We Scored 0/100 on Our Own AI Visibility Tool — Here's What We Did Next

The day we launched pickedby.ai, the first product we tested was our own.

We typed "pickedby.ai" into the checker. Hit the button. Watched the progress bar.

0 out of 100.

We had just built a tool to measure AI visibility — and we were completely invisible to AI.

Honestly, it was the most clarifying moment of the whole build. Because it meant the problem was real. And it meant we had to fix it in public, with our own product, from scratch.

Here's exactly what we did over the next 24 hours — and what happened.

Step 1: We added an llms.txt file

The first thing we did was the simplest: we created a file at pickedby.ai/llms.txt.

Think of it as the AI-era equivalent of robots.txt — except instead of telling crawlers what to ignore, you're telling AI systems exactly what your product is, what it does, and who it's for. No jargon. No marketing language. Plain, structured facts.

Ours looks something like this:

Specific. Concrete. Mentions the audience, the use case, the competing tools, the platforms. Every word is something AI could use to match our product to a real query.

This alone moved our score from 0 to around 15. Not life-changing — but it's one file, and it took 20 minutes.

Step 2: We posted on Reddit with our product name in the title

Here's what most creators do when they post on Reddit: they describe the problem they solved, maybe drop a link, and call it a launch.

The problem is that AI doesn't care about your launch. It cares about your product name appearing in public, credible, third-party contexts. A Reddit post is exactly that — if the product name is actually in it.

We posted on r/SideProject with the title: "I built a free tool that checks if ChatGPT recommends your product."

That post is now a public Reddit page with "pickedby.ai" in the title. Reddit is everywhere in AI training data. That's the point.

Step 3: We made our product description actually specific

Our original landing page description was something like: "Check how visible your product is to AI."

That's meaningless to a language model trying to match queries. When someone asks ChatGPT "what tools help Gumroad sellers get found by AI?" — our vague description wouldn't match. We rewrote it to be specific about the audience, the category, and the use case.

Before: "Check how visible your product is to AI."
After: "Free AI Visibility Score for digital creators — check if ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity recommend your Gumroad, Etsy, or LemonSqueezy product. 10 seconds, no signup."

Every noun in that sentence is a keyword someone might use to describe what they're looking for. That's the point.

Where we landed

After those three steps — llms.txt, a Reddit post, and a rewritten description — our score moved from 0 to 35.

Still Bronze tier. Still a long way from Gold. But the direction changed, and it changed fast.

What's next (the honest answer)

We're not done. 35/100 means there are still dimensions we're failing — and we know exactly which ones. More third-party mentions. A "best of" list somewhere. A comparison piece. We're working through all of it.

We're doing all of that in public, with pickedby.ai as the case study. The next post in this series will cover the products we checked that scored highest — and what they have in common that most creators don't.

If you want to follow along — and see your own score while you're at it — the tool is free.

And if your score is 0 — don't feel bad. Ours was too. The only question is what you do next.