How to get your app cited by AI search
A growing share of the people asking for the best tool for a job never reach a search results page at all. Here is what those answers are built from.
- Written by
- SpacerrApps
- Published
- Reading time
- 4 min read
Somebody who wants a tool used to search, scan ten blue links and click two. A growing number of them now ask an assistant instead, read one paragraph, and click nothing at all.
That answer was assembled from pages. Which pages, and how you get onto them, is a different job to ranking first.
What an answer engine is actually reading
Three things, in roughly this order of usefulness to it.
Pages that describe products in prose. Directory listings, comparison articles, roundups. A paragraph saying what a tool does, who it is for and what it costs is directly usable in an answer. A landing page saying "Productivity, reimagined" is not.
Pages that name several products together. A model answering "best X for Y" is looking for a page that already made that comparison. This is why being in somebody else's roundup is worth more than any amount of writing on your own site.
Structured, machine-readable statements. JSON-LD describing your product, and increasingly a /llms.txt file describing your site in markdown.
Your own homepage is the least useful of the three, because every homepage claims to be the best and a model has no reason to prefer yours.
Why listings beat your own site here
An answer engine is doing what a careful person does: preferring a third party over the vendor.
That means the highest-leverage move is to exist, in prose, on pages you do not own. Which is exactly what a directory listing is, as long as the listing is a real page rather than a tile in a grid. The distinction matters more here than it does for ordinary SEO, and it is the whole of do directory submissions still work.
Six things to change this week
1. Rewrite your description as a sentence that answers a question. "Turns a recorded meeting into a summary and a task list, for teams using Slack and Linear. Free for five meetings a month." Category, input, output, integrations, price. Every one of those is a phrase somebody asks about. The longer version is in how to write an app description.
2. State what you do not do. A model quoting a limitation alongside a recommendation is a model that trusts the source. Vagueness is what gets a page left out.
3. Put the price in text. Not in an image, not behind a toggle, not as "contact us". An answer that cannot state the price usually names a competitor that could.
4. Get listed where the listing is written. Ten directories that publish an article per product beat sixty that publish a tile. The ranked set is in the best directories to submit your app.
5. Add SoftwareApplication JSON-LD to your own product page. Name, category, operating system, offers with a real price. It costs twenty minutes and it is the one machine-readable claim you fully control.
6. Serve a /llms.txt. A plain markdown file at the root of your domain saying what the site is, what the product does, and where the important pages are. It is a young convention, it is cheap, and the crawlers that matter here read it.
What does not work
| Not this | Why |
|---|---|
| Keyword stuffing your homepage | These systems read meaning, not density |
| Blocking AI crawlers, then hoping to be cited | You cannot be quoted from a page nobody read |
| Buying "GEO" packages | Currently the same link farms with a new name |
| Waiting to see if it lasts | The pages take months to be picked up |
That second one is worth pausing on. A lot of sites added blanket disallows for AI crawlers in the last two years. If your distribution depends on being recommended, that setting is now working against you. Check your robots.txt before you do anything else on this list.
How to tell whether it is working
Ask the assistants directly, in the words a buyer would use. "What is the best tool for [the job your product does]?" Then ask for sources.
Do it once a month and write down which pages get cited. Those pages are your real competitors for this channel, and getting onto them, as a listing or a mention, is the whole strategy.
Start with a page that reads well
The single most useful asset here is a page that is not yours, written in plain prose, saying what your product does.
Submit your app and it gets one: a directory page and a full write-up, drafted from what you tell us and read by a person before it goes live. Both are free, both stay online, and this site publishes a /llms.txt listing every one of them.