You're a product builder. Should you also be a writer?
You're building a product. Your focus is code, features, user experience. Not meta descriptions. Not FAQ schema. Not internal linking. But content still needs to get done. Docs, landing pages, blog posts, metadata. And if you ignore it, nobody finds your product. So you have a choice. Spend hours on content yourself. Hire someone who doesn't understand your product. Or let an OS handle it....
We spent 6 months building for enterprise. Nobody bought it.
We thought we were ready. Bigger deals. Fewer customers. Better margins. That was the dream. So we built enterprise features. SSO. Advanced permissions. Audit logs. A whole new pricing tier starting at $2,000/month. We spent 6 months. Three engineers. One dedicated product manager. Endless meetings about "enterprise readiness." We launched the tier. Sent emails to our biggest users. Ran...
What's something you measured that completely changed how you build product?
For months, we were building features based on what users said they wanted. Feature requests. Sales calls. "It would be great if you added X." We built X. Nobody used it. So we stopped trusting what people said and started tracking what they actually did. The dataset We pulled 12 months of usage data from Rankfender. 1,247 active users. 27 distinct features across 8 modules. We looked at three...
What's the one SEO myth you believed for way too long?
I'll start. I believed that "keyword density" mattered. I spent hours making sure our target keyword appeared exactly 3-4 times per 500 words. I used tools that highlighted which words were "under-optimized." I even re-wrote paragraphs to squeeze in one more mention. Turns out that hasn't been a real ranking factor for over a decade. Google's RankBrain (2015) and BERT (2019) made keyword...
Google isn't anti-AI. It's anti-AI slop.
Everyone is panicking about the March 2026 Core Update. It started rolling out on March 27 and will take up to two weeks to complete . The spam update hit just three days earlier and finished in 19.5 hours, the fastest spam update on record . But here's what the data actually says. JetDigitalPro analyzed 600,000 web pages across the update period. The correlation between AI usage and ranking...
SEO used to be human-driven. GEO is model-driven. Do humans still matter?
For 20 years, SEO was a human game. You wrote for people, optimized for Google's crawlers, and built backlinks by convincing other humans to link to you. The inputs were human. The outputs were human. GEO is different. You're optimizing for language models that extract and synthesize. The inputs are structured data, schema markup, comparison tables. The outputs are citations, not clicks. So...
We asked 5 AI models the same 1,000 questions. How often do you think they agreed?
We built a model to generate 1,000 questions that people actually ask. Not random prompts. We scraped 50,000 real user queries from search logs, forum threads, and support tickets across 12 industries. We clustered them by intent and generated 1,000 representative questions. We asked those same 1,000 questions to 5 AI models: ChatGPT (GPT-4), Gemini (Ultra), Perplexity (Pro), Claude (4.5...
We gave AI our entire competitor tracking data and asked it to predict who would beat us.
Six months ago, we ran an experiment with our own data. At Rankfender, we tracked 5 of our own competitors across 8 AI systems. We log their share of voice, citation velocity, content gaps, platform variance. Months of raw numbers sitting in a dashboard. I pulled 6 months of data and fed it into Claude. One question: "Based on this, who is most likely to overtake us in the next 6 months? Show...
We gave AI our entire product roadmap and asked it to predict our failure points. It was brutal.
We ran an experiment 2 weeks ago. Control group: a two-hour roadmap review meeting. Six people in a room (virtual). We debated features. We argued about timelines. We discussed dependencies. We left feeling productive. Test group: We fed the same roadmap into Claude. No slides. No politics. No one trying to protect their pet project. Just the raw plan. The prompt: "Analyze this roadmap....
What's something AI is actually terrible at that nobody talks about?
I'll take the hit. AI has no idea when someone is politely furious. You know the email. "Hi team, just circling back on this again as I haven't heard anything. Thanks for your attention to this matter." Reads like a sweet grandma wrote it. A human reads that and thinks "oh no, they are about to burn the building down." AI reads it and thinks "great sentiment, very positive, 98% satisfaction...
Help us not build the wrong thing (4 upcoming features)
Hey PH Community ! We've been heads down building. Four new things in the works. I want to know which one matters most to you. RASE v1.0 – App Store Intelligence Tracks how your mobile app appears in AI answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity) and in store search. If you build apps, this tells you where you're visible and where you're invisible. ROSE v1.0 – Full On‑Page Engine Scans your entire site....
What's something you built that you thought was genius and nobody used?
Three months. Two developers. One feature nobody used. I knew it was bad when I checked the analytics and saw that the only person who used it more than once was me. And even I stopped after the second week. Here's how I knew it was a waste of time. Not in hindsight. In the moment. I just ignored the signs. The first sign: I couldn't explain it in one sentence. If you can't tell someone what...
We let Claude write 100% of our code for 7 days. Here's what broke first.
Last week we did something stupid. We paused all human coding. Gave Claude (Anthropic) access to our GitHub repo. Told it to build new features, fix bugs, and ship. No human review. No guardrails. Just Claude and our codebase. For 7 days, it ran the engineering team. Here's what happened. Day 1: Confidence was high. Claude (Sonnet 4.6 then Opus 4.5) fixed a small CSS bug in 30 seconds. Then...
We're launching RCGE v2.2 soon. Help us not build something you'll hate.
We're enhancing Rankfender's Content Generation Engine (RCGE) and v2.2 is coming in the next few weeks. Before we lock things in, we want to know what actually matters to people who use content generation tools. Here's what RCGE already does: Intelligence. It analyzes the top 10 ranking articles for any keyword and identifies patterns. What structure do they use? What headers? What formatting?...
What's the worst advice you've ever gotten about marketing your product?
I'll go first. Someone told me: "Just be consistent. Post every day. The algorithm rewards consistency." So I did. For six months, I posted every single day. Sometimes at 7am. Sometimes at 10pm. Weekends included. I wrote about our product, our features, our roadmap. I followed all the "best practices" — hook in the first line, three takeaways, call to action at the end. I got maybe 30 likes...
When does AI content cross the line from helpful to spammy?
We spent the last 4 months tracking 473 pieces of AI-generated content across our own site and customer sites. 218 got cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity. 255 got ignored. 12 got flagged in reader feedback as "low quality" or "clearly AI." We wanted to understand what separates the ones that work from the ones that don't. Here's what the data showed. The content that got cited Three things stood...