START HERE · YOUR WEBSITE

Your website is the discovery channel you actually own

Your Steam page belongs to Valve. Your following belongs to whichever platform is having a good year. Your website belongs to you, it works while you sleep, and it is the piece almost every indie skips. This is where to start.

Start with the basics → See it tested in the open

Last updated

Why bother, when you already have a Steam page

Because the Steam page answers one question — should I buy this — and only for people who already found you. Everything before that moment happens somewhere else: a search, a question typed into a chatbot, a link someone sends a friend. A site you own is the only surface where you decide what that looks like.

The short version
  • It compounds. A social post is worth the most on day one. A page that answers a real question is worth more in month six than in week one.
  • It is where AI answers come from. Language models quote pages, not posts. If your site has no readable text, you are not in the answer.
  • Nobody can switch it off. Reach, ranking rules and entire platforms change. A domain you own does not.
  • It is the cheapest thing here. No ad budget, no agency. Mostly time and a bit of patience.

Everything written about this

Every post that belongs to the website side of things — search, AI answers, tooling, and the public experiment. Newest first.

10 Aug 2026 · SEOGoogle core update 2026: is there one in August?Trackers spiked on 1 August and the forums called it an update. Google did not. Every confirmed 2026 core update, three things "Google sa… 31 Jul 2026 · SEOHow to rank in ChatGPT (and why the answer keeps changing)ChatGPT cites different sources depending on how hard it thinks: Semrush found only 25.6% overlap between reasoning modes on identical pr… 29 Jul 2026 · projectThe Crit Pick SEO case study: the first month of real dataTwo weeks to get crawled, then 18 clicks and ~1,650 impressions. The first real Search Console data from Crit Pick, plus the dos and don'… 27 Jul 2026 · SEOWhat is llms.txt? (And why Google says you don't need one)llms.txt is a Markdown file at your site's root that's supposed to hand your pages to AI models. Ahrefs checked 137,210 domains: 97% of t… 24 Jul 2026 · projectThe Guild Wars 3 page, by the numbersWhy the GW3 tracker is shaped the way it is, read as search strategy, not code: what term it chases, how the keyword set was cleaned, and… 22 Jul 2026 · projectHow I built the Guild Wars 2 event timerA live clock for every fixed-schedule event in Tyria, and the calls I made building it, including which SEO advice I took and which I lef… 20 Jul 2026 · SEOHumans hate text. AI needs it.Readers skim, so we build pages out of visuals. But the crawlers behind ChatGPT and Claude read raw HTML only — no JavaScript, no images… 17 Jul 2026 · projectBuilding a Guild Wars 3 page before the game existsWorking notes on the Guild Wars 3 tracker: why it's shaped the way it is, the SEO/UX tensions I had to settle, and what I still need to fix. 15 Jul 2026 · projectHow I filtered a 300k keyword sweep into one GW2 listA plain account of turning a giant Semrush export into one master GW2 list: what I kept, what I threw out, where I filed it, and why. 13 Jul 2026 · SEOAI search visibility won't sell your indie game. Here's what it actually does.Zero-click is real, but AI referrals are tiny and no storefront counts web traffic — Valve says so outright. So what is AI search visibil… 12 Jul 2026 · projectSetting up a gaming blog for SEO: structure, tags and tracking before contentThe unglamorous part nobody shows off: structure, tags, branding, tracking and schema, all set up before the first post went live, and th… 5 Jul 2026 · marketingFree and cheap indie game marketing toolsA practical, no-budget stack of indie game marketing tools: the free ones worth setting up first, and the few cheap upgrades worth paying… 5 Jul 2026 · basicsIndie Game Marketing BasicsThe unglamorous order that actually gets a game found: a burst of short clips, the two channels you own, and a Steam page that does its j…

Where to start

Three places, in the order that makes sense. The first teaches the ideas, the second gives you the tools, the third shows the whole thing running on a real site with the numbers in public.

01 · Learn itSEO Beginner BasicsWhat SEO actually is, without the jargon, and the order I would learn it in. Start here if search is a black box. 02 · Equip yourselfSEO ToolsThe handful of tools worth your time, what each one is actually for, and which of them are free. 03 · Watch it workShowcase ProjectCrit Pick: a site built from zero as a public SEO experiment. Every number published, including the bad ones.

Common questions

Do I need a website if my game is only on Steam?
You can ship without one. But the Steam page only converts people who already arrived, and it gives you nothing to point at outside Steam — no press kit, no devlog, nothing a search or an AI answer can cite. A small site fills the gap before the store page does its job.
How much work is this really?
Less than social, and it accumulates instead of evaporating. A handful of pages that genuinely answer questions will keep working for years. The catch is that it starts slowly, so it is worth beginning long before launch.
Can I just use a devlog on itch or a Notion page?
You can, and it is better than nothing. The trade-off is that you inherit someone else’s URLs, their layout and their decisions about what search engines can read. If it stays on a domain you own, you keep all three.