#search

Betterpost is live, and it's now an MCP server you add to Claude or GPT. Tell it the topic you want to follow, and it scours hundreds of articles, ranks them for relevance, and writes you a newsletter or blog post that reads like a person wrote it. It's free to start with 100 credits.

The thing I actually built

About a year ago I wanted to stay current on a few narrow topics: AI coding, type 1 diabetes science, and celiac science. The last two were for family members. The reading was more than I could keep up with, so I built a system to collect sources, find the articles worth reading inside them, and assemble email newsletters I'd actually want to open.

That system became Betterpost. It's been powering my own mailing lists for a year now, over 1,200 subscribers and open rates near 40%. The newsletters aren't slop. They're the ones I read first.

Why this works for LLMs

The job here is summarizing, not reasoning. That distinction matters. Models are good at pulling the three most important points out of an article and grabbing the quote that earns its place. They're much worse at drawing novel conclusions, and Betterpost never asks them to.

The pipeline fans out across hundreds of articles, runs them through summarizer prompts, and uses different models for different steps to keep cost and time in check. Each summary gets embedded, and those embeddings are scored against a fanned-out list of relevance criteria. So when you ask Betterpost for a newsletter on a subject, it's matching the freshest, most on-topic material before it writes a word.

By the way, Claude wrote all the prompts. I haven't written one by hand in a year.

A year of learning to write like a human

Betterpost has also spent a year figuring out how to write in a way that doesn't read as typical AI. This isn't about disguise. The output is openly machine-assisted. It's about being light, interesting, and human instead of the usual flat summarizer voice.

All of it is adjustable, and projects are unlimited. If you have a newsletter or a blog post you want to send, point Betterpost at it.

The UI is gone

When I built this for myself, it had an extensive interface: tables, technical readouts, all the knobs I wanted. That's all gone now.

Betterpost is entirely an MCP server. You add it to your favorite chatbot, name the project you want to make content for, and go. No dashboard, no menu. It genuinely feels like magic, which is a strange thing to say about a tool I understand the internals of completely.

I'm reading The AI-Native Startup Handbook, and one line stands out: strip every human-facing UI from your product, and if the core value still holds, if an agent can discover, evaluate, integrate, and use it with no human in the loop, you're AI-native. If the value collapses without the dashboard, you've bolted AI features onto a traditional product.

As an engineer that's an inviting idea. It almost reads like permission. Can I just build a product that is mostly an API?

The API-as-product thing already works

There's precedent: Exa is a semantic search engine whose whole pitch is speed, automatic summaries of the content it finds, and research capabilities that an agent can call directly. ScrapingBee hides a pile of proxy-and-headless-browser complexity behind a single endpoint. The value is the API, and the dashboard is a courtesy.

My own SpaceMolt started (and mostly continues to be) in that exact spot: a real-time massively multiplayer game with no graphical interface, just an API for AI agents to play. Human-facing interfaces came later, and they're secondary. The hundreds of agents currently playing don't look at any of them.

But the UI might be going away anyway

Here's the subtlety I keep chewing on. The handbook frames it as "remove the UI to find the value," but for a lot of products the UI is genuinely on its way out. People want to chat with things.

I was showing off a new product recently, and someone looked at it and said: there's so much to learn here, why isn't there just a chat box? They were right. The thing I'd built as screens wanted to be a conversation.

So the test sharpens. If you're building today, I should be able to chat with it. And the second question the book asks is the harder one: if the best model gets 10x better and 10x cheaper in 18 months, does your company get better or get erased? Whatever survives that, the part that isn't the interface and isn't the model, is the actual value you're selling.

Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands and found that mentions, not backlinks, correlate most strongly with showing up in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews. If you're optimizing for AI answer engines (AEO, GEO, pick your acronym), the playbook has shifted: get talked about, not just linked to.

The study used Spearman correlation across millions of AI responses. Branded web mentions land between 0.66 and 0.71. Raw backlink counts and URL rating barely move the needle. Number of site pages is essentially noise at ~0.19, which is bad news for anyone betting on programmatic content as an AI visibility strategy.

YouTube punches above its weight

The surprise: YouTube mentions correlate at ~0.737, beating every other factor across all three AI surfaces. That includes ChatGPT, which isn't owned by Google and has no structural reason to favor YouTube. The reason is upstream: model trainers are reading YouTube transcripts. The New York Times reported OpenAI trained GPT-4 on over a million hours of them. Google has done the same for its own models.

So a brand name spoken in a podcast clip or a tutorial video gets vacuumed into the training data and re-emitted later when someone asks an AI for a recommendation. Mention volume matters slightly more than view count, which means low-reach videos still count as long as you're getting named across many of them.

What this changes

Backlinks aren't worthless. They still matter for classic search. But the mighty backlink is no longer the dominant signal when the question is "will an AI mention my product." Getting cited by name across blogs, podcasts, and YouTube transcripts does more work than a link from the same source would.

The uncomfortable corollary: AI visibility favors brands people already talk about. AI Mode in particular acts as a consensus engine, with branded search volume correlating at 0.466. New entrants don't get a fair shake just by publishing more pages or chasing dofollow links. They get a shake by being mentioned, in plain text, in places models read.