Show HN: Get AI to recommend your product or service
A developer created a free tool called Plaudit Labs that scans a website, analyzes why AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity do or don't recommend the product or service, compares results with competitors, and provides a checklist to improve AI recommendation rates. The tool requires no signup for a scan.
Background
- The rise of "AI-powered search" (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews) means many people now get product recommendations directly from an AI chatbot instead of traditional Google results. If an AI doesn't know about your product, or doesn't cite it when answering relevant questions, you lose traffic.
- "Recommendation rate" is the % of times an AI chatbot mentions or links to your site when asked a relevant purchase question (e.g. "best tool for X").
- The author built a scan tool (Plaudit Labs) that simulates what AI chatbots do: it generates realistic buyer questions, checks whether your site gets cited in the answers, and compares you against competitors. It then produces a fix-it checklist (e.g. missing structured data, poor citations from authoritative sources, unclear product pages).
- This is a free, no-signup diagnostic tool aimed at indie makers and small businesses who can't guess why their site is invisible to AI chatbots. The key insight: optimizing for AI recommendation is a new SEO frontier, separate from traditional Google ranking.