Discovery has changed

For most of the past two decades, founders thinking about discovery had a simple-ish answer: search engine optimisation. Make your site rank in Google. Bring in users through the queries they’d type to find products like yours.

That hasn’t gone away. But discovery is now broader and stranger. AI-powered answer engines summarise queries instead of just listing links. Models recommend products in conversation. Users increasingly find new tools through AI rather than traditional search.

If your product is going to be found in 2025 and beyond, you need a broader picture of discovery. Traditional SEO still matters. So does showing up well in AI-driven answers. So do communities, social platforms, partnerships, and other channels traditional search never covered.

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Getting found (SEO, AEO, and AI discovery)