I’m not an SEO expert.
Just a developer trying to get at least some users to the things I build.
And lately it feels… strange.
What I’m seeing
I published several posts on Dev.to.
Some were original — 20–80 views
Some slightly adapted — maybe 100–300
But overall, nothing really moves.
At the same time:
- Google traffic → almost zero
- My own site → barely indexed
- Social → small spikes, then nothing
Feels like you start from zero every time.
The weird part
When I write a normal article — nobody reads it.
When I build a simple tool page for one very specific use case —
it has more chance to be indexed and actually used.
Not huge numbers. But different behavior.
This doesn’t look like classic SEO anymore.
Feels more like:
content that ranks → vs → answers that get extracted
The moment it clicked
I asked ChatGPT:
"regex for email validation"
It returned:
- working regex
- explanation
- edge cases
Everything in one place.
No need to open anything else.
So why would someone click search results?
What I’m trying now
Instead of writing more content, I started building tools.
Small ones. Very simple.
- JSON formatter
- Regex tester
- Base64 encoder
- SSL checker
- IP lookup
Right now I’m building towards ~100 tools.
Early signals
Still early, but I see:
- tool pages get indexed faster
- people actually stay on them
- some long-tail queries appear
- structured parts sometimes show up in AI answers
Again, small numbers.
But not the same pattern as blog posts.
How I structure a page now
I stopped thinking in terms of:
tool + some SEO text
Now each page looks more like a small answer system:
- clear title for one exact problem
- working tool
- short intro
- 2–3 useful sections
- examples
- FAQ
- glossary
- related tools
- links to nearby tools
Data structure behind it
Instead of writing everything manually, I model pages like this:
{
slug: "json-formatter",
title: "JSON Formatter",
searchIntents: [
"format json online",
"pretty print json",
"json beautifier"
],
useCases: [
{
title: "Debugging API responses",
description: "Make JSON readable"
}
],
glossary: [
{
term: "JSON",
definition: "Structured data format"
}
],
relatedSlugs: ["json-validator"],
clusterSlugs: ["json-validator", "json-diff"]
}
Shared layout
All pages use same structure:
<ToolPage>
<ToolHeader />
<ToolUI />
<HowToUse />
<UseCases />
<Examples />
<FAQ />
<Glossary />
<RelatedTools />
<ClusterTools />
</ToolPage>
Only the tool itself is different.
Everything else is predictable.
What I think is changing
Not sure yet, but looks like:
Content is no longer the main unit.
Structured answers are.
Blog posts are easy to summarize.
Tool pages with clear structure are harder to replace.
Not sure where this goes
Honestly, I don’t have a conclusion.
Just testing.
I’ll keep building tools, structuring pages, and see what happens.
If something works — will share numbers.
If not — also useful result.
Curious about others
Are you seeing any traffic from AI tools?
Or still mostly Google?
