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Our Story: Why We Built AI Search Index

The founders of Superlines share why they created AI Search Index – a focused tool for tracking how AI bots crawl your website. Learn about our journey from pioneering GEO to building a product that helps every website owner understand their AI visibility.

Kimmo Ihanus
6 min read

Our Story: Why We Built AI Search Index

Kimmo Ihanus and Jere Meriluoto, co-founders of Superlines and AI Search Index Kimmo Ihanus and Jere Meriluoto, co-founders of Superlines and AI Search Index. Credit: Mikko Perttunen / Markkinointiuutiset.fi

We are Kimmo Ihanus and Jere Meriluoto, the founders of Superlines. Today, we are launching AI Search Index, and we want to share why we built it.

We Have Been Working on AI Search Since Before It Was a Thing

Our journey with AI started long before ChatGPT became a household name. In 2020, we were among the first two teams in the Nordics to gain access to OpenAI's GPT-3. Back then, most people had no idea how transformative AI would become for search and marketing. We saw it coming.

Since those early days, we have been obsessed with understanding how AI systems process, interpret, and use website content. We built internal tools, automated complex analysis, and developed solutions that helped marketing teams understand this new channel before most knew it existed. When Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) emerged as a discipline, we were already deep into solving its core challenges.

That experience led us to build Superlines, a comprehensive AI search analytics platform that helps brands understand and improve how they appear in AI-generated responses. Superlines tracks brand visibility, citation rates, and share of voice across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI platforms. We are proud that leading brands and agencies globally trust us to help them navigate this new frontier.

One Feature Kept Standing Out

As Superlines grew, we noticed something interesting. While our platform offers comprehensive AI search analytics, including brand visibility tracking, citation monitoring, and competitive intelligence, one feature consistently resonated with a specific audience: AI Bot Analytics.

AI Bot Analytics shows you exactly how AI crawlers like GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot interact with your website. It reveals which pages they visit, how often they return, and what patterns emerge in their behavior. This data is concrete, actionable, and immediately valuable.

Many conversations with potential customers followed a similar pattern:

"We love what Superlines does, but we are not ready for the full platform. We just need to understand what AI bots are doing on our website."

"Can we get just the AI bot analytics without the brand visibility tracking?"

"We want to see if AI is even reading our content before we invest in optimizing for it."

These were not feature requests from enterprise marketing teams. They came from website owners, content creators, developers, and small business operators who wanted a simple answer to a simple question: Are AI systems reading my website?

The Market Needed Something Focused

We realized there was a gap in the market. On one side, you have comprehensive AI search platforms like Superlines that serve marketing teams tracking brand performance across AI assistants. On the other side, you have website owners who just want to know if GPTBot is crawling their blog or if ClaudeBot has visited their documentation.

These two use cases are related but different. A content creator does not need share of voice analysis. A developer does not need citation rate benchmarking. They need clear, specific data about AI crawler activity on their website.

We could have added a simpler tier to Superlines, but that felt like the wrong approach. The platforms serve different purposes. Superlines is business intelligence for AI search. What these users needed was a diagnostic tool, something focused, fast, and free to start with.

What AI Search Index Does

AI Search Index is exactly what many of you have been asking for: AI bot analytics without the extra complexity.

When you connect your website, AI Search Index immediately shows you:

  • •Which AI bots are visiting: GPTBot (OpenAI/ChatGPT), PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended (Gemini), Bingbot (Microsoft Copilot), and others
  • •How often they visit: Daily, weekly, and monthly crawler activity trends
  • •Which pages they read: The specific URLs that AI systems prioritize
  • •Crawler patterns: Peak activity times, visit frequency, and behavior changes over time

This data answers fundamental questions that every website owner should be asking:

  • •Is my content even accessible to AI systems?
  • •Are AI crawlers finding my most important pages?
  • •Which AI platforms are actively indexing my content?
  • •How has AI crawler activity changed over time?

The answers inform real decisions. If GPTBot visits your homepage but never finds your product pages, you have a crawl accessibility issue to fix. If PerplexityBot visits your site frequently while ClaudeBot does not, you know which platforms are more likely to feature your content.

Why This Matters for Everyone

We built AI Search Index because we believe everyone should have visibility into how AI systems interact with their website. This should not be exclusive to enterprise marketing teams with comprehensive analytics budgets.

Consider what happens without this visibility:

  • •A blogger writes helpful tutorials but does not know if any AI system has ever seen them
  • •A small business invests in a new website but cannot tell if AI crawlers can access the content
  • •A developer maintains documentation but has no idea whether it is being used to inform AI responses

These are not edge cases. With over 800 million people using ChatGPT every week, AI-generated answers increasingly shape how people discover content and make decisions. If AI systems are not reading your website, you are invisible to a growing percentage of your potential audience.

AI Search Index gives you the data to understand your starting point. From there, you can make informed decisions about whether and how to optimize for AI search visibility.

Our Commitment to the Community

We believe in supporting the broader AI search optimization community. That is why AI Search Index includes a generous free tier. You can start tracking AI bot activity on your website without paying anything.

We want website owners to have access to this data regardless of budget. Understanding whether AI systems are reading your content is a fundamental insight, not a premium feature.

For those who need more, such as historical data, advanced analytics, and multiple websites, we offer paid tiers that scale with your needs. But the core value, seeing which AI bots visit your website and how often, should be accessible to everyone.

Built by Pioneers, For the Next Generation

Our experience building Superlines taught us what matters for AI search visibility. We have worked with some of the largest brands in the world on their AI search strategies. We have seen what works, what fails, and what data actually drives decisions.

AI Search Index distills that experience into a focused tool. It does one thing well: showing you how AI bots interact with your website.

This is not a side project. It is a product we built because the market needs it. Every day, more AI systems are training on web content and using it to answer user queries. Understanding how these systems see your website is the first step toward appearing in their responses.

Try AI Search Index Today

We invite you to try AI Search Index and see what AI bots are doing on your website.

Getting started takes minutes. Add a lightweight tracking script to your site, and you will immediately start seeing AI crawler activity. No complex setup. No lengthy onboarding. Just clear data about your AI visibility.

If you are already using Superlines for comprehensive AI search analytics, AI Search Index complements that by giving you deeper server-side crawler insights. If you are new to AI search optimization, this is the perfect starting point to understand where you stand.

We built this because we believe in the future of AI search and want to help everyone participate in it. Whether you are a solo blogger, a growing startup, or an established business, knowing how AI reads your website is the foundation of any AI search strategy.

Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

— Kimmo & Jere

Get Started

Ready to see how AI bots interact with your website?

  1. •Visit AI Search Index
  2. •Create a free account
  3. •Add the tracking script to your website
  4. •Start seeing AI crawler activity immediately

Have questions? We would love to hear from you. Reach out to us at support@aisearchindex.com.

About the Founders

Kimmo Ihanus is the Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of Superlines. With over a decade of experience in AI, marketing, and data, Kimmo ensures that both Superlines and AI Search Index stay at the cutting edge of innovation. "I've been obsessed with AI and algorithms my entire career," he says. "Helping people understand how AI systems see their content is exactly the kind of problem I love solving."

Jere Meriluoto is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Superlines. Dedicated to solving marketers' biggest challenges, Jere leads the company's vision and strategy. "If you're going to build, build what the best will use tomorrow," he says. "AI Search Index is exactly that—a tool that every website owner will need as AI search continues to grow."

Together, they founded Superlines in Helsinki with a shared passion for data, automation, and AI. They were among the first teams in the Nordics to work with GPT-3 in 2020 and have been pioneering AI search optimization ever since.