A friend asked ChatGPT for the best tool in my category last month. I wasn't in the answer. That stung more than any Google ranking ever has.
February was the month the AI-search shift stopped being theory. If a model doesn't know you exist, you are invisible to the people who now ask the model instead of searching.
The ones that hit
Generative Engine Optimization is the new SEO: getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers. Different game, same goal: be the source the machine trusts.
The deeper move is becoming a distribution-first company. Build the audience before the product. I learned this the hard way at Cathedral Studios. We got 40,000 Steam wishlists in 48 hours for The Bornless with zero budget, because we had spent months in the community first. The wishlists were just the community showing up.
Tied to that: the founder-as-brand flywheel. Your story is the marketing. People trust a person before they trust a logo.
And two on the retention side I love: streak mechanics (Duolingo built an empire on this) and dense community seeding, where you dominate one tight group before going broad.
The thread
Intelligence is getting cheap. Everyone has the same models now. So the moat moves to who gets deployed, who gets remembered, who the community actually vouches for.
This is the same lesson the forest keeps teaching me. The visible tree depends on the mycelium underneath, the invisible network nobody sees. Distribution is mycelium. Do the unglamorous relationship work below the surface and the growth above it looks like magic.
It's just months of showing up before anyone was counting.