I measured whether AI assistants can see my micro SaaS at all. 0 of 12 queries cited us, and a dead domain won our own brand name.

Most of the AI-visibility advice I see here is vibes, so I ran the numbers on my own product and I am posting them because the result was worse than I assumed.

The test. 12 prompts through a model with web search on: 1 exact brand name, 4 category queries, 7 how-do-I queries in our problem space. Count which domains get cited.

Result: 0 of 12 cited us. On our own brand name it cited a .app version of our domain that is not ours and returns a 404. The winners on the how-do-I queries were help.openai.com (5) and support.google.com (2), i.e. the platforms' own help centres are eating the whole category.

Then the crawler logs, 30 days:

• ClaudeBot: 4 hits, every one a 404 on a subdomain we do not serve
• GPTBot: 0
• OAI-SearchBot: 0
• ChatGPT-User: 0

We were not ranking badly. We were not in the index at all.

Two things that surprised me:

1. Google indexing bought us nothing. Search Console said the homepage was indexed and healthy. It did not put us anywhere near an assistant's answer.
2. A dead domain beat us on our own name. Nobody maintains it. It has age and inbound links, and the model had no reason to prefer a site it had never fetched.

What I changed, roughly in order of what seemed to matter: shipped an llms.txt (we were serving a 404 on that path), pre-rendered four long guides with Article and FAQPage JSON-LD instead of leaving them behind client-side rendering, added Organization and WebSite JSON-LD at the root, requested indexing per URL. I now track crawler hits and cited-domain count instead of impressions.

The product, since the rules ask for context rather than a bare link: https://openprofiles.io – it runs this same check for a person instead of a domain. It shows what the sources actually return about a name right now with the source URL behind each claim, then lets that person publish a public, no-login, machine-readable page they control. Free while in beta, no account needed for the audit.

The cheap version of this you can run today without any tool: grep 30 days of access logs for GPTBot and ClaudeBot and see whether they have ever fetched you. My bet is your number is also 0.