Measured, 27 July 2026

We sell AI visibility. We scored zero on our own product.

We build a tool that tells you whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name your brand. On 27 July 2026 we pointed it at ourselves across 34 buyer prompts in our own category. It named us in none of them. Mention rate zero. Visibility score zero. The engines named SEMrush, Profound, Peec AI and Otterly instead, and they cited Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn to do it. Below is the whole result, including the part that hurts, and what we changed because of it.

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”, “cheaper alternatives to Profound”, “compare the top answer engine optimization tools for a bootstrapped founder”. Three engines each. We were named in zero. Not a low number, not a bad week. Zero.

The product works. It found the gaps, ranked them, and named the winner in each one. The gaps were all ours.

Who the engines named instead

The part worth your time

Our tool also logs the sources behind each answer. Those 34 answers cited 601 pages. Here are the domains the engines went back to most:

Two of the top five are forums and video. A third is a social network. Not one is a vendor blog, ours included. 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 has nothing for it to read.

What we got wrong

We spent our first weeks writing pages. Comparison pages, guides, five free tools, clean structured data, a sitemap an AI crawler can walk. Good work, and it changed our number by nothing, because we were feeding the wrong thing. The engines were never short of pages about AI visibility. They were short of a reason to believe we existed.

The brands beating us are not better written. SEMrush is named 25 times because semrush.com is cited 67 times and because people argue about SEMrush on Reddit. That is the whole mechanism. It is unglamorous and it does not respond to another blog post.

What to do instead, if you are at zero too

1. 1. Measure before you decide anything. Write 20 buyer questions that do not contain your brand name. Run each in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Count how many name you. Most founders guess this number and guess high.
2. 2. Read the citations, not the answers. The sources under the answer tell you where the argument about your category happens. Go there. For us it was Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn. For a Shopify tool it might be YouTube and two niche forums.
3. 3. 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. Directory listings count too, because “best X tool” pages get retrieved constantly.
4. 4. Re-run the same 20 questions in a month. Answers move between runs, so one check is a data point and only the trend is a measurement. Compare the rate, not a screenshot.

Why we published this

Because a visibility tool that hides its own visibility number is asking you to take its word for something it can measure. Ours is zero today. We will re-run it and post the number again whichever way it goes. If it stays at zero, that is a fact about our product you should weigh before you pay us.

For scale, so you can weigh the rest of this properly: the same day we measured that zero, someone paid for Fulcru for the first time. One customer, $100 a month. That is the whole business today. We would rather you knew both numbers.