Startups & Venture · August 2026
Hudson sells an AI-powered product search tool, and the panel had just been praising user-generated content as a free viral growth loop. He agreed with the growth point and then turned it over: the industry he is selling into is consuming the open web writing it needs for training. His conclusion was that a product without its own user-generated content will eventually have nothing left to learn from.
Transcript
they're Kelly. They're starting to be public. We, we, uh, we're going down that exact same line of thinking. Um, what I like about that
one, Zach, by the way, is it creates a viral loop. And, you know, this is when you go to market, Lon, one of the tactical, practical things that founders sometimes forget, which is what if one person who uses my service introduces it to 1.5 people or 2.6 people and then gets in a search engine. Oh my lord. Then the site starts growing while you're asleep.
I think one other thing I would say about that, though, is while it does help with the viral loop, the LLMs and these AI companies are cannibalizing the data that they rely on for training. Like you see, think about how many bloggers, wirecutters, these types of posts that used to exist in the world are disappearing because there's no incentive to write them anymore. They're just going to get sucked up immediately. If you don't build content into your product, if you don't build user-generated content into your product, you have nothing to train on or give these recommendations. Super important for e-commerce. That's why we started doing it now, but it's also super important to think about for a lot of other categories of searches.
Yeah, I just am thinking about the number of pages that Google has for Entan that are, yeah, I wonder like how many pages you actually have in there. And this is super interesting. Do you get a lot of search traffic anymore or is that game over?
You know, I don't think that I know people are talking about AEO a lot. We invested a lot into SEO and it still continues to drive users over to Anton. Wait, what was the term used?
AEO.