Are you optimizing for Google while your users search on ChatGPT? (Why I stopped doing traditional SEO)

Every indie hacker knows the grind: you build a great product, and then you spend 80% of your time fighting the Google algorithm or posting endlessly on X/Reddit just to get a trickle of traffic.

I was doing the exact same thing until I looked at my own habits. When I need a new SaaS tool or an automation platform, I don't Google it anymore. I go to Perplexity or ChatGPT and ask: "What is the best tool for [X]?"

But here is the scary part for us founders: LLMs don't care about your beautiful landing page or your clever marketing copy.

If your product’s data isn't structured in a way that AI engines can easily parse and verify, they will simply recommend your competitor whose data is machine-readable. AI search engines look for semantic relationships, clear feature definitions, and verified entities, not keyword-stuffed H1 tags.

The "Aha" Moment I started testing how LLMs recommended products in my niche and realized there was a massive gap between traditional SEO and what we now call GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

So, I built a solution to fix my own problem: CitableHub.

It’s basically a directory and a machine-readable layer where AI-native startups get structured for discovery. Instead of fighting for Google page 1, CitableHub translates your product's core value into the exact structured format that models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude actually want to read and cite as a source of truth.

The Result? I just checked my analytics this week, and I am already seeing organic referral traffic coming directly from Perplexity and ChatGPT sources. It actually works.

We as founders need to stop fighting for the search engines of 2015 and start optimizing for the generative engines of today.

I'm curious: Have any of you started seeing AI tools pop up as referral sources in your analytics? How are you optimizing your SaaS to be "read" by AI? Let's discuss.