> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.web3-advertising.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Crypto has a search problem. - URL: https://www.web3-advertising.com/crypto-has-a-search-problem/ - Published: 2026-08-28T11:08:18.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-28T11:08:18.000Z - Description: We spend fortunes getting attention in web3 and almost nothing getting found. Crypto decided search doesn't apply, but it does. - Author: Madusha Thilakarathna When we built [Outposts](https://outposts.io/?ref=web3-advertising.com), nobody on the team thought about search. We might have mentioned it once or twice, but we were busy shipping, and search felt like someone else's problem, the kind of thing a web2 company worries about. That is close to the default position in crypto. "Lets think about SEO later" is something I have said out loud, and I don't think I'm alone. I also don't think it's right. [My last piece](https://www.web3-advertising.com/why-crypto-marketing-feels-a-decade-behind-web2/) was about how crypto marketing feels a decade behind web2\. That one was about off-site: the paid channels, the distribution, the work of getting in front of people who have never heard of you. This is the other side of the coin: on-site search. The moment someone is already looking for exactly what you do, and you get to decide whether you are there when they look. Crypto has largely dropped the ball here. The assumption is that our users live on X (ex-Twitter), Discord and Telegram, so that is where the whole growth motion goes, and Google gets treated as a channel for other kinds of companies. But people search. They search whether a token is a scam, how to bridge to a chain, which wallet is safe to use, etc. That's someone with their hand up, at the bottom of the funnel, asking to be sold to. Web2 spent fifteen-plus years building a discipline around catching that moment. We did the classic crypto thing and ignored it. It doesn't apply to us. We mostly handed it to the aggregators. Search almost any crypto question and you get [CoinGecko](https://www.coingecko.com/?ref=web3-advertising.com), [CoinMarketCap](https://coinmarketcap.com/?ref=web3-advertising.com), a media site, a Reddit thread, or a scam. You rarely get the project that actually built the thing. Of course, not everyone ignores it. A few protocols show up for themselves. [Phantom does great SEO work](https://phantom.com/learn/crypto-101?ref=web3-advertising.com) and writes genuinely useful guides, [Symbiosis runs a well-optimised website](https://symbiosis.finance/bridge-btc-to-eth?ref=web3-advertising.com), but there are not many of them. SEO, and now AEO, is fruit that is ripe for the taking. ![A screenshot of a Google search results page after a search for "bridge eth to sol" showing the SEO results ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/dd/d7/ddd7acdd-b0e2-462c-8132-53172eb6962a/content/images/2026/08/Good-SEO-1.png) I know it's open because we stumbled onto it almost by accident. (I know, another accidental learning.) We’d finally decided to tackle some SEO work while doing some performance optimisations. Almost immediately, Outposts started ranking. For two or three months we were pulling hundreds of visitors a day out of search. These were people we'd never have reached on Twitter. We're not experts at SEO, but a run like that, from a team that wasn't even trying that hard, tells you how little competition there is out there and how effective it is. Then, just like that, things changed. This is the part the industry has not caught up to, because it happened fast and it happened inside Google. Getting a click out of a search is harder than it used to be. By [SparkToro's 2026 study](https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2026-less-than-one-third-of-google-searches-still-send-a-click/?ref=web3-advertising.com), more than two-thirds of Google searches in the US now end without anyone clicking through to a website at all, up from around six in ten two years earlier. Google increasingly answers the question on the page itself, with an AI summary sitting above the results. So ranking is no longer enough. You now have to be the source the AI decides to quote. A whole practice is forming around this, answer engine optimization, or AEO (although I'm not a huge fan of the term), getting your content cited inside AI answers rather than just ranking for the blue links. ![A Google search result page for "what is AEO" that has been marked up by the author showing the AEO and SEO goal results, while also pointing out where you can find additional SEO questions](https://storage.ghost.io/c/dd/d7/ddd7acdd-b0e2-462c-8132-53172eb6962a/content/images/2026/08/AEO-SEO-Gold-1.png) Web3 is now behind on two things at once: the search it skipped, and the AI layer that has been built on top of it. And the rules have teeth. Our run ended as quickly as it started. Google stopped showing us. No email, no warning, nothing in any dashboard. We watched the traffic fall off a cliff and worked out what had happened from the chart. Outposts takes real news from web3 communities and digests it into short, scannable updates for a newsletter and a dashboard. It is honest editorial work. But [Google's automated system](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies?ref=web3-advertising.com) flags sites that publish a lot of pages without adding enough of their own on top, and it does not stop to check whether you are a newsroom or a content farm. When you think about it, every news site is kind of doing the same thing we were. Unfortunately we got caught in a net meant for spam, and there's nobody to appeal to. The temptation now is to have AI churn out a hundred articles overnight and hoover up the traffic. Guaranteed that is the fast way to get buried, for the exact reason we were: it is the same mass-produced pattern Google's spam net is built to catch. [Don't get in Google's bad books](https://coinbound.io/what-happened-cointelegraph-google/?ref=web3-advertising.com). What works is slower and duller. Work out the questions your users are actually typing. Answer them better, and more originally, than anyone else is bothering to. Make your own site the best result on the page, and the thing the AI wants to cite. Most teams will not put in that kind of work, which is why the ones who do will be the ones that win. So if you run growth for a web3 product, try this. Go and search the one question your best customer would type right before they found you, and look at who comes up. If it is not you, start there.