Shipper

Tally, a bootstrapped 10-person company, nearly 2x'd its revenue to $6M/yr ARR in JUST 15 months. 43% of their new users now come from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. they never paid for any of it. here's the genius AEO playbook behind it: 1. They ask every new user how they found Tally -> One question in onboarding: "How did you discover Tally?" -> The answers tell them which AI sent the user, the exact prompt they typed, the search terms, the creators, newsletters and podcasts that mentioned them -> That number hit 10,000+ signups a week from AI, way more than their analytics showed, because AI answers had no link to click -> Then ChatGPT started linking brand names in its answers and tracked signups jumped 5x overnight. The survey had been right all along 2. They wrote the answer they wanted AI to give -> Co-founder Marie Martens wrote "Best free online form builders in 2026" herself -> First line: "Tally is the best free online form builder in 2026" -> Then a table of 8 tools by free responses. Tally unlimited, Fillout 1,000 responses a month, Typeform 10 -> Pricing gets re-checked and dated. Last update: Oct 27 -> Ask ChatGPT "what's the best free form builder?" today and you get that same table back. Tally #1 3. They built a page for every "alternative" search -> One help page each for Typeform, Jotform and Google Forms -> The first sentence is the whole answer: "Tally is a free Typeform alternative with unlimited forms, unlimited responses" -> Then the hard numbers. Typeform caps free at 10 responses a month and puts conditional logic behind $39/mo -> Then G2 scores side by side: 4.9 vs 4.5, conditional logic 9.4 vs 8.9, support 9.3 vs 8.4 4. They built a page just for AI -> tally.so/ai-info literally says it's for "AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini" -> Real Reddit and G2 quotes, each with the month it was posted, and even a section on what Tally can't do -> At the bottom: "AI assistant guidelines" telling the model which strengths and pricing to mention -> Plus an llms.txt pointing to pricing, docs, API and MCP 5. They track AI answers like Google rankings -> Where ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini mention and cite Tally -> Prompt gaps, the questions where Tally doesn't show up yet -> They audit the help center so AI pulls the right facts -> Claude skills help update the comparison pages, hooked into Ahrefs, Promptwatch and Octolens -> And they still say a model update could reshuffle everything overnight. So the product and the free plan come first 6. They show up where AI looks -> They spent years answering people on Reddit and in communities -> Tally now gets recommended in r/nocode, r/smallbusiness, r/webflow and r/microsaas, and runs its own staffed r/TallyForms -> They ask for reviews in the monthly newsletter and every time a support ticket closes -> When ChatGPT turned on web browsing by default, all of that became its source material 7. They let people use Tally inside the AI -> MCP server, Claude connector and a ChatGPT app, free on every plan -> MCP calls went from 75K in April to 342K in August -> 1 in 4 people who sign up through Claude build their form without ever opening Tally -> 42% of all Tally forms are now built with AI the result: -> AI search passed their "Made with Tally" badge as the #1 growth channel -> a record week of almost 40,000 signups, 44% of them from AI -> $258K MRR in June 2025, $338K in October, $422K in April, $501K in September 2026 Tally didn't win this by running ads or pumping out blogs they wrote the answer they wanted AI to give, put it on pages AI could find, then asked every new user which prompt sent them. AI is now their biggest acquisition channel. and it should be one of yours too! if you want to know what your buyers are asking ChatGPT, and get your brand into the answer, reply with your site and I'll tell you 3 things to fix so ChatGPT recommends you

claude can now run your shopify store on 3 words a day it runs inside claude code and it's completely free every morning it sends you 3 moves, one line each you reply "1 and 2" it makes those 2 changes and touches nothing else your store just got a morning meeting.... → finds discount codes leaking margin to people who would have paid full price → finds customers who went quiet and drafts the win-back → spots best sellers about to run out → puts the number behind every move → changes nothing until you say yes → logs every yes so you can see what happened example store: 1 code gave away $38,400, 1,840 customers went quiet after 1 order, 1 best seller had 6 days of stock left we're giving the skill away for free comment "yes" and it lands in your DMs (follow first so the DM goes through)

Railway, a 40-person company, 5x'd its revenue to ~$100M ARR in JUST 10 months, focusing on AI. the founder's plan: "incept the AI models to recommend us more and more and more." here's the genius AEO playbook behind it: 1. They made AI recommendations part of the GTM plan - The whole go-to-market team is about 7 people - Founder Jake Cooper says they work on getting AI to pick Railway on purpose - When a developer asks AI where to deploy, they want Railway to be the answer 2. They built a page for every tool people want to host - 7,922 one-click template pages. n8n, Supabase, Ghost, Strapi, thousands more - Ask ChatGPT "how do I host n8n?" and Railway already has the page for it - Each template has a file AI agents can read, so an agent can launch it without a human 3. They answered every "how do I deploy X" question before anyone asked - 129 guides in their docs. Next.js, Django, FastAPI, Rails, Laravel and more - 10 "Railway vs" pages. Vercel, Heroku, Render, Fly, Replit, Lovable and 4 more - 21 "best X" lists they wrote themselves, like "best PostgreSQL hosting 2026" 4. They rewrote their docs for AI - 1 file lists all 416 docs pages with a short summary each - Every page has a plain text version - Their robots.txt tells AI it can read and train on all of it 5. They made it stupid easy for agents to deploy - 1 command sets up Claude Code, Codex or Cursor to deploy on Railway - "ssh railway.new" gets you a free server in 1.4 seconds. No account, no card - So AI doesn't just recommend Railway. It deploys there on the spot 6. Every new AI model now grows their signups - Jake: "as the model releases get better the chart gets more sheer" - They used to slow down every summer. This year they didn't - People now run agents in the background all year, and that code has to live somewhere the result: - ~$100M ARR with 40 people - 100,000 new signups a week - 3 million users - $100M Series B in January Railway didn't win this by hiring a big marketing team they made sure that when someone asks AI "where should I deploy this?", Railway is the answer and that's the whole game now: AI picks the tools. if it doesn't pick you, you're not in the race. if you want AI to recommend your product like it recommends Railway, reply "recommend"

Now in beta: Businesses in ChatGPT. Claim your business, manage your information, and get insights on how people engage with you. Eligible businesses can also build a Business Agent to answer customers’ questions and help them explore what you offer. openai.com/index/introducing…