That’s a very good question. If I step back, it’s clear that the definition of “success” has fundamentally changed for us.
To give you some context: years ago, we used to get nearly 50 new registrations (now mostly under 20) a day, and we’ve reached almost 30,000 members over the past 6 years. Out of those thousands of people, a dedicated core group naturally formed, the team that keeps the site alive and remains active in the community to this day.
For me, the number one success is when this core group expands, and it’s also a success when a great, helpful conversation sparks on the forum, allowing us to discuss deep, technical topics in a genuinely warm and friendly atmosphere.
What breaks my heart, though, is that the people who get stuck in the AI chat are completely locked out of this experience.
There is a very important -if not the most important- difference between Google (or search engines) and AI.
When a person goes to a search engine, they know exactly and basically do so with the goal of clicking through to the source! Someone who goes to an AI chat does so to get the information right then and there!
All they see is what the AI tells them, if it even cites an example: “According to someone on XY, you should do this and that…” If the user just wants a quick fix, they won’t go any further. They will never step inside our forum to actually experience what would eventually make them stay, become active, and in time, become part of that core group I mentioned at the beginning.
Sure, “brand awareness” is probably there. If the AI mentions us often enough, people might remember the name, and if they come across us elsewhere, it will click: Ah, I’ve heard of them…. But that is not a community yet.
I think true success in this new era would be a win-win scenario where the AI actively encourages users to click through to the source for the human element.
If the AI offered something to the user like: “For the full discussion and practical advice from the community, click here,” it would keep the entire ecosystem healthy. By directing users back to us, over time they too could enrich the forum with real, new human experiences, which in turn would continuously feed and train the AI.
Since we have no direct influence over how LLMs choose to display links, I recently started experimenting with a practical workaround: I built a plugin that, among other things, generates multilingual llms.txt and llms-full.txt on my forum, in which I formulated guidelines specifically for AI crawlers, leveraging the fact that AI models generally try to avoid safety liabilities in niche, highly regulated, or technical DIY topics.
I am very curious to see if prompting the LLMs directly through llms.txt will have any “psychological” effect on how they structure their answers and citations. It’s a small experiment, but at this point, I’d rather try every avenue to bridge the gap between AI-based search and real human communities.