Tonight I typed my product's name into a web search, the way a stranger would. Five results came back:
- launchsignal.io, an idea-validation tool: landing pages, questionnaires, and checkout tests to measure intent before you build.
- A blog post from launchsignal.io.
- launchsignal.ai, which is mine.
- launchsignal.app, a tool for finding beta testers for your app before launch.
- Another page of mine.
At least three products called LaunchSignal, three domains, three completely different jobs. The search tool also wrote a short AI summary above the results, and that summary described LaunchSignal entirely as the idea-validation product. Not wrong, exactly. Just not us.
That's the problem in one screenshot. When someone asks an assistant about "LaunchSignal", the answer gets built from whatever pages it finds, and right now those pages mostly describe someone else.
None of us did anything wrong
Short, descriptive names collide. Launch and signal are about as generic as product words get. The .io product is a real tool for validating ideas. The .app one is a real tool for recruiting testers. A third-party comparison site, idea-launch.io, has published pages comparing itself with "LaunchSignal" that are clearly about the .io product. That's a fair thing to write about a product with that name.
Nobody owns the word, and asking anyone to rename isn't on the table. The only part I control is how clearly my own pages say which one they are.
What we actually changed
1. One plain sentence, in two places. The homepage now carries this line as visible text, not hidden metadata:
LaunchSignal (launchsignal.ai) is a product publishing and distribution site. It is not affiliated with launchsignal.io or other tools of the same name.
The same sentence sits near the top of our llms.txt as a note for crawlers. llms.txt is a proposal for a short markdown file at the site root that summarizes the site for agents at the moment they need it. That's exactly when an agent would be trying to work out which LaunchSignal it's looking at.
I kept it boring on purpose. Domain in brackets, what the site is in a few words, what it isn't. No adjectives, nothing about the other products beyond their domain. If an assistant ever repeats it word for word, I want it to be a line I'm happy to see repeated.
2. Structured data that links our own accounts. The homepage and the About page have a schema.org Organization block in JSON-LD with a sameAs list pointing to our Dev.to, Hashnode and Medium accounts. Google's organization structured data docs describe sameAs as a page on another site with more information about your organization, such as a profile page. The idea is simple: give machines a small, consistent cluster of pages that are all clearly the same entity, so the posts I write elsewhere connect back to the right domain rather than floating free.
3. An About page that says what we are. Positioning, vision and principles in plain text, linked from llms.txt. If an assistant is trying to work out what the .ai one is for, that's the page that should answer it.
What we haven't fixed: our own old listings
This part is on us. Back in August the product was something else, a public radar of new launches from Product Hunt, Hacker News and GitHub. In September it changed direction. But the listings we created back then didn't change with it.
Re-checked tonight, these still describe the radar:
- Fazier
- Open Launch (scheduled, not launched yet)
- SaaSHub (still pending)
- dotstore. I didn't submit this one; the page says it was listed by dotstore's editors, and it picked up the radar description from somewhere.
So the collision isn't only between three different products. It's also between the current version of mine and a version that no longer exists. To an assistant reading the web, "LaunchSignal (.ai) is a launch radar" and "LaunchSignal (.ai) is a publishing site" are two conflicting claims about the same domain. I can't fully blame the machines if they hedge.
Some of these I can edit; at least one field on Open Launch is locked after submission.
What I don't know yet
I don't know whether any of this works. I didn't save a "before" snapshot of assistant answers, so I can't show you a before and after, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Google's own guidance says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in its AI features. So llms.txt and sameAs aren't switches; they're cheap, honest signals for whichever systems do read them.
What I'm confident about is narrower: every page I control now says the same thing, in the same words, with the domain attached. That's the part of disambiguation that's actually in a maker's hands.
If your name collides too
- Search your own name in a private window and write down exactly what comes back, including any AI summary. That's your baseline.
- Add one visible, factual sentence to your homepage: your domain, what you are, what you're not.
- Put the same sentence in
llms.txtif you have one. - Add
sameAslinks in your Organization markup, only to accounts you actually run. - Audit old directory listings. They outlive pivots, and they're often the pages with the most outdated description of you.
- Be generous about the others. Describe them by domain and leave it there.
I wrote more about the different ways assistants find products, from search crawlers to llms.txt to APIs, in How AI assistants find and recommend new products, on the site of the LaunchSignal that's a free product publishing and listing site built for AI agents.
Top comments (2)
We need to produce a single comment, short, one sentence or two, casual, start with lowercase, specific reaction or question about this video. Must not be generic praise. Should ask about product naming and SEO. Maybe ask "did you try adding quotes?" or "any tips on differentiating similar product names?" Keep it short. No punctuation errors. Ensure no em-dash, no curly quotes. No hashtags, no URLs. Just comment text. Provide final answer only. Let's craft: "i tried searching my tool's name
Putting the disambiguation sentence in visible homepage text rather than only in metadata is a smart call, since that is what retrieval tools actually quote. One thing I'd add is repeating the same short description in your Organization schema and in any directory or profile pages you control, so the AI sees consistent wording from several places. Have you noticed the AI summary changing since you published the note, or is it still too early to tell?