I Audited 3 Popular Open Source Projects for SEO - Here's What I Found

Last week, I saw a post on HackerNews: "I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project" (498 upvotes). The author built an amazing tool, but when people search for it, they find: Copycat tutorials Competitor sites Random blog posts But not the actual project. This is a massive problem. So I audited 3 popular open source projects to see what's going wrong. The Problem: GitHub ≠ SEO Most developers think: "I have 10K GitHub stars, people will find me." Wrong. GitHub is terrible for SEO: No custom URLs Limited metadata control Buried under competitor content Project #1: AI Search Engine (5K+ stars) SEO Score: 40/100 🔴 Issues Found: ❌ No dedicated website ❌ README missing keywords like "AI search" or "Perplexity alternative" ❌ Zero blog content ❌ Only 3 GitHub topics The Fix: Create docs.projectname.com (free with Vercel) Add "Alternative to Perplexity" section in README Write 3 tutorials: "How to self-host", "Docker setup", "vs Perplexity" Expected result: 200% traffic increase