About the Company

IndexGPT is a Shopify app built for a problem that barely existed two years ago: helping e-commerce store owners show up and get recommended by AI assistants. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Mistral — the platforms where a new generation of buyers is going to find products and businesses before they ever open a browser tab.

The company was co-founded by Mário Mateus, who came to AI search through SEO consulting. Working closely with Shopify merchants, he watched a clear pattern emerge: store owners who were doing everything right on Google were invisible on AI. The reason was not that AI search was unknowable — it was that nobody had built the tools to help merchants understand and act on it.

IndexGPT was built to close that gap. The app gives store owners a dashboard of tools to measure, understand, and improve their AI positioning — including prompt tracking, LLM outreach, an AI SEO score, and, powered in part by SEOptimer's API, a detailed SEO report that sits at the heart of the product.

The Challenge

AI search does not replace traditional SEO — it depends on it. This is one of the most important and least understood points in the current conversation about search. When a user asks ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend a product or store, those AI tools perform what are called fan-out queries: they break the prompt into searchable keywords and run those searches across Bing, Google, and other engines. If a store is not well-positioned in traditional search, AI will not find it either.

This meant that IndexGPT's clients needed to understand two things simultaneously: their AI positioning and their underlying SEO health. Mário needed a way to deliver both — clearly, quickly, and at scale — to merchants who were often solopreneurs with no dedicated marketing team and limited patience for technical complexity.

The other challenge was cost. The Shopify merchants IndexGPT serves are not enterprise clients with large SEO budgets. Many of them had never paid for an SEO tool before. Whatever IndexGPT built into its product had to be genuinely affordable — delivering professional-grade data without the professional-grade price tag that tools like SEMrush carry.

How They Use SEOptimer

Mário Mateus came to SEOptimer first as an SEO consultant, before IndexGPT had fully taken shape. He was running daily client meetings and needed a report he could share before each call — something accurate, readable, and fast to generate. The flexibility to choose which sections to include was particularly useful: a client in a marketing department who understood SEO needed a different report from a solopreneur who just needed to know what to fix first.

"The reports were very easy to generate, they were quick, and they were straight to the point. I could also choose exactly what sections I wanted to show, so I could adapt to the client in front of me."

As IndexGPT grew, the use case evolved. Manual report generation gave way to full API integration. SEOptimer's API is now embedded directly into the IndexGPT app in two distinct ways.

The first is a dedicated report section within the app itself. IndexGPT users can generate an SEO report at any time — covering their keyword positioning, core web vitals, backlink profile, and other traditional SEO metrics — download it as a PDF, and act on it independently or with guidance from the IndexGPT team. This gives merchants access to the kind of data that was previously locked behind expensive monthly subscriptions, included as part of an affordable package.

The second is more sophisticated. IndexGPT has built a proprietary AI search report — a 50-plus data point analysis that tells merchants how they are positioned across the major LLMs, what needs to be fixed to improve their visibility, and exactly where each issue was found. SEOptimer's data feeds into this report alongside IndexGPT's own AI agents and analysis tools, forming part of a larger intelligence layer that no single tool could provide alone.

The Scale

The numbers tell the story clearly. When Mário Mateus was running SEOptimer manually as a consultant, he was generating reports daily or weekly — one per client, per meeting. Today, through the API integration, IndexGPT generates between 30 and 50 SEOptimer-powered reports every single day, automatically, as Shopify merchants use the app.

Every one of those merchants is already an IndexGPT client, so the report is not a lead magnet, it is a core part of the product experience. Users arrive, explore their AI positioning score, generate their SEO report, download the PDF, and begin acting on it. The whole process is seamless and requires no intervention from the IndexGPT team.

"Yesterday we generated over 50 reports. Every day we're generating dozens of reports for our clients. This is done all automatically."

What the Reports Do for Clients

Mário is thoughtful about how SEO data lands with non-technical clients, and his approach to presenting reports is worth noting. He uses what he calls the sandwich technique — opening with what is working, addressing what needs to improve, and closing again on the positives. The goal is to avoid demoralising merchants who have invested significant time and energy into their stores, while still delivering the honest assessment they need.

"Store owners treat their stores like their babies. They put all their energy and hopes into them. The reports are really important for helping people refocus on what actually matters and the direction to go."

One situation he encounters regularly is merchants who believe their site is mobile-optimised, only to receive a report flagging it as a problem. Rather than leaving clients confused or defensive, Mário uses the report as a teaching moment — explaining that mobile optimisation is measured against specific, external metrics used by Google, not just by how the site looks on a phone. The report gives him a concrete, objective reference point that removes the personal sting from the feedback.

This objectivity is one of the things he values most about the SEOptimer reports. They are not his opinion — they are data. And data is harder to argue with.

SEO and AI Search: Why Both Still Matter

Mário believes traditional SEO and AI search optimisation are not competing priorities — they are the same priority approached from different angles.

"If you don't take care of your own SEO, AI is going to have a very hard time finding you. Even though the search on AI is a bit different from Google, AI still does fan-out queries. It breaks the prompt into searchable keywords and searches those individually — and that search can happen on Bing, on Google. So for a client to be found and recommended by AI, they still need to do their traditional SEO work."

This is the central insight that IndexGPT is built around, and it is also why the SEOptimer integration makes so much sense within the product. Merchants cannot improve their AI visibility without first understanding their SEO foundations. The two reports — the SEO report powered by SEOptimer and the proprietary AI positioning report — work together to give a complete picture.

"AI leads visitors to websites with a lot more search intent. People who arrive via ChatGPT are much more likely to buy, because the AI has already given them context, already explained what they need to know. So even though fewer people find a store through ChatGPT than through Google, more of them are likely to buy. The leads arrive already warm."

The Bigger Picture

IndexGPT is developing fast. At the time of this conversation, the company had just launched an LLM Sentiment Report — a tool that feeds a store's key questions and product categories into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools, compiles the responses, and tells the merchant how AI in general is feeling about their brand. Positive, negative, neutral — and what to do about it.

Mário sees SEOptimer as a long-term partner in this work. As the AI search landscape evolves, the foundational SEO data that SEOptimer provides remains relevant — because the algorithms, whether traditional or AI-powered, continue to reward the same underlying qualities: speed, structure, relevance, and authority.

"Having this partnership with SEOptimer is great, because we're constantly developing new solutions to help our clients understand where they are and where they need to go. And SEOptimer is working on the technology that allows companies like ours — and our clients — to understand exactly what needs to be taken care of in terms of AI SEO."

Why SEOptimer

For IndexGPT's merchants, the value proposition is straightforward: professional-grade SEO data at a price point that makes sense for a Shopify solopreneur. Most dedicated SEO tools cost upwards of €100 a month — a significant commitment for a small store owner who needs the data but not the full platform. By integrating SEOptimer's API into the IndexGPT subscription, Mário has made that data accessible to merchants who would otherwise never have it.

For Mário personally, the value is in the accuracy, the flexibility, and the simplicity of integration. The API works. The reports are clean. The data is trustworthy. When you are generating 30 to 50 reports a day automatically on behalf of your clients, those qualities are not nice to have — they are the baseline requirement.

"Anyone who wants to take their SEO seriously should generate a report and start working on it. The sooner you start, the sooner you reap the results. SEO is a game that should be attacked as early as possible — because it's going to keep on giving. Organic positioning will do more for your business than any paid marketing campaign ever will, and SEOptimer will help you and your clients get there."