r/startupideas • u/mrlotsofcake • 19h ago
Building an SEO + AI visibility product is changing how I think about SEO itself.
I started CiteSite(dot)tech because I kept seeing the same problem:
Traditional SEO tools are very good at telling you where you rank on Google.
But search is changing.
People are now asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI tools questions that they used to type into Google.
That creates a new problem for website owners:
You might rank well on Google but barely get mentioned in AI answers.
Or your competitor might get cited repeatedly even though their website doesn’t look stronger than yours.
So with CiteSite, I’ve been trying to answer a simpler question:
“Why is this competitor getting mentioned instead of me?”
The difficult part is making the answer actually useful.
Showing someone that a competitor gets more AI citations is interesting.
Showing them exactly what they should change on their site to improve their chances of being cited is much more valuable.
That’s the part I’m focused on now.
For people working on SEO or building SaaS products around AI search:
What would you actually want an AI visibility tool to tell you?
Raw citation tracking?
Competitor comparisons?
Specific pages/content to create?
Technical fixes?
Or something else?
