Software buying starts with a shortlist, and the shortlist increasingly comes out of a chat window rather than a results page. This page is about how that shortlist gets assembled, and which parts of it you can actually reach.
Who is asking
The people asking are rarely the people who will sign. A marketing lead asks for the best tool for a small team, an engineer asks whether it fits the stack they already run, a finance owner asks what it costs per seat, and someone in security asks which certifications it holds. Four questions, four answers, one purchase.
What they have in common is that none of them start with your name. By the time a prospect types your brand into anything, the category question has usually already been asked and answered — and you were either in that answer or you were not.
Questions buyers actually ask
Not keyword variants — whole questions, the way a person types them into an assistant. These are the shapes we build tracking around.
- best help desk software for a 10-person support team
- cheaper alternatives to the CRM we currently pay for
- how does this tool compare with the one my competitor uses
- does it integrate with Slack and HubSpot
- how much is it per seat, and is there a free tier
- is this vendor SOC 2 Type II certified
Which surfaces matter here
Category questions get answered in prose on every surface we track, but not in the same way. Chat surfaces will happily produce a shortlist with reasons attached. A Google AI Overview shows up more often on the narrow end — a specific integration, a specific pricing question — where a short factual answer fits above the results.
That is why a SaaS brand cannot treat this as one channel. Being named in a chat shortlist and being linked from an Overview are separate outcomes with separate causes, and a brand can hold one while losing the other.
Reference pages for these surfaces
Where these answers come from
The pages an assistant leans on in this category are rarely all yours. Each block below is a source family worth checking before you write another article.
Review marketplaces and category directories
These publish exactly the page shape a shortlist question attracts: a named category, a list of products, and structured opinion attached to each one. You cannot edit the ranking, but you can keep your profile current and you can know which directories carry your category.
Third-party roundups
The “best tools for X” posts written by media, agencies and your competitors' content teams. They target the exact question a buyer asks, and they are the easiest place to be missing from without ever noticing.
Community threads
Reddit, Hacker News and niche forums answer the question a review page cannot: what it was actually like to use. Threads age well and stay retrievable long after they stop getting traffic.
Your own comparison and alternatives pages
The one source family you fully control. A page that names the competitor, states the trade-off honestly, and does not pretend the answer is always you tends to be more usable than a feature matrix where your product wins every row.
Product documentation and changelogs
Integration questions, limits and API behaviour get answered from documentation — which usually lives on a subdomain with its own robots.txt that nobody has read since it was set up.
What the documentation says
Each line below is read from the linked document — a vendor's own guidance, a published standard, or a public register. Nothing in this section is our estimate.
OpenAI documents separate crawlers for separate jobs — OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT's search features, GPTBot collects content for model training — and states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. A docs subdomain that blocks everything blocks that too.
Source: OpenAI — Overview of OpenAI Crawlers (opens the source document in a new tab)Google documents software app structured data — name, operating system, application category, offers and rating — as the markup that can make a software page eligible for a rich result in Search.
Source: Google — Software app structured data (opens the source document in a new tab)Google's guidance is that structured data is what makes rich results possible, and that its own Search Central documentation, not schema.org, is definitive for how Search behaves.
Source: Google — Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search (opens the source document in a new tab)Crawler access is expressed in robots.txt, standardised as RFC 9309, which matches rules per user-agent and per path. “Allowed” is therefore a per-bot, per-directory answer rather than a single yes or no.
Source: IETF — RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol (opens the source document in a new tab)
What is not documented
Open questions, not omissions. Anyone answering these with a precise number for your category is guessing.
- No assistant vendor publishes how a review-marketplace page is weighted against a vendor's own site. Anyone selling a directory listing as an AI-visibility tactic is selling a hypothesis.
- Whether a question triggers a search at all is decided per turn by the model. A shortlist answered from training data and a shortlist answered from live retrieval look identical to the reader and respond to completely different work.
- We cannot see how many real buyers ask the questions we track. Prompt tracking measures answers, not demand — treat the question set as a panel you designed, not as a market survey.
- Category boundaries are the model's, not yours. A product that considers itself a revenue platform can be answered as a CRM, and no vendor documents a way to correct that from outside.
What GetCited.me measures here
We run your category questions on a schedule and read the answer: whether you are named at all, which competitors were named next to you, which URLs the answer cited, and how you were characterised. The question set is built from your own topic clusters rather than from a generic SaaS template.
The headline figure is the organic mention rate — questions that never contain your name. Questions that do name you are reported separately as recognition and as head-to-head comparisons, because a brand a model knows perfectly well can still lose every comparison.
Cited sources are grouped by host, so “we are missing from the answer” resolves into something you can act on: a review marketplace you have no profile on, a roundup that left you out, or a competitor's comparison page doing the work of three.
Launch (Free) tracks Gemini only, with a one-time grant of answer credits and weekly automatic tracking. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are on Growth and Scale. Card payments are temporarily disabled while payment-provider onboarding completes, so every account currently runs on Launch — the pricing page lists what each plan includes.
What you can actually do
Concrete steps, each one checkable with a free tool or explained in the glossary.
Free tools for this industry
No account, no card — results in the browser.
Related terms
Keep reading
The reference sets behind this page.