Devlog #2: SEO for 150,000 game pages, and why only ChatGPT recommends my site

In Devlog #1 I wrote about building a backlog tracker for myself. This one is about the part I underestimated: getting anyone to find it.

My biggest problem was never the code. It was "where do I share this so people know it exists?" Reddit banned me for posting, so I stopped fighting it and went the other way: make NXTO findable on its own.

Two things made that harder than it sounds:

Google finds pages slowly. Bing supports IndexNow, so every time the catalog changes the server pings it with the changed URLs. Cheap to build, and it's probably why Bing-based products notice me first (more on that below).

Hosting costs money, so game pages now show where a key is cheapest, converted to your currency (guessed from your country, otherwise from the interface language).

Some links earn me a small commission. You never pay more.

Right now the only assistant that recommends NXTO is ChatGPT. That isn't random. Different assistants pull from different search indexes:

Links matter much less than in classic SEO. What matters is being in the index the assistant searches, and being mentioned in places it trusts. So my to-do list is: get into Google Search Console and Brave, keep the pages server-rendered, and collect mentions from people who aren't me. This post is part of that.