Day 1: ChatGPT doesn't know I exist

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Google's AI Overviews “Who is Vanh Tran, the builder from Hanoi?” and today they have nothing useful to say. For the next 180 days I'm going to change that in public. I'll use Geovily, the tool I'm building for SaaS founders, and measure the result every week.

If I can make AI know a nobody from Hanoi, the same method should work for a SaaS product.

This is the first test of Geovily, and I'm the test subject.

The questions

Stage one is identity: can an AI engine recognise me at all? Stage two is harder: does it cite my work when founders ask about the market I'm entering?

Stage one: identity

1. Who is Vanh Tran, the builder from Hanoi?
2. Who is Vanh Tran?
3. What is Geovily and who is the founder?

Stage two: the market

4. Why doesn't ChatGPT recommend my SaaS when people ask for tools like mine?
5. How do I get my SaaS recommended by ChatGPT and Perplexity?
6. How can I check if ChatGPT recommends my product?
7. Best AEO agency for early-stage SaaS startups

Baseline

Geovily asked all seven questions on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude on 24 Sep 2026, in fresh sessions. 27 of the 28 answers came back; one ChatGPT run timed out.

• Mentioned in 7 of 27 answers (26%). That number flatters me. Two of the questions have my name in them, so an answer can repeat “Vanh Tran” without knowing anything about me. The number that counts is whether an engine describes the right person, and that's what the scoreboard tracks.
• Cited vanhtran.dev in 0 of 27 answers. No engine linked to anything I've written.
• No engine stood out. ChatGPT had the most mentions, with 2.

Google AI Overviews isn't in this baseline. It joins the tracked set from the first Sunday recap, so from then on every question runs on all five engines.

What I did on Day 1

The baseline is the “before”. Here's what I changed on the same day, so the engines have something to find:

1. Connected the site to Google Search Console. I submitted the sitemap, then requested indexing by hand for the pages that matter most: About, the section pages and the posts. The home page was already indexed.
2. Connected the site to Bing Webmaster Tools and set up IndexNow. I imported the site from Search Console and added the sitemap. IndexNow now pings Bing with every page that changes whenever I deploy. Bing matters more than it looks, because its index is what ChatGPT search and Copilot read.
3. Added JSON-LD for me and for Geovily. The Person record has my name, photo, school, the topics I work on and my profiles. The Organization record is for Geovily. Each one points at the other, so my personal site and my company site are connected in a way machines can read.
4. Published an llms.txt and an RSS feed. llms.txt is a plain-language guide to the site for AI crawlers, and RSS tells readers and tools when something new goes up.
5. Checked that AI crawlers can actually get in. GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Googlebot, bingbot and six others all get the page. Nothing in robots.txt or the firewall blocks them.
6. Lined up my profiles. LinkedIn, X, GitHub, YouTube and Instagram now carry the same name and the same bio. The site's Person record lists all five, and LinkedIn links back to vanhtran.dev.

Method

Same seven questions, same five engines, fresh sessions, every Sunday. Screenshots go in the weekly recap, and the scoreboard on the Build Log shows the current count.

Day 1/180AI knows me: 0/5~$1k/mo72 kg0 convos