I shut down my SaaS a few weeks ago. But before that, I accidentally discovered something pretty interesting about SEO. In ~2 months, Meet Lea went from 0 to 464k SEO impressions. I wasn’t doing SEO “the proper way”. No content team. No expensive backlinks strategy. No obsession over domain authority. Most of it came from: → programmatic pages → comparison pages → glossaries / FAQs → internal linking → link magnets Basically, I treated SEO more like a system design problem than a marketing task. What surprised me most wasn’t even the traffic. It was where the traffic came from. A lot of users told me they discovered the product through ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. Not through Google directly. That changed how I think about SEO entirely. It feels like we’re moving from: “ranking webpages” to: “becoming the source AI assistants trust when answering a question”. Some pages that barely got clicks on Google still generated signups because LLMs were surfacing them in answers. That’s also why “buy / compare / alternative to” pages worked absurdly well. At some point someone literally told me: “Claude said you were probably the best fit for what I’m trying to do.” Which is honestly a crazy sentence to receive. After shutting down the product, I decided to document the entire process while everything was still fresh in my head. So I turned all my notes into a long playbook. It covers: → the content systems → the programmatic SEO setup → AI-assisted workflows → Claude Code orchestration → indexing / crawl issues → comparison pages → glossary strategy → schemas → internal linking → audits → etc A lot of it is SaaS-oriented, but most of the ideas work for any content-heavy site. You can give it to your favorite coding agent (Claude / Cursor / Kilocode ...) and it will implement it for you. Here’s the playbook if you want to read it: https://paulirolla.substack.com/p/how-i-went-from-0-to-464000-seo-impressions

Anthropic just passed OpenAI in business adoption for the first time, and within hours both companies dropped offers to lock users in. Codex gave 2 months free. Claude Code bumped limits 50%. Here's why I think we're in a "free sample phase" where the real product isn't the subscription, it's you. Use it like crazy, but build projects flexible enough to swap tools the day pricing resets.