Show HN: I built a tool to make AI recommend you (and I'm conflicted about it)
firstclick.so
The answer, apparently, is chaos. And maybe opportunity?
I built FirstClick because I noticed something strange. My previous startup was getting zero traffic from AI assistants, but our competitor (objectively worse product, sorry not sorry) was getting mentioned by Claude and Perplexity constantly.
It drove me crazy. So I reverse engineered why. Turns out there's a whole new game being played and most founders don't even know it exists yet.
FirstClick does three things 1. Writes BOFU comparison content automatically ("X vs Y", "Best alternatives to Z") 2. Optimizes it specifically for AI citation, not just Google 3. Tracks when/if AI models actually recommend you
The uncomfortable part is that I'm essentially helping companies game AI search results. Same way SEO gamed Google for 20 years. Is this... good? Bad? Inevitable?
I go back and forth honestly. Part of me thinks this is just the new reality founders need to adapt to. Part of me wonders if we're all just training AI on increasingly optimized marketing content until nothing means anything anymore.
Anyway, it works pretty well. Happy to answer questions about how AI models decide what to recommend, the technical implementation, or why I probably should have just become a photographer.