I sell AI visibility. Am I selling hot air?

Ask an AI which cola to buy. It says Coca-Cola.

It doesn't need your website for that. Or your schema markup, or a fix kit, or an agency. Coca-Cola was the answer to that question long before AI existed. It will be the answer after.

Now ask it for a botox clinic in Utrecht. Utrecht has around 55. When we asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok, they named 12 between them.

The other 43 aren't ranked lower. They're just not there.

There is no page two

Wanting to be named isn't new. Every shop sign is the same wish. Every business card. When someone needs this, let them think of me.

Google gave that wish ten blue links, then ten more, then ten more. Hardly anyone clicked through to page two, but it was there. Everyone was somewhere.

An AI answer has room for five names. Maybe ten. Then it stops.

We saw it in our own data. On 28 September we looked at a month of real Foreground scans. 44 of 73 scored 0. Apple, ASML and national newspapers scored between 57 and 100. Every small business scored between 0 and 12.

Meanwhile every business in the world wants to be in that handful of names. Every plumber, every hotel, every software tool. Mine too.

Most won't make it. That's not the AI being unfair. That's what an answer is. Short.

Maybe that's even okay. Most of us were never on page one of Google either. We could just pretend we were.

Guilty as charged

So an industry grew up to sell you a way in. Tools start around $29 a month. The enterprise ones don't show a price. A serious agency with a real team? I don't know. Five thousand a month. Ten. A hundred.

I'm part of that industry. Foreground costs $49 or $129 a month. So the question is fair, and I've asked it myself more than once.

Am I selling hot air?

Partly, the whole market is. Anyone who promises you'll be recommended by ChatGPT is promising something they don't control. Nobody controls what an AI says next week. Not the tool, not the agency. The models get updated and the answer moves.

So I don't promise it. Foreground counts. It asks the questions your customers ask, the same way every time, and shows you who gets named instead of you and which pages the AI read before it decided. That's a measurement. A thermometer doesn't cure a fever. It tells you if you have one.

The fix is where I'm honest about not knowing. We built a fix kit: what to change, written from your own site, every claim fact-checked. Does it move the number? I don't know yet. I'm testing it on Foreground itself. In every niche I track, it's still named in 0 of 12 answers.

Until that changes, I don't claim the fix kit works.

Can you move it at all?

With money, yes. The slow way.

Coca-Cola isn't named because of a meta tag. It's named because it has been everywhere for over a century. Shops, films, every list anyone ever wrote. Spend enough to be everywhere and AI will notice. That's not AI visibility. That's being big.

For everyone else, I've seen one real opening. Narrow questions.

Nobody asks AI for "a hotel." They ask for a quiet boutique hotel for a couple, in the Old City. Those questions have short lists, and small businesses win them. In 10 of the 11 niches we tested, at least 3 of the top 5 names were independents.

And once, we saw how it happens. A small hotel in Chiang Mai had been named in 0 of 47 answers. Then ChatGPT named it twice. Both times it cited the same review, on a Thailand travel blog that ChatGPT reads more than any other site for that question.

One page. One mention.

That's not a strategy you can buy at scale. It's a crack in the wall. But it's real.

Who I am in this

I build apps. That's the honest version of my job.

When one is done, I start the next one. A remote-job board. A phrase app for expats. A course marketplace. A crypto bot I switched off. A PDF tool that doesn't exist anymore. Now this.

The building I'm good at. Stripe works. The paywalls work. The checkout works: the first person to pay for Foreground was me, testing it.

What I'm not good at is the thing this whole industry is about. Getting noticed.

I see the joke. I built a tool that tells you whether anyone mentions you. For my own business, it says no.

Why build it then

Because I'd rather know than guess.

Most of this market is promises. "Get recommended by ChatGPT." "Rank first in AI." I can't keep promises like that, so I don't make them.

What I can tell you is one true thing. When your customer asks AI, are you in the answer? If not, who is? And what did the AI read before it decided?

Maybe that's worth $49 a month to you. Maybe it isn't. Either way, you'll know where you stand.

Everyone wants to be named. Almost nobody is. I'd rather count than pretend.

— Marc. Run a free scan: one niche, 12 answers, no credit card.