codebuddy.tech

I thought Google and Bing were enough — then I saw this dashboard

I've been building web tools and small projects for about a year. Like most developers I use Google and Bing. I submit my sitemaps, I think about keywords, I do the basics. I figured that covered my bases.

Then I came across a post on r/SaaS from someone who's been building solo for 3+ years. They shared their search engine traffic breakdown and it stopped me cold.

Google was seventh. DuckDuckGo sent more than three times as much traffic as Google.

Now I'm not saying Google SEO doesn't matter — it absolutely does. But I realized I had never once thought about whether my sites show up properly on DuckDuckGo, Yandex, or Baidu. I've never optimized for them at all.

I'm a Vancouver developer building in public — 8 sites live, currently pre-revenue, learning as I go. Seeing someone else's real data was more useful than any SEO guide I've read. So I'm sharing it here in case it helps someone else the same way it helped me.

Today I'm going to start submitting my sites to Bing Webmaster Tools properly and look into DuckDuckGo indexing. Small step but I wasn't doing it before.

Thanks to u/Support-Gap for posting honestly about their journey. This is exactly the kind of thing that helps other builders.