Hey there,
I’m just back from the UK padel convention, where I announced the winners on BidPadel. The day before it, I played at a padel meetup for the tech, AI and software crowd, the booking platform companies, in my branded hoodie:
Every one of those companies wants the same thing now: to be the name AI gives when someone asks which one to use. So my Padel AI Visibility Index got real interest, and I started helping padel businesses get cited more. Which brings me to what I’ve been building.
Back in 2012 I started ranking my online businesses in Google. The first was a Shopify store selling iPhone panorama prints, which I later sold on Empire Flippers. In 2013 I put what I’d learned into building and then selling a small SEO agency. In 2017 I ranked FunnelEngine.com top for “clickfunnels.com”, then got my personal site top for “how to buy altcoins” for six months during that crypto boom.
AI search feels a lot like 2012 again. People now ask ChatGPT where to hire skis or which padel club is best, and most businesses have no idea what to do about it. Some on-page fixes and new content get you a long way. When it gets competitive, the AI names the businesses other sites talk about, not the ones with the best domain rating.
Domain rating, the score SEOs obsessed over for a decade, barely matters to AI. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found that mentions of a brand across the web were about twice as strongly linked to showing up in Google’s AI Overviews as domain rating, and three times as strongly as backlinks. ChatGPT and Perplexity seem to care even less about authority. Small sites get cited all the time if they answer the question clearly.
So, funnily enough, I’m back to building niche sites, something I’ve not done since my Website Investing podcast days. I’m building out my own site in every niche we go after, and looking to buy them on places like Flippa too. BidPadel is already a well-known name in padel, and AI names it too. Snowbistro has been around since 2012 and has history with the UK ski trade. A focused site that answers real buyer questions, and that the industry actually talks about, doesn’t need years of link building to get cited.
Padel, ski and everything else I’m doing now sits under one banner: Cited
It’s a productized service (I used to rank top in Google for that term too!) that gets brands mentioned in AI answers. I’m running it with Maciej again, from LetterOperators fame, who’s handling the tech and operations side. We’ve built our own app to track mentions, plus other tools we use internally.
Every Monday you get a report on where AI names you and who it names instead. Every week we send you a new guide or page for your site plus a paste-ready fix. On the bigger plan we also get you cited on the sites AI already reads.
There are two plans, Visible at $495 a month and Shortlisted at $995. No setup fee, no contract, no calls.
Here’s the launch offer: If you’ve ever bought anything from me, your first 30 days on Visible are free. Just reply to this email and I’ll set it up.
Not bought from me before? Run your free audit and we’ll tell you what AI says about your business right now, and who it names instead.
Cheers!
Richard
PS. I guess I contradicted myself when I said 2026 was my last year in business! To be honest I missed working with Maciej, and it’s nice to have found something that fits us both, me with SEO and him building the app that runs it. We could release it as a SaaS one day, but I think that game is going to zero. It’s better to protect your IP by wrapping it up in a service.