SEO is still the best distribution hack for indie developers.
The screenshot you are seeing is a blog post I released yesterday (https://blog.ozigi.app/blog/how-to-start-a-newsletter-2026) ranking #1 on Google's result page for a competitive search "How to start a newsletter in 2026."
This blog post was generated and edited on the Ozigi long-form dashboard.
It even outranked Mailtrap.
A few days ago, I read an article on the Google Developer Blog about how optimising for SEO is still your best bet at discoverability, in this world of AI.
I took that into consideration and doubled down on my SEO efforts for the Ozigi blog.
I noticed a spike in my website traffic today that I couldn't account for. Went to check my blog traffic and saw that it was doing numbers I didn't expect.
I searched the keyword on Google to see how far below I ranked, and to my surprise, I ranked #1.
SEO is not dead, you're just not optimising properly.
If you are interested in the exact SEO hack I used to achieve this, just drop a comment below.
I would love to know what you did. I am currently trying to figure out SEO for a recently launched SaaS for the farming community.
https://acreboss.com
Congrats on the #1 ranking — outranking Mailtrap on a competitive keyword is genuinely impressive. The Google Developer Blog point you mentioned is interesting because it runs counter to the narrative that AI search is killing SEO. What I've noticed is that AI-generated answers in search actually increase clicks on the #1 result when the query is how-to or tutorial — people read the summary, want more depth, and click through. So SEO may matter even more than before for the top spot, while everything below #3 gets squeezed. Curious what specific optimisation you focused on — was it primarily on-page structure (headings, semantic HTML), backlink velocity, or something in the content format itself?
Interested to hear the hack if you would be so kind