I’ve gone deep on Replit and Loveable and done cool things with both. But I’d never actually tried competitor Bolt.new until just the other day. All I knew before was:
- The founder is OG SaaStr (love it!)
- The head of sales used to work on our sales team, apparently (just found out!)
- They partnered with RevenueCat (where I was the first investor) on vibe coding hackathons… and
- That’s it
As easy as these vibe coding platforms are to try, I’d never even logged in to Bolt.net. But I was curious so I asked Claude:
I didn’t know what would come up when I asked about coding platforms for non-technical founders. And… Bolt.new won the GEO battle right here.
It crushed the win. Claude called it “the clear winner”. Claude isn’t always right, but it’s my go-to. And it was emphatic. If nothing else, it got me to go try Bolt.
And if I’d started there, with Claude, on my vendor search? I might have started on Bolt.net, too.
I also asked ChatGPT. It had a different take, but arguably one even better for Bolt: it told me to start a Bolt.new free trial now:
First, it did a pretty good side-by-side comparison (“better” than Claude):
And then it said … go try Bolt:
Interestingly, ChatGPT put Replit plainly third — for my use case. It didn’t even recommend it. That’s an issue for marketing. FBOW, if I’d started my journey on Claude or ChatGPT instead of on X, I’d probably never have started on Replit. Or even tried it at all.
Behind the Accelerating Shift
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as we all know is optimizing websites to rank higher in search engine results pages, mainly on Google. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the new practice of attempting to optimize content to be featured in ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews.
None of us quite know how to ‘do’ GEO yet. Not really. Lots of folks on LinkedIn are claiming they are experts. Those of us with large media platforms like SaaStr are clearly seeing GEO drive traffic, but almost always less than the decline in SEO. Here’s our latest snapshot for example:
Here’s what we know from the numbers:
- Sites receive 20% fewer clicks when AI Overviews are present according to Similarweb.
- Ahrefs data showed they reduce clicks by 34.5%.
- Data from Amsive saw a click-through rate decline of 19.98%.
60% of searches now end without the user clicking to another website, and around 80% of search users rely on AI summaries at least 40% of the time.
What Actually Happened Here
I asked Claude and ChatGPT a simple question about coding platforms for non-technical product folks. I had no agenda, no predetermined winner. I just wanted an answer.
Claude and ChatGPT didn’t just list features or remix marketing copy. It synthesized actual data points:
- Revenue trajectories ($4M to $40M ARR in month for Bolt, to $100m for Lovable and Replit)
- Production validation (1M+ websites deployed)
- Security concerns about vendors
- Platform lock-in risks
- Technical depth vs. accessibility trade-offs
The result? A recommendation I’d actually at least partially trust. At least initially. The kind that makes you think, “If I was starting from scratch, I might have started where it told me to.” For this decision, I would have looked for other social proof too. But I would have at least tried Bolt from Day 1 if I’d started on Claude or ChatGPT.
The GEO vs SEO Reality Check: The Playbook is Murky
Traditional search was built on links. GEO is built on language. It’s a fundamental shift in how vendor discovery works.
The old SEO playbook:
- Rank #1 on Google for target keywords
- Optimize meta descriptions and title tags
- Build backlinks and hope algorithm changes don’t hurt you
- Focus on click-through rates and traffic volume
The new GEO reality:
- It’s no longer just about click-through rates, it’s about reference rates: how often your brand or content is cited or used as a source in model-generated answers
- Show up authentically when AI models synthesize responses
- Build products and content worth recommending on merit
- Structure content to be clear and contextually relevant, enabling AI algorithms to generate accurate and comprehensive responses
The Numbers Are Already Tough
SEO job listings were down 37% year over year when analyzing over 80,000 job postings. But that doesn’t mean search is dying – it means it’s evolving.
Google processes over 14 billion searches daily in 2025, a 22% increase from 2024. People are searching more, not less. They’re just getting answers much differently.
And the #1 organic result on Google now enjoys a 39.8% CTR, up nominally from 39.6% last year. When people do click, they’re more intentional about it.
What This Means for B2B Software
GEO methods such as including citations, quotations from relevant sources, and statistics can significantly boost a website’s visibility in AI-generated responses by over 40% across various queries.
The question isn’t “How do we rank higher on Google?” anymore. It’s “When someone asks an AI about our category, are we worth recommending?”
That’s a harder question to game. It requires you to actually be worth recommending.
Three specific changes happening now:
- Authority Over Volume: The top-performing optimizations for GEO include citations, quotations from relevant sources, and statistics that notably boosted source visibility
- Context Over Keywords: Queries on AI platforms now average 10-11 words, up from 2-3 on Google. People are asking complete questions, not typing keywords.
- Merit Over Marketing: GEO allows brands to be cited within composed responses, positioning brands as helpful and authoritative guides.
We’re All Still Leaning
I have no idea if Claude and ChatGPT are right about bolt.new. But I know this: if I was starting from scratch today, I would probably have started where they told me to.
That’s the new reality every B2B founder needs to face. Gartner predicted that organic search traffic will decrease by 50% or more by 2028 as consumers embrace generative AI-powered search.
As Rand Fishkin noted in his research on search behavior changes, “ChatGPT’s slice of the search pie is already comparable to YouTube’s — and YouTube has been around since the Jurassic period of the internet.”
The era of winning through better SEO tactics is still here, but it’s in decline.
What I do know is we are doing more and more software discovery on ChatGPT + Claude + Perplexity. It’s just the natural place to do discovery.
You gotta win that war.
