useful where buyers already talk

You can't spam Reddit into citing you, and you shouldn't try. A single deleted post can sink an account. But answering real questions in your category, honestly and without a pitch, builds the kind of thread models retrieve. Attribution without a link still works: people remember the name.

The honest problem with earning citations

Here's what nobody selling "AEO" tells you: the third-party placement play is the highest-leverage and the slowest. Finding the right listicle, the right author, the right thread, then pitching each one by hand, eats weeks. Most founders start, get three replies, and quit.

That gap is exactly where the AEO agencies charge four figures a month, and where a lot of them cut corners with exact-match anchor spam that models are learning to distrust.

We're building the honest version of this into Fulcru. Early access is opening for a backlink and citation marketplace that matches your pages with relevant, real sites the models already read, the listicles and resource pages that show up in your own source audit, not random link farms. The point is contextual placements on pages in your actual category, the kind AI is designed to value. It's early and not open to everyone yet. If earning citations is your bottleneck, that's the piece to watch.

Where to start today, for free

Before any of that, know your map. Run the free Fulcru visibility report at fulcru.app. It shows you the exact questions where AI names a competitor, and, more useful, the exact pages it pulls those answers from. That source list is your target list. Every page on it is a citation you could earn.

Stop polishing the one page AI trusts least. Go find the pages it actually reads, and get on them.

Want to see which questions ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity already answer with your competitor's name? Run the free Fulcru visibility report at fulcru.app.

The AI Crawler Checklist: Why the Model Never Even Read Your Page

Stefan Vasile — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:59:52 +0000

You can write the perfect page, answer-first, honest, quotable, and still get zero AI citations. Not because the content lost. Because the crawler never got in.

AI assistants don't read the web live for every answer. They rely on crawlers, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google's crawlers, that fetch and store your pages so a model can retrieve them later. If those bots can't reach or render your page, you're invisible before the content ever gets judged. This is the plumbing nobody checks.

Here's the full checklist. Run it on your own site today.

1. Are you blocking the AI crawlers by accident?

The most common own-goal. Open your robots.txt (it's at yoursite.com/robots.txt) and look for lines like this:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

A lot of sites added these in 2023 when blocking AI training was the trend. The problem: the same bots that "train" also fetch pages to answer live questions. Block them and you opt out of being cited at all. Decide on purpose. If you want AI visibility, let them in:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Check your CDN too. Cloudflare and others ship a one-click "block AI bots" toggle that overrides your robots.txt. I've seen founders swear their site was open while Cloudflare quietly returned a 403 to every AI crawler. Test the real response, not the setting.

2. Does your content exist without JavaScript?

This one kills more vibe-coded sites than anything else. Many crawlers fetch your raw HTML and don't run JavaScript, or run a limited version of it. If your page ships an empty <div id="root"> and paints all the real text with client-side React, the crawler sees a blank page.

Test it in ten seconds. Open your page, view source (Ctrl+U), and search for a full sentence from your main content. If it's in the raw HTML, you're fine. If the source is just script tags and an empty shell, the crawler probably sees nothing.

The fix is server-side rendering or static generation, so the words are in the HTML on first load. If you're on Next.js, Nuxt, Astro or plain HTML, you're likely fine. If you're on a pure client-side single-page app, this is your biggest leak.

3. Is the answer in the first 100 words?

Crawlers and models favor pages that answer fast. If your real content sits below a hero section, a cookie banner, three testimonials and a newsletter box, the model has to dig for the passage worth quoting, and often it just moves to a cleaner source.

Put a direct, quotable answer near the top. One clear paragraph that responds to the question the page targets, before any preamble. Write it so it can be lifted whole into an AI answer with nothing else attached.

4. Is your structure clean and machine-readable?

Models parse structure to understand and extract. Give them clear signals:

↳ One <h1> that states the topic, then <h2>s that each match a real follow-up question.
↳ Real lists and tables in HTML, not screenshots of lists. A model can quote a <table>. It can't read a PNG.
↳ Short paragraphs. Dense walls of text are harder to extract a clean passage from.
↳ A visible last-updated date. Freshness is a trust signal, and models lean toward current pages.

5. Do you have an llms.txt file?

llms.txt is an emerging standard: a plain-text file at your root (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that hands AI systems a clean map of your most important pages, in Markdown, without the nav, ads and clutter of your full site.

It's not yet honored by every model, and it won't rescue a page the crawler is otherwise blocked from. Treat it as cheap insurance, not a magic switch. A minimal one looks like this:

# Your Brand

> One sentence on what you do.

## Core pages
- [What is [category]](https://yoursite.com/what-is): the definitive explainer
- [Your product vs alternatives](https://yoursite.com/compare): honest comparison
- [Pricing](https://yoursite.com/pricing): plans and what each includes

Ten minutes to write, and it makes your best pages easy for a model to find and quote. There's little downside.

6. Are your important pages actually indexed?

A page nobody has crawled can't be cited. Check that your key pages are submitted in a sitemap, aren't marked noindex by accident, and return a clean 200, not a redirect chain or a soft 404. One stray noindex meta tag left over from a staging build can hide a page for months.

