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Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

> I had a chance to learn SEO/content principles from people who are responsible for creating content strategy for some of the most successful startups. The main thing that I want to achieve with this tool is to allow teams of one to create highly valuable content with references to authoritative sources _and_ suggest how to link this content to the rest of the content on their websites. I think I can automate hours of work by combining LLMs with scraping.

Wait a minute - your product fit is to scrape info from as many websites as possible, feed it into an LLM, and have it all link to each other to boost its SEO power? Am I correct in saying that's what you are doing, or am I way off?

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Suppose you are hired as a copywriter to write a blog post for my website about doggy daycare. You are tasked to write about "cold-weather workouts for dogs", but you have little to no knowledge about the subject. So you have to research. You open Google and search what existing articles come up related to this topic. You read them, write down interesting facts, and then propose an outline to the employee. Employee approves it and you write the article based on everything you've discovered. So we are on the same page, this workflow describes the absolute vast majority of copywriting jobs.

So that's basically what AIMD does. You enter the topic, it searches for interesting facts and citations, it analyzes the structure of articles that already rank well on the subject, and proposes an outline. You [the human] edit/approve the outline, and AIMD writes the article for you.

Right, so you type in a topic and you instantly get blogspam that is made perfect for SEO. There is no other use for this other than making every single search engine even worse than it already is.

In principle, I agree with you.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this subject and it boils down to: I can try to do this in such a way that creates the best possible outcome or I can wait for someone else to do it in such a way that makes it worse for everyone.

Take something like https://writesonic.com/ as an example. It is backed by Y Combinator and claims to have 5M+ users using it to write articles. They do exactly what you described – they use your topic to generate an article cramming unreferenced/unattributed facts into whatever they claim to be "SEO optimized" article structure. In fact, one of the reasons for developing AIMD is because I saw a substantial uptick in copywriter submissions of what is very clearly Writesonic generated content. They don't care about factual accuracy or attribution.

In contrast, what I am building towards is a fact checked, properly referenced way of writing articles. Every borrowed fact, citation, quote, etc is properly attributed. You could obviously choose to remove those references, but part of what I want to achieve is educating that keeping those references actually increases the legitimacy of the content.

One way or another, a variation of this is going to dominate the vast majority of content writing. The best possible outcome is that someone creates tools that reward good behavior/good actors.

dark colored hats have entered the chat...

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