I’ve been building online for 6 months. My biggest fear isn’t failing — it’s disappearing.
I’ve been trying to build on the internet for about 6 months now.
Not in the “I want passive income while I sleep” way.
More like: I want to build enough leverage that I don’t have to spend my life working on things I don’t believe in. I don’t want to look back one day and realize I was useful to payroll systems, Jira boards, and other people’s roadmaps, but never built anything meaningful of my own.
The uncomfortable part is that building is not the hard part anymore.
With Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, Vercel, Stripe, Supabase, etc., I can ship faster than ever.
The hard part is not disappearing.
I had this realization after launching a small tool and checking Google Search Console.
The site existed.
The pages worked.
The product was usable.
But Google had basically only noticed the homepage and one old redirected page.
Everything else — rankings, example report, guides, privacy, terms — existed, but might as well have been invisible.
That hit me harder than any failed launch.
Because as indie hackers, we obsess over:
- features
- design
- pricing
- stack
- “should I add auth?”
- “should I add Stripe?”
- “should I rebuild this in Next?”
But then we ship a site that search engines barely understand and AI crawlers may not be able to read.
So I rebuilt my project around that problem.
The product is called AIO Checker:
It checks whether a public site is actually readable as a source for search and AI systems:
- crawl access
- indexability
- initial HTML readability
- structured data
- sitemap quality
- llms.txt detection
- AI crawler rules
- snippet / exposure controls
I ran it on itself after the rebuild:
- AI Visibility: 92/100
- AI Exposure: 49/100
- 591 visible words in initial HTML
- 27 sitemap URLs
- JSON-LD found
- llms.txt found
The funny part: the tool also exposed its own weaknesses.
It told me I still have thin trust signals and that my crawler exposure policy is too open if I care about training bots.
That felt honest, which is what I wanted.
My current thesis:
Most indie products don’t die because the product is bad.
They die because the internet never learns how to describe them.
Google doesn’t index enough pages.
AI systems can’t parse the React shell.
The homepage is vague.
The sitemap is incomplete.
The founder writes one launch post, gets 11 upvotes, then assumes the market rejected the product.
Maybe the market never even saw it.
So my next bet is simple:
Create useful, boring, indexable pages around real search intent.
Not “AI SEO ultimate guide 2026” garbage.
Actual pages like:
- why ChatGPT can’t read my React site
- how to allow ChatGPT Search but block AI training
- do I need llms.txt?
- AIO Checker vs traditional SEO audit
- public scans for Vercel, Stripe, GitHub, etc.
I don’t know if this will work yet.
But I know the previous version — building quietly and hoping people magically arrived — definitely didn’t.
If you’re building something right now, I’d be curious:
When was the last time you checked whether your site is actually readable before JavaScript runs?
Drop your URL if you want. I’ll run a few through AIO Checker and reply with the most obvious issue I see.
Small update:
I’m going to run a few free scans from this thread and reply with the single most obvious visibility issue I find.
Not a full audit, just the highest-leverage thing I’d fix first.
If you drop your URL, I’ll look at things like:
whether the initial HTML is actually readable
whether the sitemap exposes useful pages
whether robots.txt blocks or allows the right crawlers
whether structured data exists
whether the homepage explains the product clearly enough for search / AI systems
I’m especially curious to see how many indie products are technically live, but invisible before JavaScript runs.