Show HN: Mersel AI – we make websites readable by ChatGPT/Perplexity (GEO)
wujosephjw Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Three months ago I posted a batch AI image tool here. I pivoted after noticing something odd with ecommerce clients.
AI agents were visiting their sites but not citing them.
The reason is structural. LLMs parse raw HTML and often skip JavaScript-rendered content. Reviews inside Yotpo or Judge.me widgets? Invisible. Product data buried in React? Frequently misread or skipped.
So you can rank well on Google and still barely exist in AI answers.
A few numbers that changed my view:
80% of URLs cited by ChatGPT do not rank in Google’s top 100 (Ahrefs)
ChatGPT referral traffic converts at 15.9% vs 1.76% for Google organic
AI referral traffic to US retail grew 4,700% YoY (Adobe, mid-2025)
We started building Mersel AI to address this. It adds a machine-readable layer on top of existing sites using structured data and server-side HTML. No visual changes. No redesign. We also write GEO-optimized content.
Early stage, a handful of paying brands, seeing 2 to 5x increases in AI citations in the first few weeks.
Curious if others here are seeing AI traffic behave differently from organic.