Herman Schutte built MentionScout to see what AI tells your buyers

Herman Schutte has been building his own products since 2011. Back then he was writing software for banks and insurers, and on the side he built SnapWidget so people could put their Instagram photos on their websites. Fifteen years later it's still going. He also runs SiteSpeakAI, a chatbot that answers visitors from your own website. MentionScout is the newest.

His pitch to a friend is simple. People don't only Google things any more. They ask ChatGPT for the best tool and go with whatever it says. MentionScout asks those questions for you every day in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Google's AI answers. It shows whether you get mentioned and which competitors get picked instead. "Think of it as Search Console, but for AI answers."

The number that started it

"For 15 years Google sent me most of my customers, so I always knew where I ranked and why." Then Google traffic to SnapWidget started sliding, while visitors from ChatGPT kept going up and converted well.

When he started tracking what the AI said, the first numbers looked fine. Then he split them. When someone asked about SnapWidget by name, the AI recommended it almost every time. When they asked a normal question, like "what's the best Instagram widget for my website?", it mostly didn't.

"And I'm the customer," he says. "I run a few SaaS products that need this, so I built the tool I wanted to open every morning."

The MentionScout you see now started in May this year. The first version took a few days with Claude Code. "No billing, and a placeholder homepage." Herman was the first user, with SiteSpeakAI and SnapWidget as websites one and two, for about six weeks before he opened signups at the start of July.

The hard part

"Getting people to pay. Building it was the easy part." For more than three months nobody started a trial. Part of that, he says, was his own fault. Free accounts had a monthly limit, and when people hit it their tracking stopped without anyone being told. He fixed that and started writing to people himself. Two of his first three trials came from people whose tracking had just stopped.

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I think they only saw how much they wanted the data once it was gone.

MentionScout has already changed how he runs his own site. It showed him AI answers citing a SnapWidget help article from 2022 that said widgets refresh every 30 minutes, which is wrong. "An old page you forgot about can still be the answer a buyer gets today."

Building from South Africa is "mostly fine". His customers are all over the world: SnapWidget's biggest country is Japan, and MentionScout's first trials came from the Netherlands, the US and India. "None of them care where I live."

He chose the Horizon ring because "I'm not going anywhere." Getting into AI answers takes time, so MentionScout keeps asking the same questions and builds up a history. "I want it to be the tool people still open in ten."

What he needs now is users, and honest feedback from them. If you run a SaaS or a small business, his free AI visibility checker at mentionscout.com shows in under a minute whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI name you. "My rule is to never build a feature until someone asks for it, so I need people to ask."