One of her clients went from 30 signups a day to 98. In two months. With zero paid ads.
That client is Quistley, an AI quiz generator. The person behind the growth is Tanya, who sold her own bootstrapped SaaS for six figures and now runs rankingonai.com, an agency doing SEO and AI visibility for companies like cal.com and Suno.
Her whole thing is getting your SaaS recommended by ChatGPT and Claude. And here's why that matters: when an AI tells you to use a tool, you trust it. It feels like a recommendation from a friend.
The numbers back it up. Ahrefs found that when AI recommends them, that click converts 17 times higher than a normal Google click.
I sat down with Tanya on the Profitable Founder Podcast. Here's the full six-step playbook.
Why bootstrap founders should care about AI visibility
SEO compounds. You start now, the results stack, and it barely costs you anything.
Paid media is the opposite. The second you stop paying, the benefit disappears. SEO and AI visibility keep running for much longer, and they hand you the best profit margins. (For a bootstrapper, that's the whole game.)
Then there's the conversion angle. Across every SaaS Tanya works with, clicks coming from AI convert at insane rates. That 17x number from Ahrefs isn't a fluke. It's what an AI recommendation does.
And one more thing she made clear: for AI visibility, your domain rating doesn't matter. She's seen blogs with a DR of 3 or 5, almost no content, get picked up by ChatGPT in hours.
The one type of content that gets you cited
Informational content is dead. If someone asks "what is an AI proofreader," the LLM just answers. No click, no link, no visit to your site.
What still works is bottom of funnel content. That's the stuff people search when they already want to buy.
→ "best SEO tools"
→ "Ahrefs versus Semrush"
→ "SEO tool buying guide"
Tanya says there's a 63% overlap between ChatGPT citations and Google's first page. So good SEO is good AI visibility. The overlap lives entirely in bottom of funnel content. Comparisons and listicles. Two birds, one stone.
Where to publish: your own blog plus everyone else's
Start with your own CMS. Tanya's pick for day one is Ghost. It's free to start, then around $15 a month, and it'll host your blog on blog.yourdomain.com.
Why your own blog first? Because every LLM checks your website before anything else. If someone asks "what is your company doing," you want to be the one controlling that narrative, not a competitor.
Then comes digital PR. Get yourself onto other people's listicles. The trick to finding them is almost too simple.
→ Ask ChatGPT for the best tools in your industry using a competitor's name
→ Scroll down, click "sources"
→ You'll see the 10 to 20 listicles it pulled from (mostly competitor content)
→ Copy them into a Google Sheet with the URLs
→ Email each one: "Hey, I saw your listicle, want to include my tool?"
Free response rates run 3 to 7%. Some people want money (a backlink is commonly around $150). But if your own listicle ranks, you have leverage: "I'll put you at number two if you put me at number two." It's not weird. It's standard.
For affiliate bloggers, give them your premium tier free for a year. Some of these bloggers do a million a year with a team of five. Treat them like the business owners they are. This is the same kind of relationship-driven distribution I see work in the best SaaS founder communities, where people trade reach instead of cash.
I've been on the affiliate side myself. When a SaaS wanted higher placement on my list, I'd just ask for a bigger commission. Bump me from 30% to 40% and you go to the top. No prepayment, no risk.
Which LLM should you actually optimize for
Google AI Overview is non-negotiable. It still drives the most clicks and it actually tracks them with real blue links.
After that, ChatGPT. It accounts for more than 70% of all LLM-driven traffic. If you're B2C, that's your answer, because a huge share of people use ChatGPT free and never touch Claude.
→ Targeting developers or product managers? They lean Claude.
→ Targeting the Twitter crowd? Grok, though its traffic is shockingly small.
→ Not sure? Default to ChatGPT.
One reality check on tracking: the AI clickthrough rate is about 1%. In Google Analytics you'll see chatgpt.com and Claude as sources. Take that number and multiply by 100 to guess how often you're really getting recommended. A link has to appear, then someone has to click it, and most of the time neither happens.
