A Letter from SeanG

Who am I

I'm SeanG, the creator of Rankaris.

I used to work at a major technical company as a systems designer focused on AI search. In January 2026, I left that company and became an independent developer.

After leaving, I built several small tools and one game. I believed the tools were useful and the game was fun. But I had zero paying users. My revenue was $0.

That failure forced me to reflect. I realized that my biggest weakness was marketing. I had spent too much time enjoying the process of building products and avoiding market work. I now see that as a form of intellectual laziness.

Why GEO

As an AI search engineer, I understood that GEO is now an important part of marketing. GEO was also my professional background. My first idea was to build a GEO SaaS product.

While exploring that path, I spent a lot of time on X and other social platforms. I talked with peers, practitioners, and potential customers. During that time, I met people like @tim_geo_seo and @yaojingang, both of whom are excellent GEO practitioners. I also tested many GEO tools myself.

That experience changed my view of the GEO industry. I realized that the biggest weakness in GEO is not the lack of tools. The bigger problem is that many users of those tools do not understand the basics.

What I saw

Many GEO tools promise clear results within days. That promise is misleading. Anyone who has actually done white-hat GEO knows that real progress is slow. GEO is a long-term discipline. If results appear too quickly, either the company was already unusually strong, or the tool is using black-hat methods. Those methods exchange long-term brand reputation for short-term gains.

Many GEO tools promise automatic writing and automatic publishing. That promise sounds attractive because people want convenience. In practice, most fully automated content becomes AI-generated junk. When I worked in AI search, we spent more than half of our time filtering and labeling low-quality information. If too much junk becomes associated with a user or brand, that brand can stop being recommended. As model companies improve their ability to detect AI-generated spam, this strategy becomes increasingly dangerous.

Many GEO tools also rely on advanced terms like JSON-LD, Schema, and E-E-A-T to signal expertise. I do not deny that these techniques matter. But the most effective method is usually much simpler. Look at the sources that AI systems already cite. Publish on those same sources. Then make your content 10% better. That approach is often more stable than technical tricks because AI search changes very quickly. When I worked in AI search, we shipped major releases every week. The rules changed so often that I sometimes could not remember what the ranking logic looked like a few weeks earlier.

Why Rankaris

That is why I changed my original plan. I decided not to build just another GEO tool. Instead, I chose to build a system for teaching GEO.

At the same time, I thought about Codedex, a platform where people learn programming by playing games. That idea stayed with me. Making games is one of the things I enjoy most. For the first time, I found a balance between my professional expertise and the kind of work I truly love.

That’s exactly how Rankaris came to be: a website where people learn GEO by playing games.

What I hope

My goal is simple. Whether you are a founder, a marketer, a product lead, or a GEO practitioner, I want you to learn something genuinely useful through Rankaris. I want you to build real GEO fundamentals. I hope you avoid common traps and become harder to mislead.

Remember, the best way to understand GEO is still to practice it yourself. Even so, I hope Rankaris can become a helpful companion along the way.

Thanks. Thanks for playing my game.

SeanG
April 27, 2026