Why AI assistants skip most SaaS websites

Ask an assistant to shortlist tools for a job — "project tracking for a 12-person agency", "invoicing that handles EU VAT" — and watch which products appear. They are rarely the best products. They are the products whose description exists as plain, quotable text somewhere a crawler could reach.

Modern SaaS marketing sites are close to invisible to a text-hungry crawler. The hero is an animation. The differentiators are icons. Pricing is behind a toggle. The one paragraph that says plainly what this does and who it is for often does not exist anywhere on the site — it was replaced by three words and a gradient.

The three questions a model needs answered

1. What is it, in one sentence, without adjectives. "Invoicing for freelancers in the EU that handles VAT MOSS" beats "the modern way to get paid".
2. Who is it for and who is it not for. Naming the boundary makes you the right answer to a narrow question instead of a weak answer to a broad one.
3. What does it cost. A number. A range is fine. "Contact us" removes you from every comparison an assistant makes.

Feature lists are not the point

A list of forty features tells a model nothing about when to recommend you. One sentence about the customer you serve better than anyone tells it exactly when. Write for the moment somebody describes their situation and asks what to use.

What is listed here

Each company below has a plain listing page and a markdown version, linked from this article and from the site's llms.txt, with a public count of AI-crawler fetches per listing. The counts come straight from server logs, including the unflattering ones.