How AI assistants find your product
AI assistants recommend products they can read. Here is how to make yours readable, in four steps you can finish in one afternoon.
The short answer
Which questions you can win, and which are already decided.
Broad questions are decided
The assistant answers from memory: the same names every time, whatever you publish.
Narrow questions are open
"Developer tools in Portugal" has no memorised answer, so it searches and reads. Those are the ones you can win.
Nobody can promise you a mention
Not in ChatGPT, not anywhere, and no directory can honestly offer one, including us.
How to help AI find you
Four steps, one afternoon, in this order.
Layer 1: Your own pagesabout 1 hourRewrite your first sentence
- One plain sentence above the fold, no adjectives. "A scheduling tool for physiotherapy clinics" can be quoted; "Reimagine your workflow" cannot.
- Name the audience and the jobassistants match situations, not keywords.
- Put the facts in texta screenshot of your pricing is invisible to them.
a few secondsCheck what a crawler sees
- Most crawlers behind AI answers do not run JavaScript. An empty div is all they get.
- Fix this before anything else.
Layer 2: llms.txt15 minutesWrite an llms.txt
- A file at /llms.txt naming your site and its three or four best pages.
- Cheap insurance, not a growth channel: adoption is uneven.
Layer 3: Directories an agent can queryabout 10 minutes eachGet listed where the facts are structured
- An assistant wants a source it can ask, not another page to read. One call, ten candidates.
- The one layer you cannot build yourselfpick two or three that publish structured data, not twenty that do not.
- A launch is a separate job. Worth doing, not a substitute.
Server registry, or product directory?
If somebody tells you to get listed in the MCP directories, ask which they mean. Usually they do not know there are two.
| Which kind | What it lists | Examples | Right for you if |
|---|---|---|---|
| An MCP server registry | Servers an agent can connect to | Smithery, PulseMCP, the official servers repository | You built an MCP server |
| An agent-queryable product directory | Products, exposed through an API or an MCP server | This site | You built a product |
The server is the door; the products are what is behind it. If you built a scheduling tool for physiotherapy clinics, being in a server registry does nothing for you at all, because nobody asking about scheduling tools is browsing a list of servers. Ours answers at https://whatareyoubuilding.ai/api/mcp.
What makes a listing worth it
A listing that is not readable does nothing for any of this.
| What it needs | Why |
|---|---|
| Real sentences, not a tagline | A listing that is a logo, a name and a URL is unquotable. One with a paragraph describing the product is a source. |
| Structured facts alongside the prose | Category, country, stage, platform. This is what makes a listing filterable rather than merely readable, and filterable is what an agent needs. |
| A link that passes | Some directories mark every outbound link nofollow, which is worth knowing before you spend the afternoon. There is a two-minute check. |
| Permanence | A launch board entry is about a day. A directory entry is about existing. Only one of those is still answering questions in six months. |
Listings here are built to pass all four — what a listing gets you.
Be in a catalogue AI agents can query
- Free, reviewed before it appears
- Do-follow link to your site
- MCP-based
Common questions
Will doing all this get me mentioned by ChatGPT?
It improves the odds on specific questions and does approximately nothing for broad ones. Anyone telling you otherwise is guessing, including us — the honest version is that you are making yourself findable, not buying a placement.
Is llms.txt actually used?
Unevenly, and less than its advocates suggest. It costs fifteen minutes and removes ambiguity for the things that do read it. That is the whole case for it; treat a bigger claim with suspicion.
Does my product need its own MCP server?
Only if an agent doing something inside your product is useful — booking, querying your data, taking an action. It has nothing to do with being discovered, which is what this page is about. Two different projects that share an acronym.
Is any of this different from normal SEO?
Less than the phrase "AI SEO" implies. Being readable, saying plainly what you do, and being cited by other sites were the answer before and are the answer now. What genuinely changed is layer three: a source an agent can query is a new kind of thing, and it did not exist to be in five years ago.
How long does it take to show up?
Longer than anybody wants to hear. Assistants lean on sources they already reach for, and becoming one of those is a matter of being referenced by other people over months. The work above makes you findable when somebody does look; it does not make anybody look.
What about schema.org markup on my own site?
Worth adding, and it is layer one rather than a fourth layer. SoftwareApplication or Product markup makes your own facts machine-readable at the point they are already written. It will not do anything for a page that has no facts on it.
What is not worth buying?
Three things this page is written against:
- "AI SEO" packages, which are the old thing with a new adjective.
- Stuffing your page with "best AI tool for X", which is a query you are not going to win and a sentence nobody can quote.
- Anyone who promises a mention in an assistant’s answer. Nobody can promise that, and anyone selling it is selling a guess.