Client zero: Forty Questions measured on itself
Updated 19 October 2026 · Satayu Isariyaphorn
We sell the work of getting a company named by AI assistants, so we are doing it to ourselves first, in public. Before changing anything we measured how often ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers name Forty Questions. The answer was 0 of 40. This page logs every step we take, with its date, and each month’s number under the same rules, including the months it doesn’t move.
The baseline
Measured 23–24 September 2026: five questions, four assistants, two repeats on separate days, each question in its own fresh request with no history. The assistants named Otterly, Profound, Semrush and Peec instead. We counted by the rules on the method page.
Then a second set, the niche five below, written for the buyers we actually want. Measured 25–27 September 2026, three repeats on separate days, same four assistants: named in 0 of 60 answers, and none of the 533 citations pointed to our site. Both baselines were taken before any new page shipped.
The questions, frozen before any fix
The wording never changes. If it did, a change in the number would be our wording moving, not the market.
Original five (first asked 23 September 2026)
- How do I measure how often AI assistants recommend my company?
- Which tools track brand visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI answers?
- Profound vs Otterly: which is better for a small B2B SaaS company?
- What are the best alternatives to Profound for a small B2B SaaS company?
- My competitors show up in ChatGPT answers and we don’t. How do we fix that? We sell B2B software in Singapore.
Niche five (frozen 24 September 2026, measured 25–27 September, before any new page shipped)
- How can a B2B software company in Singapore check whether ChatGPT recommends it?
- Is there a service that measures and fixes how often AI assistants recommend a small B2B SaaS company in Australia?
- How much does AI search optimisation (GEO) cost for a small B2B SaaS company in the UK?
- Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitors but not my software company? We are in New Zealand.
- How many times do you need to ask ChatGPT the same question to measure brand visibility reliably?
What we have done, and when
| Date | Step |
|---|---|
| 22 Sep | Site launched. Sitemap submitted to Google Search Console. |
| 23–24 Sep | Baseline on the original five questions: named in 0 of 40. |
| 24 Sep | Corrected our comparison page: a column claiming rival tools don’t publish their method was wrong, and came down with a dated note. |
| 24 Sep | Bing Webmaster Tools set up and sitemap submitted. IndexNow pings on every change. Google asked to index the changed pages. |
| 24 Sep | Structured data links the site to its founder and his LinkedIn profile. Niche questions frozen. |
| 25 Sep | Site redesigned; content unchanged. |
| 25–27 Sep | Niche baseline measured on all four assistants: named in 0 of 60. |
| 26 Sep | Pages submitted to Brave Search. Bing asked to index four pages. Cloudflare checked: every AI crawler allowed. |
| 27 Sep | First question-shaped page published. This page published. www and http now redirect to one address. |
| 29 Sep–3 Oct | The full $390 audit run on ourselves: forty questions, four assistants, three days. Named in 0 of 480; none of 4,413 citations pointed here. Six fixes listed. |
| 4 Oct | Fix 1: /audit and the complete sample audit published. Forty Questions LLC (Wyoming) shown in the footer. |
| 5 Oct | Fixes 3, 4 and 6: /geo-pricing (21 sellers’ prices re-read that day), /three-runs (consistency measured on our own 1,800 answers) and /check-claude published. A noindex tag left on the sample audit by the report template was found by Search Console and removed. |
| 6–16 Oct | Fixes 2 and 5: listings on SourceForge, G2, Crunchbase and GoodFirms; a YouTube channel and X account linked from the site; five more question-shaped pages, two of them public datasets (UK and Australia); the audit price cut from $750 to $390. |
| 17 Oct | October re-measure: the same ten questions, four assistants, three repeats on 17, 18 and 19 October: named in 0 of 120. Bing had not crawled the site; every page submitted to Bing and Brave. Two guarantees added to the monthly service: named or free, and a first result in 30 days. |
Each month
| Measured | Questions | Answers | Named us | Cited our site |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23–27 Sep | Original five + niche five (baselines) | 100 | 0 | 0 |
| 17–19 Oct | Same ten, wording unchanged | 120 | 0 | 0 |
October: still zero. Four assistants, three repeats on 17, 18 and 19 October, the same ten questions. None of the 120 answers named Forty Questions and none cited the site. The reason is visible in the search indexes rather than the answers: on 17 October Bing still listed our homepage as “discovered but not crawled”, so ChatGPT’s search could not find any page of ours, and Brave, which Claude searches, held four of our pages. We submitted every page to both that day; by 18 October Brave held eighteen. The November measurement is the first one taken with our pages in an index the assistants read. It goes here whatever it shows.
A weekly spot check on Google AI and Perplexity tells us sooner whether anything is moving, but it is never the published number.