Anyone else feel like discovery on the internet is completely different than 2 years ago?
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Been thinking about this a lot. Two years ago, if I wanted to find or evaluate something, I'd Google it, skim a few links, maybe check a review site.
Now a good chunk of that happens in a chat window. I ask ChatGPT or Perplexity directly and just get an answer, sometimes with zero clicks to any actual website.
It feels like a pretty fundamental shift in how people find things, not just a new feature. Curious if others are noticing this in their own habits, or seeing it show up in how people find their products.
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Yes, I see it too, and the part that gets me is you can't see it happening. With Google you at least had Search Console — impressions, clicks, which page brought them in. When someone asks ChatGPT and it names you (or doesn't), there is no dashboard for that. You just get more or fewer signups and don't really know why. Are you seeing it in your own numbers yet — like traffic dropping but signups holding steady? That gap is where I think the real story is.
@saied_alimoradi Yeah, that "no dashboard for it" line is exactly the gap. With Search Console you at least had a paper trail. With this, you're right, it's just vibes and guesswork.
I haven't seen the traffic-drop-but-signups-hold pattern in my own numbers yet, but I've heard a couple of other founders describe almost exactly that. Organic search traffic flat or down, and when they ask around, some new users mention "oh I asked ChatGPT and it recommended you."
What's strange is there's no equivalent of "impressions" for that. You don't even know how many times you almost got mentioned and didn't. Feels like the earliest days of SEO all over again, except there's no Webmaster Tools yet to make sense of it.
Are you tracking anything manually right now, even something scrappy like periodically asking ChatGPT/Perplexity your own category questions and logging what comes back?
@_tanmay_pal Yeah, scrappy is exactly where I am — asking ChatGPT and Perplexity my category questions and logging what comes back. But I've stopped trusting single prompts, because LLMs are stochastic. Ask the same thing twice and the answer moves. So a prompt you "rank" for today might drop tomorrow, and you learn nothing.
What I think is the real edge is tracking the topic, not the prompt. In SEO the unit was the keyword. Here I think the unit is the topic — the cluster of questions people ask around one need. One prompt is noise. The topic is the thing that stays stable enough to actually measure. That's where I'd put my attention if I wanted a real signal instead of vibes.