Build your website
Best practices for your own game website: useful pages, search basics, readable information and a clear route to the game.
Choose a useful next step.
Give the site one useful job: help someone understand the game and find the next step. Use the guides for the question you have, rather than buying a tool first.
- Build the useful page
Explain the gameplay, platforms and availability. Keep store, demo, press and contact links easy to find.
- Check how it is found
If the page is missing from Google, begin with the search-diagnosis guide.
- Measure one question
Keep visits, search impressions and player actions separate. The experiments below show why that distinction matters.
Read the guide for your next step.
GuideSearch Console AI report: what indie developers can measure
What indie developers can measure in Search Console, how Google reports AI search traffic, and where attribution and visibility claims stop.
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GuideUbersuggest vs Semrush: I ran the same keywords through both, four times
Four historical keyword-tool comparisons: matching outputs, changed difficulty scores and the limits of applying the results to an indie game.
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GuideSemrush pricing and review 2026: what it costs, and who should actually pay it
Historical Semrush test observations and optional toolkit costs, with a practical question: does your studio need a paid SEO suite at all?
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GuideUbersuggest review: is it worth it for an indie dev?
Should you buy Ubersuggest? Tested against Semrush over 125 keywords, checked on a site with no audience, with the part of the lifetime plan the pricing page buries. Three verdicts, one per experience level.
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GuideYour brand SERP: what a publisher sees when they google you
Check what someone finds when searching for your game or studio, and make sure the correct project is easy to identify.
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GuideWhy your website isn't showing up on Google
Not indexed and not ranking look identical and share almost no fixes. How to tell which one you have, in about five minutes.
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GuideHow 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 prompts, and Reddit's share of citations halves. Here's what that means for getting your game described correctly — and what's actually worth doing.
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GuideWhat is llms.txt? (And why Google says you don't need one)
What the proposed llms.txt format does, how it differs from crawler preferences and access control, and why a fetch is not a citation.
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GuideHumans hate text. AI needs it.
Make essential game information available as readable text alongside screenshots and trailers, while respecting differences between crawlers.
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GuideAI search visibility for indie games: mentions, visits and limits
Separate AI mentions, attributed visits and game outcomes. Check descriptions and evidence without treating a citation score as sales.
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GuideSetting up a gaming blog for SEO: structure, tags and tracking before content
A historical publisher build log on structure and tracking. Useful ideas for a game website, without a requirement to build a large blog.
Read the guide →The shared foundations.
Indie Game Marketing Basics
A manageable indie game marketing plan: the right players, a clear game page, one useful next action and a realistic way to observe the result.
Read the guide →FoundationFree and cheap indie game marketing tools
Choose tools for one practical indie marketing task at a time. Free options, optional scheduling and historical prices with current provider links.
Read the guide →Experiments from my own projects.
These are historical observations from Crit Pick, my gaming publication. They describe publishing decisions and measurement limits; they do not measure developer sales or wishlists.
I published 263 articles in ten days. Here's what Search Console showed afterwards.
What happened after a large publishing sprint on Crit Pick, with the sample limits, reporting windows and unresolved explanations made clear.
Read the experiment →Publisher experimentWhat eight weeks of Crit Pick data actually show
An early Crit Pick checkpoint: cumulative search figures, uneven page results and the conclusions those observations cannot support.
Read the experiment →Publisher experimentCrit Pick, month two: one page per Pal, and the web that ties them together
A historical Crit Pick build log about page structure and internal links, with the planned mechanisms kept separate from measured results.
Read the experiment →Publisher experimentGoogle core update 2026: is there one in August?
A historical August search investigation, corrected to distinguish observations, aggregate averages and unresolved causes.
Read the experiment →Publisher experimentThe Crit Pick SEO case study: the first month of real data
The first historical Crit Pick search baseline: an early publisher case, not a measured promise of indie game sales or wishlists.
Read the experiment →Publisher experimentThe Guild Wars 3 page, by the numbers
A historical keyword-planning snapshot from Crit Pick, separating reported tool values from assumptions about demand and competition.
Read the experiment →Publisher experimentHow I built the Guild Wars 2 event timer
How a player-facing event timer was built on Crit Pick, with product decisions separated from assumptions about SEO results.
Read the experiment →Publisher experimentBuilding a Guild Wars 3 page before the game exists
A historical Crit Pick build log about writing a useful game page when confirmed information is limited.
Read the experiment →Publisher experimentHow I filtered a 300k keyword sweep into one GW2 list
A historical keyword filtering example: remove ambiguous terms, record the rules and distinguish a selected list from a search-performance result.
Read the experiment →