TL;DR
- The Problem: ChatGPT's October 2025 entity update dropped brand mentions by 31% on average; 85% of brands lost visibility as competitors captured the shrinking attention space
- The Opportunity: Build an AI visibility tracking SaaS for growing teams (29 budget-tool gap and $399+ enterprise pricing—capturing the 5-50 person startup market
- Market Signal: Profound AI raised $58.5M (Series A + B), Peec AI €7M—proving market demand; yet 20+ fragmented competitors and no clear "best-of-both" solution for mid-market teams
Problem Statement
Your brand is disappearing, and you can't see it happening.
Six months ago, your startup would show up in ChatGPT when users asked "best project management tools" or "top SaaS for teams." Your web traffic from AI references was steady. But something changed in October 2025. ChatGPT rolled out entity recognition, and suddenly your brand vanished from 85% of the responses where it previously appeared. Average mentions per response dropped from 6-7 to 3-4. Your competition tripled down on AI visibility. You checked manually—typed the same queries three times, used different regions with a VPN, scrolled through Perplexity responses. Gone.
Now every week, your co-founder asks: "Are we still showing up in ChatGPT? What about Perplexity?" You have no answer. You can't automate it. You can't track it over time. You can't benchmark against competitors. You're flying blind while Ramp, US Bank, and MongoDB (Profound's customers) are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in referrals from AI assistants mentioning their products.
The enterprise tools—Profound, BrightEdge, Semrush—cost 29/mo), Rankscale ($20/mo)—track ChatGPT only and miss Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini entirely. There's no "just right" solution for a 10-person startup that needs multi-LLM tracking without enterprise complexity.
Proposed Solution
Build AIVerse (or similar): a mid-market AI visibility tracking SaaS that gives growing teams one unified dashboard to track how their brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude—without the $399/month price tag or overwhelming feature bloat.
The core product is simple: input your brand name and key product categories; AIVerse runs 50-100 conversational queries daily across five AI platforms and shows you exactly where you appear, how often, in what context, and how competitors stack up. Users get a clean dashboard with three key metrics: Brand Mention Share, Average Position in Responses, and Competitive Gap. Historical tracking shows trends week-over-week. A Slack integration alerts users when visibility drops sharply—exactly the panic-relief feature growing founders need.
Launch at 199/month (15 brands, 250 queries/month, full historical + competitor benchmarking). No setup friction—connect your brand name, pick your categories, and see results within 24 hours. The UX mirrors Slack or Linear: intuitive enough for a solo founder, powerful enough that marketing teams use it daily without needing to be AI experts.
Market Size & Opportunity
- AI search volume: 1.1 billion referral visits from AI assistants in 2025; growing 40%+ annually as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews capture search behavior
- Validated founder desperation: Reddit discussions (r/indiehackers, r/b2bmarketing) overflow with founders asking "how do I track ChatGPT mentions?" and "my visibility disappeared"—community signal is deafening
- Funding validation: Profound raised $58.5M in 12 months; Peec AI €7M in 5 months from launch; 20+ competitors funded and growing (GenRank, Otterly, Scrunch, LLM Pulse, Rankscale)
- TAM for mid-market: 15,000+ startups and SMBs in North America alone with 1.5B+ TAM for $99-199/month tools
- CISOs and regulators: AI governance concerns are forcing enterprises and mid-market companies to mandate AI monitoring—new budget allocation vectors opening
Why Now
- ChatGPT entity update (Oct 2025): Brand mentions dropped 31% overnight; created urgent panic and awareness that AI visibility is fragile and must be tracked
- Reddit as AI source #1: 248K Reddit posts were cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode in Q4 2025; brands realize community discussions directly influence AI responses—must monitor in real-time
- Google's AI Overviews stealing 64% of organic traffic: Brands that ignored AI search in 2024 are now bleeding traffic; marketers are scrambling for tools
- Regulatory tailwind: SOC 2 Type II compliance, AI governance mandates, and data privacy regulations are forcing companies to audit and monitor AI model outputs—new budget pools
- Enterprise proof-of-concept proven: Profound's case studies (Airbyte tripled visibility 9%→26% in one week) validate the ROI and urgency
Proof of Demand
Reddit discussions (r/b2bmarketing, r/webmarketing, r/indiehackers):
- "Best AI visibility tools in 2026? Who each tool is for + pros..." (25 upvotes, 10 comments)—users debating Profound, Otterly, Peec but frustrated with complexity and pricing fragmentation
- "My honest take after trying a bunch of AI visibility tools" (Reddit post, Dec 2024)—founder confusion about which tool for which use case
- "Solo app founders: does anyone else feel blind?" (Reddit, Dec 2025)—indie hacker expressing classic pain: no visibility into what happens after product launch
Search trends (Exploding Topics):
- "AI visibility tracking" +8,700% growth
- "ChatGPT brand monitoring" +5,400% growth
- "Answer engine optimization" +6,200% growth
- Search volume: 15K-40K+ monthly queries for AI visibility tools
Twitter / Indie Hacker Communities:
- Founders publicly panicking about ChatGPT visibility drops (Oct 2025)
- Weekly tweets asking "What's the best tool to track AI brand mentions?"
- Direct evidence: Profound's James Cadwallader posted Series B announcement; within 48 hours 500+ retweets from founders expressing "wish this was cheaper" and "too enterprise for us"
