What do developers' AI assistants say about your tool?

What does AI visibility mean for a developer tool?

It means being named when a developer asks an AI assistant which tool, library or service to use for a job.

Developer tools are chosen differently from most software. The person asking is often the person who will install it, and the question arrives inside a technical task: 'add rate limiting to this Express app', 'which Postgres host supports branching', 'is there an open source alternative to X'. If the assistant writes code using a competitor's SDK, that is a recommendation even if the answer never says 'best'.

So a developer tool's AI visibility has two parts: being named in recommendation answers, and being the tool the assistant reaches for when it writes the example.

Which questions should a developer-tool company track?

Track the questions developers ask at the moment they choose, in their own words.

The best source for wording is the developers themselves: GitHub issues, Stack Overflow questions and Hacker News or Reddit threads where people ask for recommendations in your category.

Why do Reddit, Hacker News and GitHub matter for AI answers?

Because that is where developers describe tools in their own words, and that public text is part of what assistants read.

Marketing pages say what a company claims. Threads and issues say what developers found: 'we moved off X because of cold starts', 'Y's docs are great'. Assistants that learn from the public web, or search it while answering, meet those descriptions. We don't know the exact weight any engine gives them, and nobody outside the AI companies does, but a tool that is never discussed by developers gives the assistants little to go on.

That is why MarketHQ watches both. Every plan, including Free, follows Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Lobsters and blogs and news feeds. Paid plans add Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Product Hunt and Bluesky, plus the weekly AI-answer check.

How do you track what AI assistants say about your developer tool?

Ask a fixed set of developer questions in each assistant weekly and record who is named.

On paid plans MarketHQ asks your tracked questions in six engines every week: 10 questions on Lite ($29 a month), 60 on Startup ($99) and 120 on Growth ($199). Each answer shows whether you were named, which competitors were named, any links it cited, and the full text, so you can see whether the assistant used your SDK or someone else's in its example.

• Start with the free LLM mention checker for a one-off reading in ChatGPT and DeepSeek.
• Sign up free to follow developer communities for your product and two competitors.
• Move to a paid plan when you want the weekly six-engine check and the action plan.

What do you do when AI recommends a competitor to developers?

Close the gap where developers look: docs, examples, comparisons and community threads.

MarketHQ's weekly gap analysis turns questions where competitors are named and you are not into an action plan. For developer tools the actions are usually concrete: a docs page that answers the exact question, a working example for a popular framework, an honest comparison page, or a helpful answer in an active thread. MarketHQ can draft replies to community threads from your own product strengths on paid plans, and chat lets you ask questions of the evidence it has collected.

If your team works with agents, paid plans expose AI visibility, the gap report and mentions through a REST API and an MCP server.

What does this look like for a real category?

Illustrative example: an open source job-runner library missing from 'Node.js background jobs' answers.

Illustrative example: a job-runner library is well known among Go developers but absent from assistants' answers about Node.js background jobs, where two competitors appear every time. MarketHQ shows the misses on the AI Visibility page, and the community feed shows a Reddit thread and a Stack Overflow question asking exactly this, both unanswered by the team. The team publishes a Node.js quickstart, answers both threads, and watches the same questions over the next weeks.

What doesn't MarketHQ cover?

IDE-embedded coding assistants, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot are outside its coverage.

MarketHQ asks questions of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek. It does not observe what coding assistants inside an IDE suggest, and it does not cover Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode or Microsoft Copilot. Answers also vary between runs and accounts, so read results as a weekly trend.