Google Isn't the Only Search Engine Anymore Your buyers are asking AI first. Your website was bui...

Google Isn't the Only Search Engine Anymore Your buyers are asking AI first. Your website was bui...Google Isn't the Only Search Engine Anymore Your buyers are asking AI first. Your website was bui...

The network for creativity

Join 1.25M professional creatives like you

Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free

Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started

Back to feedPost

Radu Sferlic

pro

• Jul 18

Google Isn't the Only Search Engine Anymore

Your buyers are asking AI first. Your website was built for a world where they asked Google.

That gap is quietly costing businesses more than any ranking drop ever did.

Here's the shift. Search used to be a list. You typed a query, got ten blue links, and picked one. Now people open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or an AI overview and ask a question in plain language. What they get back isn't options. It's an answer. Often one recommendation, already decided.

Which means the strategy has to change.

Websites built for Google were built to rank. Keywords, backlinks, meta tags, position tracking. All of it still works, and none of it is enough anymore.

Websites built for AI search are built to be understood and cited. That's a different job entirely.

AI needs structure. Clean markup, proper schema, content organized so a machine can extract a clear answer instead of guessing at one. It needs clarity. Vague marketing copy gets skipped, specific claims get quoted. And it needs trust signals, because AI pulls from a small pool of sources it considers credible. If you're not in that pool, you don't exist in the answer.

The businesses figuring this out right now have an enormous advantage. Most of their competitors are still optimizing for a search behavior that's already changing underneath them. This window won't stay open long. It never does.

Google isn't dead. It's just no longer the only door.

If you want to know whether AI is mentioning your business or your competitors, send me a message. Let's find out where you actually stand.

Maty Sandoval

max

• 2d

The shift from ranking in search results to being understood by AI answers is a useful framing. What is the first website change you would recommend to a business adapting to that behavior?

Julia Calabrese

curator• Jul 17

Hi everyone! Superside is scaling our creative team, and we're hiring AI Creative Directors ⚡️ We're looking for people who live inside node-based AI pipelines [Flora, Figma Weave, Krea Nodes] and who know how to chain models together to build real production workflows, not just prompt one tool at a time 🧠 If you've spent the last couple of years deep in this space - building pipelines, breaking them, rebuilding them better - you know exactly what that means. This role is for people who think in systems, not single outputs. Superside is 100% remote. Learn more about us: https://www.superside.com/ Open role: https://jobs.lever.co/superside/2df61b6c-a628-4fba-ab3e-ccaba86adcde?lever-via=padFs434mF&lever-social=job_site If you are interested and want to apply, send me a DM!

Boluwatife Delight

• Jul 18

This is amazing

Hlieb Dmytruk

• Jul 17

One of the most underrated capabilities of AI is design creation. Just five years ago, you had to pay a designer and wait hours for a concept to be made—and if you didn't like it, you had to wait several more hours for revisions. Today, with the power of AI, you can generate 10 different design options in just a single hour, pick your favorite, and take it to a professional to build it out completely. No long waiting times, no endless decision-making and no overpayments. Maximum creativity. Try it, generate it, choose it, create it.

AI Art AI Engineer aidesign

Maty Sandoval

max

• 2d

That AI-generated product photography with the gold accents and stone textures looks genuinely editorial, not the usual stock-photo AI look. What was your prompt workflow like to keep the lighting this consistent across shots?

Octavian ciulei

• Jul 17

From AI Slop to Autonomous Pipeline: Drilling for Data with Base44 & Envato 🛢️⚡ The Backstory: The Panic & The Concept I spend my days building raw, headless, zero-touch B2B data pipelines. But recently, a high-ticket client asked the one question that terrifies every backend builder: "Can I see your portfolio?" I didn't have one. I had 48 hours to prove I wasn't just talking.

I spun up Base44. It generated a structural layout in seconds, which was sick, but the content? Absolute corporate AI slop. Fake statistics, soulless design, empty words. It was a dead skeleton. I needed to override the AI and give it a heartbeat, which led me to the core theme of this project: Drilling.

I grew up in Moreni, Romania—the 3rd place on Earth to extract oil back in 1929. My great-grandparents literally drilled the earth for raw fuel. Today? I drill the modern web for unstructured data. So, I turned the Base44 template into a digital drilling rig. As you scroll down the depth gauge (from 0m to 1420m), you dive deeper into my real, live architectures.

The Envato Glow-Up: Injecting the Soul A cool metaphor is nothing without the right aesthetic. I wanted the site and the video to feel like a high-tension tech thriller. I hit Envato Elements to completely override the AI's generic look:

The Visuals: I ripped out the plain background and injected a dark, industrial grainy texture via CSS to give it that gritty, underground feel. I swapped the AI placeholders with my actual live work: geospatial heatmaps, running Make.com webhooks, and my NLP LLM-as-a-Judge Streamlit app.

The Sound Design (SFX): I wanted the viewer to feel the pressure. I used Envato for the dark cinematic synthwave track, heavy sub-boom drops for the panic moments, digital error buzzers when the AI failed, and rapid-fire UI clicks.

The Voice: I used a cinematic AI voice generator to narrate the exact moment my ancestors' history connected with my modern tech stack.

The Video: Learning DaVinci Resolve in 5 Hours Here’s the craziest part of this submission: I didn’t know how to edit videos before this weekend. I wanted the pitch video to be as dynamic as my code, so I literally learned DaVinci Resolve from absolute zero in 5 hours just for this challenge. I built a 4-way split-screen grid and edited a rapid-fire "ladder" sequence of me downloading Envato assets, synced perfectly to mechanical keyboard clicks every 0.2 seconds. It’s raw, fast, and shows exactly how I operate.

The Result I didn't just build a pretty template. I built a fully functional B2B infrastructure. The contact form at the bottom of the site is hardwired via webhooks straight into my Make.com pipelines.

AI gave me the speed and the skeleton. Envato gave it the aesthetic and the soul. My ancestors drilled for oil. I automate the future. You can check my page here: https://garrulous-build-logic-flow.base44.app/ Post on SocialMedia X:https://x.com/ydgsgiwhs/status/2077907190224961774?s=20

#HumanByDesign #GiveItAGlow #EnvatoChallenge #BuildInPublic #Base44

envatochallenge