AI Killed Developer Tutorials (What Startups Should Do Instead)

Why would a developer scroll through a 2,000-word post when they can get a personalised, step-by-step answer with one prompt from ChatGPT?

They wouldn’t.

And the numbers prove it.

Stackoverflow’s monthly traffic fell by 35% in less than two years, not because developers stopped running into bugs. They just stopped reading long threads to fix them.

For developers, they love it.

For technical startups who use tutorials and guides to attract developers, not so much. Because fewer traffic means fewer leads and fewer signups.

It’s clear.

If you want your content to bring in leads, writing helpful tutorials isn’t enough anymore. Now, you need to make sure your content is both valuable to developers and AI.

So, how can you make sure that this developer shift doesn’t impact your lead generation?

The answer is GEO, and this Princeton research paper on Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) shows how you can start optimising your technical content to show up more in AI search engines.

Here’s what you need to do to increase visibility in AI search and keep your lead generation engine running:

1. Include statistics and cite sources
2. Interview & quoting experts
3. Include personal experiences and specific results
4. Write clearly and structure content for fluency

1. Use Statistics and Cite Sources (40.4% increase in Visibility)

AI tools are trained on research papers, documents, and well-cited pages. So, when your content includes references and verifiable numbers, it mimics the kind of material LLMs are designed to favour.

For tutorial articles, the kinds of stats that work are usually the ones you already have. It could be about time to build or the rate of adoption. For instance:

• “On average, it takes about five minutes to build”
• “actively used by 500+ developers”
• “Used internally by 14 teams across 3 regions”

Even internal numbers count, as long as you say where they came from and link to them. Something like this would work, just make sure to link to the case study:

“We conducted this test internally across three engineering teams”

By including statistics and citing their sources in your tutorials, you not only optimise your content for generative engines but also give developers more reason to trust you.

Implement this today:

Find tutorial posts where you made vague statements and edit them, adding statistics & citations.

For example:

❌ “This method is faster.”

✅ “This method reduced deploy time by 30% in our CI pipeline.”

Start small: Pick one guide, find one stat, and add it in.

2. Interview Experts and Quote Them (40.4% increase in Visibility)

Direct quotes add authenticity and depth to the content, making it more valuable to the generative engine.

You can choose to interview experts on certain subjects and quote them in your tutorials, starting in-house. That’s a good place to start. Or if you’d like to speed things up, you could quote experts from a podcast, a speech at an event, or even a tweet.

This does three things:

1. Shows AI search engines that your tutorial is effective and valuable to the reader.
2. Improves developer trust through borrowed credibility.
3. Increase visibility on other platforms if the quoted expert shares your post.

Implement this today:

Find a tutorial where you made a recommendation, and back it up with a line from someone known for working in that space. Format it as a blockquote, add the name, done!

3. Share Personal Experiences and Specific Results (37% visibility boost on Perplexity.ai)

Generative engines value unique content. What better way to make content unique than including the experience of the author?

What qualifies as unique experiences?

Personal setup time, unexpected occurrences that were time-consuming, and edge cases that occurred because of operating systems. And you also have to be specific about it.

For example:

“Got it running locally in under 7 minutes, including updating dependencies.”

AI search engines look for information that gets the users the best results, and if you can show that your guide helps the reader in the best way possible, you’re more likely to get cited.

Implement this today:

Pick one guide where you walked through a setup or process. Add one line that reflects what actually happened:

• How long it took
• What broke
• What the reader might miss

4. Optimise for Fluency (15–30% visibility boost)

Fluency makes content generally more readable and digestible for the LLMs

Unlike traditional search engines, generative engines capture nuances to get the best result for the user, and fluency supports this.

What this means for your tutorials and guides:

• Target the 8th — 10th grade readability level so your article can be understood by practically anyone. You don’t need complex words to explain technical concepts.
• Proper structure across sections. Each section should build on the next and provide a clear flow of ideas.
• Use emphasis to highlight important information. Makes it easy to identify the most important point both for developers and AI.

Try this today:

Find your most popular tutorial and run it through Hemingway Editor or Readable.com. Look for sentences flagged as very hard to read and break them down into shorter sentences.

Target a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 8–10. You’ll maintain the technicality of your article while making it clear for anyone with basic language proficiency.

You Can Automate It

You can get an AI search assessment on all four metrics in a single click.

Here’s how:

Start with what’s already working. Take your top-ranking tutorials and feed them into ChatGPT or Claude.

Create these four prompts:

• One for citations and statistics
• One for expert quotes
• One for personal experiences
• One for fluency improvements

Pro Tip: AI models are more accurate when they focus on a single task, yes, even with a 1M context window.

Next, automate the workflow:

1. Test your prompts in ChatGPT or Claude
2. Chain them in automation tools like N8N, Zapier, or Make.com and integrate into your existing workflow.
3. Create a single trigger that runs all four assessments

That’s it. Instead of manually reviewing each article, you now have an automated GEO review system.

However, if you’d prefer not to start from scratch, spending hours crafting prompts, testing and automating workflows, you can shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.

I’ll show you:

• How I got a client’s article cited in AI search for multiple related keywords
• How I’m automating their article review process to optimise content from the draft phase
• And even throw in a free AI automation audit of your current workflow

Just DM me “GEO” so I know you came from here.

Your developer tutorials don’t have to die. They just need to evolve.

Bonus: Interactive Formats

Citations might help you stay top of mind, but the end goal of every tutorial or guide is to get turn readers into leads.

So, to get readers to click through and try your product, you need to give them something that goes beyond just information.

You need interactive formats.

These could be in-browser sandbox environments, embedded code playgrounds, cost calculators, or videos.

Companies like Stripe already do this. In addition to explaining APIs in their documentation, they also provide videos on how developers can implement them, helping them see exactly how the Stripe team got it working.

It’s as simple as that.

You just need something that solves their problem and makes them click through.