Unscripted SaaS · Interview
Somya Goyal on Getting Your Brand Cited by ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini
with Somya Goyal — founder of Stellarcast, building in the open from India
Why this matters for SaaS: Somya Goyal spent 15+ years owning quality for enterprise programs — then put her own name on Stellarcast, a platform that watches whether AI models actually cite your brand. Her wedge is the thing most tools skip: not another one-time audit dashboard, but a continuous loop that monitors, diagnoses, executes, and proves the fix. It’s a first-time-founder story about building in the open, picking a wedge incumbents ignore, and betting a whole product on a category (AI visibility) that’s barely a year old.
The conversation
Episode overview
Jeremy Rivera talks with Somya Goyal, founder of Stellarcast — a platform that manages how your brand is seen across AI models. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Gemini “what’s the best X?”, the model names a few brands; Stellarcast watches whether you’re one of them, figures out why you’re missing, drafts the fix, and — once you approve — ships it and proves the lift. A first-time founder after eight years at Accenture and 15+ in quality engineering, Somya is building in the open from India. She and Jeremy dig into why AI citation is a completely different game from Google ranking, how fast LLM answers actually refresh, and why “most brands have never read what AI says about them.”
Somya wrote up her plain-English take on the category on the Stellarcast blog: What Is Answer Engine Optimization?
What we get into
Highlights
- The four-agent loop — monitor, diagnose, execute, prove — and why closing the loop beats a one-time audit
- Why AI citations overlap Google’s top-10 links by only ~14%: ranking and citation are different objectives
- How the buyer’s question changed from “which is the best brand?” to “will it do the things I need?”
- Treating LLM answers as a liquid surface — updates in minutes to days, not months, with freshness weighted heavily
- Why AI is often “confidently wrong,” citing two-year-old pricing and reviews even after fresh data exists
- CMS integrations (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow) and keeping a human in the loop to approve every fix
- Going from owning enterprise QA to shipping her first SaaS with her own name on it
The core idea
Monitor, diagnose, execute — then prove
Most AI-visibility tools stop at a dashboard. Stellarcast runs a loop of specialist agents instead: one monitors every engine for how you’re cited versus competitors; one diagnoses why you’re missing — the facts, sources, entities, and which specific model can’t find you; one drafts the fix and, on your approval, ships it on your behalf; and one re-checks the engine to verify the lift. “Let’s say every Monday it’s going to prove that for X number of questions, the LLMs cite you.” This can’t be a one-time process, Somya argues — a model that names you today might quietly swap in a competitor two days later and cross you out.
Citation ≠ ranking
AI is confidently wrong about your brand
Being #1 on Google doesn’t mean you’re named in the answer — AI citations overlap the top-10 links by only about 14%. And most brands, Somya points out, have never actually read what AI says about them. Models are sometimes “confidently wrong,” citing pricing or reviews from two years ago even when fresh data exists. She liked Jeremy’s prior guest Patrick Stox’s framing that “SEO is now a subset of GEO,” adding that SEO is 20 years old and now evolving with a brand-new term: AI citations. Her plain-English definition of the work: make your brand easy for AI to find, understand, and read.
In her words
Quotes from the episode
“Most of the brands have never read what AI says about them — and sometimes AI is confidently wrong.”
— Somya Goyal, Stellarcast“Make your brand easy for AI to find, understand, and read. That is the new name of AEO.”
— Somya Goyal, Stellarcast“Most of the tools stop at the dashboard. The whole point of Stellarcast is closing the loop.”
— Somya Goyal, Stellarcast
Ideas worth stealing
Key takeaways
- Don’t stop at a dashboard — the value is in closing the loop: monitor, diagnose, execute the fix, and prove the lift on a recurring cadence.
- Optimize for citation, not just ranking. With only ~14% overlap, AI visibility is a separate objective that needs its own measurement.
- Read what AI actually says about you first — you can’t correct a “confidently wrong” answer you’ve never looked at.
- Treat AI answers as a liquid surface: they refresh far faster than Google re-ranks, so recency of content and citations matters more.
- Keep a human in the loop — Stellarcast drafts the fix, but you approve before it ships.
- Plain-English AEO: make your brand easy for AI to find, understand, and read.
Connect with Somya
Where to find her
Try it: Stellarcast.ai · Read What Is Answer Engine Optimization? · Explore the Stellarcast blog · Connect on LinkedIn. Stellarcast is in early access, onboarding a first cohort of pilot brands and agencies as design partners.
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