Why nobody finds your SaaS

Search Google for this, with your own domain:

site:yourdomain.com

Search Google for your exact product name.

Two ways to do this. Pick either one.

In a browser, no terminal needed: open your site, right click, choose "View Page Source", then press Ctrl+F and search for one distinctive word from your headline.

In a terminal, if you prefer: use the full https address, not just the domain, or the Windows version breaks below.

# Mac or Linux
curl -sL https://yourdomain.com | grep -i "distinctive"

# Windows PowerShell
(Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://yourdomain.com" -UseBasicParsing).Content -match "distinctive"

On Windows, plain curl is usually an alias for a different command and grep does not exist by default, so the Mac/Linux line above will fail there. The PowerShell line above returns True or False. It also fails if you type just the domain without https:// in front, because PowerShell mishandles the redirect that follows. Tested this directly, twice, before writing it here. If any of this feels like too much, just use the browser method above. It has none of these problems.

Whichever way you check, search for one distinctive word, not the whole sentence. Headlines are often split across tags, like this:

<h1><span>Fast, Free Tools</span><br/><span>with Privacy First</span></h1>

Searching for the full sentence there returns nothing, even though the page is server rendered perfectly. You would go and fix something that was never broken.

Both methods show you the page as a machine receives it, before any JavaScript runs.

This is the most common problem I find on products built from React and Next templates.

This one has two steps. The first is quick but incomplete. The second is the real answer.

Step 1. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser.

Search that page for these names:

• —OAI-SearchBot — this is the one that indexes you for ChatGPT search
• —GPTBot — this one collects training data, which is a different thing
• —PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot
• —and User-agent: * followed by Disallow: /, which blocks everything at once

A lot of people search only for GPTBot, find nothing, and assume they are fine.

Step 2. The check that actually tells you the truth.

A clean robots.txt proves nothing on its own. Blocking usually happens somewhere else entirely:

• —Cloudflare has a switch that blocks AI bots at the edge. Your robots.txt stays clean.
• —Firewall or bot-protection rules at your host, by user agent or by IP range
• —A rule on your own server returning 403
• —Rate limits returning 429
• —A login wall or a region block

So test the whole path at once. Open ChatGPT with web access on and ask it:

Open https://yourdomain.com and tell me what is on the page

One thing that does not work: faking the bot with curl -A "GPTBot". Many blocks check the IP range, not the user agent name. Your laptop will pass where the real crawler is blocked, and sometimes the reverse. It gives you a confident answer that is wrong.

Names change. Providers add and rename crawlers. Check the current list in each provider's own documentation before you edit anything.

Read your own h1. Out loud.

Open ChatGPT and ask it two questions.

1. best [your category] tools
2. what do you know about yourdomain.com

One thing worth knowing: when I check products this way, the ones that do get named are almost never named because of their own website. They get named because of a comparison article or a forum thread someone else wrote.

Open pagespeed.web.dev and enter your domain. Look only at the top section, the one based on real Chrome users.

Why not the Lighthouse tab in your browser: I ran the same lab test on the same page twice and got results 5 seconds apart. Same page, same computer, 10 minutes apart. Lab tests guess. Real user data measures.