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Ask HN: What is replacing SEO for discoverability?

39 points by jppope ↗ HN
Obviously things are changing pretty fast and a huge chunk of inquiries that would have been answered with search results are just LLM answers now. If you want people to find your product/service in 2024 how do you get your self out there?

19 comments

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constantinum
Being active on Reddit(Google favours Reddit on top search results)

PPC(if you have budget)

YouTube(you can see a list of YouTube videos on top search positions)

Sponsoring(podcasts,newsletters)

hightrix
> Being active on Reddit

This has gotten really frustrating since the exclusivity agreement. Reddit now has no way to search for privacy mind folks that refuse to use Google.

That said, this is probably good for mental health as it means less time on Reddit.

nosioptar
It is frustrating. You can still get info from reddit pretty easily though.

On Android, Red Reader still works and is free. The built in search works pretty well. It's much a much better experience than reddit in a browser. You don't have to have an account for it (unless you want to post and such).

Reddit posts still show up in ddg results.

Startpage.com will get you google results without using google.

lagniappe
compensated social influence
sandspar
Simple: become famous
nicbou
Or buy the influence of someone who is already famous
ctrust
Trade conferences. (Trade conferences will outlast all digital media.)
cseleborg
This piqued my interest. Can you elaborate?
sandspar
Not OP, but we've had variations of "let's get a bunch of people together for a party" since the Stone Age. Meeting and events became a formal "industry" only a few decades ago. But meetings and events themselves are as Lindy as prostitution and war.
ctrust
Exactly right. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
kremi
I guess it won’t take very long before you can do PPC (or similar paid advertising) in LLM results. Google had to turn to paid advertising for profitability. OpenAI and the likes might have to do the same — competition is fierce and price are dropping so not sure users will continue to accept paying a subscription.
claudiulodro
It's more nuanced these days and depends on what type of business you have.

The era of e.g. writing blog posts with some code snippets to try and get search traffic that converts into freelancing clients is waning (and the strategy wasn't super effective in the first place). That's always been better done via networking/social media/"thought leadership".

If you have like a SaaS CRM for Painters, the LLM is just another thing that your SEO will affect. If someone asks "How can I keep track of my painting clients?", the LLM is going to give some advice and probably point to some products (including hopefully yours). That remains largely unchanged, since LLM answers are not a substitute for a CRM (yet?)

crazygringo
Are you sure it's not still just traditional SEO and marketing?

I'm not sure how many people are asking ChatGPT for the best humidifier. And if they're asking Google and they look at the Gemini answer at the top, it seems to often be Gemini interpreting/summarizing the regular search results. Which means, just regular SEO strategy.

I don't think we're at a point where specifically targeting LLM searches is a productive strategy. Obviously that may change, but I don't think we're there yet.

j45
People are asking perplexity.

Gemini strategy might not link to buy the same thing from you for all the free work you provide google to keep people on google

mikewarot
At some point, there will be a standard way to put affiliate links into your content such that the AI that recommends them also gets a cut. I think it's going to be bribery all the way down.

Something about the URL, or perhaps a super-cookie, or some such will then give OpenAI, or whoever, a kickback.

conradklnspl
If you have a niche SaaS product that somehow embeds in your customer's website, I've been working on a search engine that can help find your competitors' customers. It lets you search over the web's HTML code, basically. While this doesn't let people find you, it can help you find them.

There are a couple other companies in this space, with data focused on specific markets (US, Europe, etc). So you could find one that suits your geography.

Another thing you can do to find people interested in what you offer is following RSS feeds for keywords of your choice. HN RSS (https://hnrss.github.io) is particularly cool for HN! Tools like RSS Bridge (https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge) and Morss (https://github.com/pictuga/morss) can also help to get RSS feeds from websites that don't provide them and only provide a very trimmed down ones.