Get your app recommended by AI (AI SEO)

When someone asks an AI "what's the best app for [thing your app does]?", does your app come up? If not, this is how you find out what the bots already know about you, why you're not getting recommended, and the exact moves to fix it.

Why it's a 3-step process: Step 1 asks the bot for an unbiased ranking, you don't mention your app at all, so there's no bias in the answer. Only then (Step 2) do you reveal it's yours and ask why it didn't show up. Step 3 turns the diagnosis into an action plan. Do them in order, in the same chat.

Run it in all four: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity each pull from different sources, so each one tells you something different. Repeat the whole process in each.

Step 1 — Get the unbiased ranking

Open a fresh chat and ask this without ever mentioning your app. You want the honest answer a real user would get.

I'm looking for the best app for [QUERY — the exact thing a user would ask, e.g. "tracking minor league baseball prospects"].

What do you recommend, and why? Rank your top options best-first, and for each one tell me why you're recommending it (ratings, reviews, what people say about it, where you've seen it mentioned).

Note whether your app shows up at all, where it ranks, and, most importantly, why the bot recommends the ones it does. Those reasons are your scoreboard.

Step 2 — Find out why your app didn't show up

In the same chat, now reveal your app and paste its link. The link matters, it lets the bot pull in your store listing or site.

The app I'm actually building is [APP]. It [WHAT IT DOES]. Here's its listing: [URL].

It didn't come up (or ranked low) when I asked for the best app for [QUERY]. Be blunt — why not? What do you and the wider internet currently know, or not know, about [APP]? What signals are the apps you recommended sending that mine isn't?

This tells you exactly what's missing, usually some mix of reviews, mentions, content, and clear positioning around that query.

Step 3 — Get the exact action plan

Still in the same chat:

If you were the founder of [APP], what exact actions would you take so that [APP] gets recommended when someone asks for the best app for [QUERY]?

Be specific and concrete. For each action, tell me what to do, where, and why it would move the needle — App Store / Play Store ratings and reviews, blog posts, Reddit threads, X/Twitter posts, backlinks, Product Hunt, directories, anything that signals to AI that my app is worth recommending. Rank the actions by impact-to-effort so I know what to do first.

Then go do the top items. Re-run Step 1 in a few weeks to see if the rankings moved.

How to use it

1. Fill in the placeholders: [APP] (your app's name), [WHAT IT DOES] (one line on what it does and who it's for), [QUERY] (the exact phrase a real user would type, not your app name), and [URL] (your store listing or website).
2. Run all three steps in order, in one chat. The no-bias Step 1 only works if you haven't mentioned your app yet.
3. Repeat in ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity. Different sources, different answers.
4. Act on the plan, then re-test in a few weeks. The goal: trust signals (ratings, reviews, blogs, Reddit, tweets) that tell the bots your app is worth recommending.