On April 14, I opened my phone and found out our @pickedbyAI account had been permanently suspended. The reason: an automated posting script I'd deployed. You can read the full story here.
Today — 48 days later — I opened my phone again. The account is back.
Update: @pickedbyAI was restored on June 1, 2026, after X reviewed our appeal. No explanation. No warning it was coming. Just — back.
I'm telling you this not because the account coming back is the interesting part. The interesting part is what happened in the 48 days we thought it was gone forever.
What we built without it
The day of the ban, I had two options. Wait for X to reverse a "permanent" suspension — which felt like a long bet — or treat it as a closed door and find another way.
I chose the second one. Here's what 48 days of building without an X account looks like:
We shipped 18 product deployments. We wrote blog posts that now rank in Google for terms like "AI visibility score" and "GEO vs SEO." We built a presence on Indie Hackers under the founder's name. We improved our own AI visibility score from 12 to 45 — which is the whole point of the product.
None of that would have happened on the same timeline if I'd been spending energy trying to build an X following instead.
What the ban actually cost us
Honestly? Less than I expected.
At the time of the ban, @pickedbyAI had 0 followers and 4 posts. We hadn't earned any audience there yet. Losing it felt significant mostly because we'd planned to use it — not because we'd built anything on it yet.
The real cost was the time I spent the day of the ban replacing 19 HTML files, dealing with the emotional tax of a dumb mistake, and rethinking our marketing strategy from scratch. That was probably 8-10 hours of real cost.
Everything after that was actually fine.
What's different now
The account is back. 0 followers (the suspension appears to have reset our count). The 12 posts from before are still there.
Here's what I'm doing differently this time:
- No automation. Ever. Not a scheduler. Not a script. Not a "post when I'm asleep" tool. Every post comes from me, manually, when I have something worth saying.
- No volume targets. The original mistake was treating X like a publishing pipeline. It's a conversation channel. I'll post when I have something specific to share — a milestone, a finding, a question I'm thinking through.
- Blog first, X second. Our blog is a permanent asset. X posts disappear into the feed in 20 minutes. The writing habit we built during the ban — that's the one we're keeping.
The thing about "permanent" bans
I spent a few hours in April trying to appeal the suspension. X's process is opaque. You submit an appeal, get an auto-reply, and then nothing happens for weeks. I stopped expecting anything.
What changed? I genuinely don't know. X doesn't tell you. One day it's gone, one day it's back. The platform makes decisions that affect your presence and doesn't explain them.
That's the real lesson — not "appeals work if you wait long enough." The lesson is: don't build your distribution on infrastructure you don't control.
Your blog is yours. Your email list is yours. A social account is rented space. You can use it, it can help, but the moment you depend on it you've introduced a risk you can't manage.
Where we are now
pickedby.ai checks whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity actually recommend your product. We give you a score, a diagnosis, and the specific fixes that will move it.
Our own score is 45. We started at 12. The improvement came from doing exactly what we tell users to do — structured content, consistent terminology, citations, schema markup. The blog posts you're reading right now are part of it.
If you want to know your score, it's free. No account. No signup. Just your product name and 10 seconds.