Show HN: Aventos – An experiment in cheap AI SEO
4 points
17 hours ago
| 2 comments
| aventos.dev
| HN
Hi HN, we built Aventos- a cheap way to track company mentions in LLMs.

Aventos is an experiment we're doing after spending ~6 weeks working on various projects in the AI search / GEO / AEO space.

One thing that surprised us is how most tools in this category work. Traditionally, they simulate ChatGPT or Perplexity queries by attempting to reverse engineer the search process. Over the past year, many have shifted to scraping live ChatGPT results instead, since those are signficantly cheaper and reflect more real outputs.

Building and maintaining scrapers is tedious and fragile, so recently a number of SaaS products have emerged that effectively wrap a small number of third-party ChatGPT/Perplexity/Google AIO/etc scraping APIs. What felt odd to us is that many of these still tools charge $70–$200+ per month, despite largely being wrappers around the same underlying data providers.

So we wanted to test a simple idea: if the core cost is just API usage and commodity infrastructure and software costs are lower because of AI, can we be a successful startup if we price near our costs?

What we have so far:

1. Analytics similar to other tools (tracking AI citations, AI search results, and competitor mentions)

2. Content creation features (early and still being improved)

We’d love feedback- especially from a non-marketing perspective on:

* bugs

* confusing terminology or tabs

* anything that feels hand-wavy or misleading

There’s a demo account available if you want to poke around:

username: divit.endal4@gmail.com password: password

Happy to answer questions about what other things we've built in the space, how these tools work, etc.

satvikpendem
1 hour ago
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> many of these still tools charge $70–$200+ per month, despite largely being wrappers around the same underlying data providers

That is business. You should be charging a premium for features that companies would like to use, that's one of the first rules of B2B.

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JimsonYang
49 minutes ago
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That’s an awesome point. I think it's an aversion on my end to charge a higher price. Partly because it's still a pretty green field so there’s a lot that hasn’t been built yet- features that companies would like to use and we would charge for.

Will we charge a premium in the future? Yeah, but only where we’re confident there’s real ROI and have a great product to back that. For instance, AI attribution in this space is incredibly difficult right now. And in my opinion, without hard numbers (revenue, sign-ups, conversions, etc.), I can’t justify asking for premium pricing.

Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong tho and making excuses for myself, I think you have a good point

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gamegod
1 hour ago
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I stumbled across this a few weeks ago via Google or Kagi. One problem I have with a lot of AI tooling today is that I can't tell if it's a legit product, or just a toy that somebody vibe-coded in a day. AI can easily crap out a website that looks like this.

This is all just my 2 cents, so take it with a grain of salt, but I see trust and authenticity as a huge issue (made worse by LLMs), and it's doubly so with AI-based companies because it attracts flies.

One question I have is it's not clear to me that this all just doesn't boil down to plain old SEO. Does your platform generate recommended actions on how to improve your ChatGPT ranking? (and how is that different from just improving your PageRank?)

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JimsonYang
21 minutes ago
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Thanks for the feedback. To answer your question is: 1) yes, you still need good content as if you're ranking for SEO. However trad seo(i'm shorthanding bcuz i'm lazy) requires you to really to be in the top 5 results. Although this has beeen made worse by google AIO, 0 click answers, and a bunch of other things. For AI SEO you need to be in the top 20-30. Easier-yes but fundamentals like writing good conent is still needed 2) The between trad SEO and AI SEO is that the content you have to create to rank well has changed-often needing multiple pieces to rank well. For instance the prompt "Which AI company has the safest AI models?" has google results show a lot of listing various companies by ranking them safe and least safe-almost promotional content. But if you look at what chatgpt is searching and getting, it's a lot more safety index, reports, and technical information.

There's SEO experts that believe that trad seo and ai seo is the same-that's fair. We're of the group that believe it's pretty much the same, although we're starting to come at an inflection point and it'll change in the future.

To answer your second question: we don't have an icon to give recommended actions. I think that's a mistake we made during planning, where we saw "ai recommended actions" and questioned the validity of them. For instance, it doesn't make sense to edit and change wikipedia becuase that's incredibly hard although a few platforms do recommend that. The idea was that users would improve their keyword research and blog content strategy and we just assist in figuring out what to write for, which we still think is the best approach- however it seems that wasn't very clear. It's different from improving page rank because the strategy has been shifted. Instead of opimizing for the 1st and 2nd result, you're optimizing for topics as a whole and can even appear on the second page of google. If you're saying improving your pagerank via making good content that's unique and high quality-then I fully agree that you need to improve your pagerank

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add-sub-mul-div
1 hour ago
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So many LLM submissions here are self promotion spam from accounts with no other activity, which further makes them seem low effort and decreases the average amount of trust they've earned or deserve.
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JimsonYang
19 minutes ago
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mb, I use reddit a lot more than hn, so that's a complete miss on my end
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