The day-one playbook with no money
This is the step-by-step Tanya gives a founder starting from zero.
→ Set up a CMS (Ghost, cheapest option)
→ Paste your landing page into Claude, ask for the 5-10 best bottom of funnel keywords
→ Ask Claude to turn those into AI visibility prompts plus a content brief for each
→ Write and publish the content (a balance of human and AI works best)
→ Index it through Google Search Console
→ Add basic SEO: meta titles, descriptions, FAQ schema, an author name, bio and photo
That author bio matters more than you'd think. Google and the LLMs reward trust signals, what they call EAT. And ChatGPT in particular loves authority arguments, so brag. Name the big clients you've worked with. Put the logos in as text, not just images, because images don't get picked up as well.
One myth she killed: you do not need to create markdown files or an llms.txt for everything. It's been debunked many times. It doesn't hurt, it's just a waste of your time.
Finally, set up tracking through Google Analytics. You want to know how many signups and how many paying conversions come from each article. SEOGets is her favorite free tool for checking clicks and impressions, because the Google Search Console dashboard, in her words, is not a vibe.
Quick wins that pay off in 72 hours
SEO takes months. AI visibility can hit in days. Tanya has seen a client listicle show up as a top-rated ChatGPT source within 12 hours.
I did this myself recently. I posted a listicle on Medium and one on LinkedIn, ranked fast on Google, and got quoted in AI Overview within 72 hours. Works great in non-competitive niches. If you want to understand the niching side of this, here's how I think about choosing a small enough lane to build a micro SaaS people can actually find.
Her current favorite quick win is YouTube. Take your keyword list, make a video (AI-generated is fine), and build a thumbnail with your logo big, your main keyword, and your company name. Google is surfacing way more video right now, sourced from YouTube, and most founders have made none.
Other sources worth chasing:
→ Wikipedia (the gold standard for trust, harder to get on)
→ G2 and Capterra for reviews that ChatGPT pulls
→ Reddit for long-tail, niche questions
→ LinkedIn, but create an "article," not a "post," so you get a meta title and longer copy
And add images everywhere. Product screenshots, dashboards, GIFs, a quick walkthrough. People skim. Give them something to look at.
The mistake engineers keep making
Tanya's biggest warning: technical SEO is only one piece. Founders with engineering brains nail crawlability and then forget content strategy entirely.
You can have 500 programmatic pages and a blazing fast site, but with no internal linking and no real backlinks, you go nowhere.
Internal linking builds topical authority. If you have 500 articles about tennis, Google decides you're the tennis expert and surfaces you. Write one article about green tea and it counts for nothing.
Her manual method that works: paste your whole CMS into Claude, ask for topical clusters and internal linking suggestions, export to a sheet with source links, target links and anchor text, then have an assistant make the changes. (One caveat she added on architecture: avoid fully vibe-coded sites. LLMs struggle to crawl heavy dynamic content. Check with a Chrome extension like AI Eyes. If it shows blank, the AI sees nothing.)
I interview founders like this every week → Watch the Podcast
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Tanya from rankingonai.com?
Tanya built and sold a bootstrapped SaaS for six figures, then founded rankingonai.com, an agency that does SEO and AI visibility for SaaS companies only. Clients include Suno, cal.com, and several YC-backed startups, most having raised between $10 and $100 million, alongside bootstrapped founders.
What results can you expect from AI visibility work?
One client, Quistley (an AI quiz generator), tripled user acquisition in two months. Daily average signups went from 30 to 98, entirely through SEO pipelines and no paid ads. Another client, Edit GPT, now gets around 70% of its traffic from its blog.
How does a tiny SaaS outrank a giant competitor?
Edit GPT shows up right next to Grammarly when you search "best AI proofreader," despite Grammarly raising roughly a billion dollars and Edit GPT never fundraising. The only reason it's possible is strong SEO and AI visibility pipelines. Size of competitor stops mattering when your content wins.
The lesson is simple: start publishing bottom of funnel content today, control your own narrative, and let an AI recommend you to a customer who already trusts it.