Run the free check instead of doing all this by hand

Steps 1 and 2, the blocked-crawler and the JavaScript-shell problems, are the two that silently sink the most sites, and they're annoying to test properly across every bot.

So we built a free tool that does it for you. Drop your URL into the AI crawler check at fulcru.app/tools/ai-crawler-check and it fetches your page the way GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot do, then tells you what each one actually sees: whether you're blocked, whether your content renders without JavaScript, and whether the answer is reachable. No card, no signup. It's the fastest way to catch the leak that's making all your good content invisible.

The order that matters

Content strategy gets all the attention, but it sits on top of the plumbing. Fix the plumbing first:

Let the AI crawlers in.
Make sure your words are in the raw HTML.
Answer in the first 100 words.
Give the model clean structure to extract.
Add an llms.txt as cheap insurance.
Confirm your pages are indexed.

Do this and every page you write afterward has a chance to be read. Skip it and the best AEO content in your category never gets seen by the one reader you're writing for.

Run the crawler check today. It takes 30 seconds and it might explain a silence you've been blaming on your content.

Want to see which questions ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity already answer with your competitor's name? Run the free Fulcru visibility report at fulcru.app.

I made my first $100 and scored 0 out of 34 on my own product, on the same day

Stefan Vasile — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:52:52 +0000

Two things happened to my startup on 27 July. Somebody paid me $100 a month, the first money the product has ever made. And I ran my own tool on my own brand and scored zero out of 34.

The tool tells you whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name your brand when someone asks for a recommendation. Mine does not name me. Not a low score. Zero.

Here is the whole run, including the part that makes me look bad, and the finding that changed what I work on.

The run

34 prompts, the kind a buyer types before they have heard of anyone:

"What's the best tool to track whether ChatGPT recommends my brand?"
"What are cheaper alternatives to Profound for AI visibility tracking?"
"Compare the top answer engine optimization tools for a bootstrapped founder."
"How can I find out which prompts make AI assistants ignore my brand?"

Three engines each. Mention rate 0. Visibility score 0.

The tool worked perfectly. It found every gap, ranked them, and named the winner in each one. The gaps were all mine.

Who got named instead

Brand	Answers naming it, of 34
SEMrush	25
Profound	25
Peec AI	23
Otterly.AI	18
Rankscale	4
Scrunch AI	2
Knowatoa	1
Am I On AI	1
Me	0

The part worth your time

The tool also logs the sources behind each answer. Those 34 answers cited 601 pages. The domains the engines kept going back to:

Source	Citations
reddit.com	84
youtube.com	68
semrush.com	67
ahrefs.com	52
linkedin.com	46

Two of the top five are a forum and a video site. A third is a social network. Not one is a vendor blog, mine included.

That is the mechanism, and it is duller than the advice everyone sells. When an engine answers "best AEO tool", it reads what people said about the tools somewhere else, then repeats the names it found. A brand nobody has discussed in public gives it nothing to read.

What I got wrong

I spent my first weeks writing pages. Comparison pages, guides, five free tools, clean structured data, a sitemap a crawler can walk. Good work. It moved my number by nothing, because the engines were never short of pages about AI visibility. They were short of a reason to believe I existed.

SEMrush is named 25 times because semrush.com is cited 67 times and because people argue about SEMrush on Reddit. That is the whole thing. It does not respond to another blog post.

What to do if you are at zero too

Measure before you decide anything. Write 20 buyer questions with your brand name nowhere in them. Run each in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Count how many name you. Most founders guess this number, and guess high.
Read the citations, not the answers. The sources under the answer tell you where your category gets argued about. Go there.
Earn a mention on a page an engine already cites. One honest comment in a thread the engines read beats ten pages on your own site.
Re-run the same 20 questions in a month. Answers move between runs. One check is a data point; only the trend is a measurement.

The tool

It is open source: github.com/gsmmediaro/fulcru

A CLI, an MCP server and an agent skill. fulcru gaps gives you the questions where an assistant names a competitor instead of you. fulcru write drafts the page that closes one. fulcru delta tells you what publishing it did.

npm install -g fulcru
export FULCRU_TOKEN=pk_...
fulcru gaps

Or in Docker, with nothing installed on the host:

docker build -t fulcru .
docker run --rm -e FULCRU_TOKEN=pk_... fulcru gaps

The measurement engine behind it is hosted and paid, because running prompt sets across three engines every week costs real money. Point FULCRU_ENDPOINT at your own if you would rather replace it.

I will re-run the number and post it again whichever way it goes. If it stays at zero, that is a fact about my product you should weigh before you pay me.

And about that first $100. One customer is not a business, and I am not going to dress it up as one. But it is the difference between a thing I hope people want and a thing one person paid for, and I would rather write that sentence at $100 than wait until it sounds impressive.

The full run, with the numbers kept up to date as I re-measure, lives at fulcru.app/guides/scored-zero-on-our-own-tool.