Your Friends Have All Signed Up. Now What? A Findability Checklist for Builders

Once your friends have all signed up, the next users have to find you on their own, and that mostly happens through Google and AI assistants. This checklist covers the technical side of being findable, in the order I'd do it. I'm Reza from the Serpair team, and this is the list we'd have wanted after our own launch. Some context first. Serpair started because the team launched a startup and Google didn't rank it. Most founders hit some version of that wall, and YC's Ankit Gupta describes the fix well in How To Get Your First Users: "Finding your first users is more of a search problem than a persuasion problem." So treat findability like any other bug and work through it. If someone hears about your product and searches its name, you should come up first. Plenty of new products don't, especially when the name is a common word or another company already uses it. Check it: Search your product name in a private window. Then search the name plus your category, like "acme invoicing". Verify your site in Google Search Console and use URL Inspection on your home page to confirm it's indexed. Search your name in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and see what they think you are. Fix it: Put the name and the category together in your home page title and first heading. "Acme: invoicing for freelancers" beats "Acme" on its own. Use exactly the same name everywhere: site, social profiles, launch listings and GitHub. Tell Google your preferred site name with WebSite structured data on the home page. Google says this markup is "most important" if you want to state a preference, and you can add an alternateName as a fallback (Google docs). <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "WebSite", "name": "Acme", "alternateName": ["Acme Invoicing", "acme.com"], "url": "https://acme.com/" } </script> Organization markup helps Google "disambiguate your organization in search results," which matters when other things share your name (Google docs). The sameAs property links your official profiles so the pieces connect. <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "name": "Acme", "url": "https://acme.com", "logo": "https://acme.com/logo.png", "description": "Invoicing for freelancers.", "sameAs": [ "https://x.com/acmehq", "https://github.com/acmehq", "https://www.linkedin.com/company/acmehq" ] } </script> Check every sameAs URL by hand. A typo in a handle points Google at someone else. Now the honest part. Schema is not a shortcut to AI citations. Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD and found no meaningful lift in citations from Google AI Mode or ChatGPT. Those pages were already heavily cited, so the result says less about brand-new sites. Google also says there's "no special schema.org structured data" needed for its AI features, and that structured data should match the visible text (Google docs). Add schema so Google understands who you are, then put the facts that matter in plain visible text. AI assistants can only cite pages their crawlers can reach. Each company documents its own bots: OAI-SearchBot powers ChatGPT search. OpenAI says sites that opt out "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI docs). GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler. It's a separate setting, so you can block training and still allow search. PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in Perplexity results (Perplexity docs). Googlebot covers Google Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google says robots.txt rules for Googlebot are the control for those features (Google docs). A minimal robots.txt that welcomes search crawlers: User-agent: * Allow: / User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Allow: / User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: / Sitemap: https://acme.com/sitemap.xml Then check your CDN or firewall, because robots.txt isn't the only gate. Google lists CDN and hosting settings as something to check, and Perplexity's docs include rules for allowing its bots through Cloudflare and AWS WAF. A quick smoke test from your terminal, using a shortened version of the user agent OpenAI documents: curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" \ -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot)" \ https://acme.com/ A 403 or a challenge page means something is blocking the bot. Some firewalls also check the real IP ranges, which OpenAI and Perplexity publish, so treat a 200 here as a good sign rather than proof. Crawlable isn't the same as useful. AI search tools often run several related searches for one question. Google calls this "query fan-out." Then they pull passages from pages that answer a specific part of the question clearly. Pick the exact problem your product solves, in your users' words. Look at how they describe it on Reddit, Hacker News or in support emails. Write one page that answers it in the first two or three sentences, then explains the details. Keep the important content in HTML text, not only in images, videos or client-side widgets. Add a short FAQ with the follow-up questions people actually ask. AI answers lean on sources the web already trusts. Pew found that Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit were the three most cited sources in Google's AI summaries. You can't buy your way into those, but you can show up honestly: List your product on relevant directories and launch sites with the same name and one-line description. Answer real questions in communities where your users ask them, and mention your product only when it actually helps. Write comparison or "how to" posts on platforms like this one, with a link back to your site. In GA4 or your analytics tool, look for referrers like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. Some AI visits arrive with no referrer and land in direct traffic, so the count is a floor. In Search Console, watch impressions for your brand name and your problem queries. Re-ask the same prompts every couple of weeks. SparkToro found that AI tools give the same list of brands less than 1 in 100 times. Track how often you appear across many runs, not where you rank in a single answer. If you'd rather not do step 6 by hand, Serpair tracks your Google rankings and whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini mention you, then turns it into a short list of fixes. It's free to start. Your friends got you to launch. This checklist helps the next people find you.