My startup is completely invisible in AI answers. Where do I start?

Start with access, because everything else is wasted if the page cannot be fetched. Confirm your robots.txt does not block retrieval agents, that the site returns a normal response to non-browser user agents, and that your core copy is in the server-rendered HTML rather than injected later.

Then fix classification. Your H1 and the first paragraph should let a stranger say what you are, who it is for, and what changes if they use it. If that takes more than one sentence, tighten it until it does not.

Third, publish one FAQ block with proper schema answering the four questions you actually get asked. This is usually the single fastest improvement to being quotable.

Only then move to authority work — a founder page, a named customer story, independent mentions. Doing that first, on a site that cannot be classified, produces very little.