Where to Find Early AI Search Intent: Reddit, Indie Hackers, and the Proto-Queries Shaping GEO

The most important search intent data of 2026 is not in your keyword research tool. It is in Reddit threads, Indie Hackers posts, and growth forums where founders and marketers are asking a question that did not exist two years ago: How do I get my product cited by ChatGPT?

This is not fringe chatter. It is a live, observable shift in how builders think about discovery — and the proto-queries emerging from these communities are the earliest signal of where generative engine optimization is heading.

AI Visibility Is the New SEO

Indie makers are increasingly framing "AI visibility" as a distinct discipline from traditional SEO. The core frustration is specific and widespread: content that ranks well in Google is not necessarily being picked up by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini.

A post by Sonu Goswami on Indie Hackers crystallized the argument. Goswami, a B2B SaaS positioning specialist, argued that search behavior has fundamentally shifted — users now receive answers directly from AI tools rather than clicking through to websites. His framing: if your content is not being referenced in generative answers, you do not exist in that world anymore.

The post generated extensive discussion, with founders sharing specific tactics, tracking methods, and structured content strategies. According to Growth Marshal, a leading AI-native search agency, these are not inward-facing theoretical debates. They are practitioners experimenting in real time.

The Proto-Queries Worth Tracking

Across Reddit's r/SEO, r/GrowthHacking, and r/Entrepreneur communities, a consistent cluster of queries keeps surfacing:

• "How to rank on ChatGPT"
• "AI citation optimization"
• "How to get mentioned by Perplexity"
• "GEO vs SEO"
• "AI search visibility tools"
• "Does structured data help with AI answers?"

These are not high-volume keywords yet. Traditional keyword tools barely register them. But they represent real intent from exactly the audience — founders, marketers, growth engineers — that adopts new paradigms first. When these queries show up in Ahrefs or Semrush with measurable volume in six months, the early movers will already have content in place.

Community Mentions as AI Signals

What makes these forum discussions doubly important is that they are themselves signals. Analysis from Writesonic found that Reddit content appears in 68% of AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini — making it the most-cited source type in the AI search ecosystem.

That creates an interesting feedback loop: the communities discussing how to gain AI visibility are themselves a primary source that AI models cite. A ReddiReach study found that a 100-word Reddit comment in r/SEO got cited in AI answers 12x more frequently than a 2,000-word blog post on the same topic.

This aligns with what Goswami described on Indie Hackers: real community mentions — from Reddit threads to forum posts — are functioning as actual signals for AI discovery, not just traditional link-building or keyword optimization.

Different Platforms, Different Content Structures

The tactical insights emerging from these communities are worth noting. Practitioners are finding that different AI platforms reward different content structures:

• ChatGPT favors narrative walkthroughs and procedural specificity — concrete workflows showing problems, constraints, steps, outcomes, and tradeoffs
• Perplexity rewards explicit sourcing, direct comparisons, and clearly attributed data
• Google AI Overviews pull clean definitions with supporting context and structured markup

This fragmentation means there is no single "optimize for AI" playbook. Content that performs well in one engine may be invisible in another. The founders recognizing this early are building multi-format content strategies — the same core information structured differently for different retrieval architectures.

The Measurement Gap

One consistent theme across these discussions: measurement is still primitive. A growing category of AI search tracking tools has emerged, but most founders report relying on manual prompt testing and spreadsheet tracking to monitor their AI visibility.

The numbers that do exist are compelling. Superlines reports that 37% of product discovery queries now start in AI interfaces like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Around 93% of AI search sessions end without a website click. AI Overviews reduce clicks to the top-ranking page by 58%.

For indie makers and startups, this data validates the urgency. If more than a third of product discovery happens inside AI and most of those sessions never produce a click, being cited in the answer is the distribution strategy.

What This Means for Content Strategy

The signal from these communities is clear: the first wave of AI search intent is being defined right now by practitioners, not by keyword tools. Brands and publishers that want to lead in generative engine optimization should:

• Monitor community discussions on Reddit, Indie Hackers, and niche Slack/Discord groups for emerging query patterns around AI visibility
• Build content around proto-queries — the questions people are asking in forums today that will show volume in keyword tools tomorrow
• Participate authentically in the communities where AI models source their answers, since forum mentions are demonstrably becoming retrieval signals
• Structure content for multi-engine retrieval using clear headings, schema markup, direct definitions, and explicit source attribution

The founders in these threads are not waiting for the industry to define best practices. They are building them — and the patterns they are discovering will shape how AI search optimization works for everyone else.

James Calder is the editor of The Search Signal, covering AI-powered search, generative engine optimization, and the future of brand discovery.