Marketing · Do this yourself

Watch which obscure pages AI chatbots cite when they recommend companies.

In short: an AI-agent-run business you oversee about an hour a week. Tools cost $30–$145/mo, agent setup is intermediate, and our estimate is 30 companies × $49 = $1,470/mo.

How it makes money: Charge companies $49/mo to watch which pages AI chatbots cite for buyer questions.

Agent setup: Intermediate · Connects several tools (Vercel, Supabase) with payments and simple data. How we rate this

Found on Reddit in r/EntrepreneurRideAlong (1 thread).

🔥 594 posts this week · 209 likes

Based on u/TarasOliinyk on Reddit (opens in new tab)

Where this came from (Reddit)

Brands spend on blogs that AI assistants ignore, while obscure list posts they never heard of quietly win the recommendation.

The threads (in our words)

  • A founder tracking chatbot recommendations says one cited source was a tiny subreddit list with 29 weekly visitors and 3 upvotes, written by a moderator who runs one of the listed companies, and that it beat a year of their blog inside ChatGPT. Read the thread on r/EntrepreneurRideAlong ↗ (opens in new tab) Oct 14, 2026 · u/TarasOliinyk · upvotes not available

Reddit blocks automated reads, so we couldn’t record upvote or comment counts. The business below is our own design inspired by these threads.

Who it’s for

B2B marketers and founders who care how ChatGPT and Perplexity recommend vendors in their niche.

Adapt it to your industry

  • Start with one niche or customer type, then expand.
  • Ask your first 10 customers what they would pay before you build more.
  • Keep a human check on anything sent in a customer’s name.

Step by step

  1. Pick 20 buyer questions your customers ask AI assistants.
  2. Have an agent ask each model weekly, capture cited URLs and save them.
  3. Score domains by how often they appear and whether they are owned, partner or random.
  4. Send a weekly digest with gaps and honest ways to earn citations (useful pages, not fake subreddits).
  5. Charge a monthly monitor plan through Stripe.
  6. Publish anonymized “where AI cites” reports for SEO.

Ready-to-copy prompt

Here are 10 buyer questions in my niche [paste] and the URLs ChatGPT cited for each [paste]. Group the sources, flag anything that looks like a self-serving list, and suggest 5 useful pages I could publish instead of gaming forums.

Start with AI

Opens the AI with this guide and the prompt filled in.

Open in ChatGPT (opens in new tab)Open in Claude (opens in new tab)Open in Grok (opens in new tab)
Time
1–3 hoursOur estimate

Your autonomous stack

Autonomy: Agents draft, schedule and report on content for each client. Your part: Weekly: skim the queue and client reports (about 1 hour).

Every layer an agent-run business needs, in order. Prices are public list prices, checked Oct 16, 2026.

  1. Agent (the brain): Grok Bot (agent + scheduled routines) (opens in new tab) (Included with The X Subscription Premium $30/mo (Super $100/mo for more usage; Plus $8 does not include Grok Bot)). Grok Bot runs the business day to day: writes, answers, decides small things and reports to you. Claude Code or Codex are alternatives.
  2. Build and hosting: Vercel hosting (opens in new tab) (Hobby free · Pro $20/mo), Supabase database (opens in new tab) (Free tier · Pro from $25/mo), beehiiv newsletter (opens in new tab) (Free up to 2,500 subscribers). The product or service your customers use.
  3. Payments: Stripe payments (opens in new tab) (No monthly fee · 2.9% + 30¢ per card payment). Automatic checkout and receipts. Other options: PayPal Checkout (3.49% + 49¢) or Lemon Squeezy (5% + 50¢, handles sales tax).
  4. Customer acquisition: Buffer (scheduled X posts) (opens in new tab) (Free plan (3 channels, 10 queued posts each) · Essentials $5/mo per channel, billed yearly), beehiiv newsletter (opens in new tab) (Free up to 2,500 subscribers), Apollo (find business emails) (opens in new tab) (Free tier · Basic $65/mo). Agent-written SEO pages, scheduled X posts and a weekly newsletter, plus cold email to businesses that follow CAN-SPAM/GDPR (real sender, opt-out link, no bought consumer lists).
  5. Delivery: Grok Bot (agent + scheduled routines) (opens in new tab) (Included with The X Subscription Premium $30/mo (Super $100/mo for more usage; Plus $8 does not include Grok Bot)). A Grok Bot routine delivers the product or result as soon as someone pays.
  6. Support: Grok Bot (agent + scheduled routines) (opens in new tab) (Included with The X Subscription Premium $30/mo (Super $100/mo for more usage; Plus $8 does not include Grok Bot)). Grok Bot answers the support inbox; anything unclear is flagged for you.
  7. Monitoring and schedule: Grok Bot (agent + scheduled routines) (opens in new tab) (Included with The X Subscription Premium $30/mo (Super $100/mo for more usage; Plus $8 does not include Grok Bot)). Grok Bot scheduled routines run each day: send, check for failures, alert you if something breaks.
  8. Analytics: Google Analytics (opens in new tab) (Free). Tracks visits, signups and sales so the agent can report what works.
  9. Human checkpoint: Weekly: skim the queue and client reports (about 1 hour).
  10. Price: charge $49 per company (monthly monitoring plan). Offer the first 3 customers a founding price for honest feedback.
Monthly cost$30–$145/monthFree tiers → paid plans of the tools above. Card fees come out of each sale.
What you could earn · EstimateEstimate: 30 companies × $49 = $1,470/moOur estimate, not a fact or a promise. It’s simple math if you land these customers at this price.
Details: source, numbers and tags

What they did

Agents ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity the same buyer questions each week and list the weird little pages that get cited, so marketers can earn those citations honestly. We designed this business from real Reddit threads; it is an idea for you to build, not a description of the posters’ businesses.

How it went

Found on Reddit in r/EntrepreneurRideAlong (1 thread). Upvote and comment counts weren’t retrievable, so none are shown. On X, 594 posts matched our search for this idea in the 7 days to 2026-10-18.

Worth knowing

Don’t create fake communities or sockpuppet lists; earn citations with real, useful pages; model answers change, so re-check monthly.

Difficulty
BeginnerOur rating
Time to build
Not reportedOur estimate
Monthly cost
Not reported
Revenue
Not reportedWe only show revenue the source states
Engagement
No public countThe source shows no number
X buzz
53.3 · 594 posts in 7 days209 likes, 67 reposts, 74 replies, 7 quotes on 16 top posts · fetched Oct 18, 2026 · query: ("ChatGPT" OR Perplexity OR "AI search") (cite OR cites OR cited OR citation OR citations) (recommend OR recommendation OR source OR sources) -is:retweet lang:en

Posted · Added Oct 18, 2026

Original builder recipe

  • ChatGPT
  • Claude
  1. Pick 20 buyer questions your customers ask AI assistants.
  2. Have an agent ask each model weekly, capture cited URLs and save them.
  3. Score domains by how often they appear and whether they are owned, partner or random.
  4. Send a weekly digest with gaps and honest ways to earn citations (useful pages, not fake subreddits).
  5. Charge a monthly monitor plan through Stripe.
  6. Publish anonymized “where AI cites” reports for SEO.

Tags

Read the original

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