2 builders who never spoke to each other

Check your buyers even use Google

Audience data can kill the channel before you staff it. Software developers at startups came in well under the national average on Google use and four times over it on one specific assistant, so the tool worth optimising for was not the one everybody names. Where nobody would think to search for what you sell, search is simply the wrong first channel however good you are at it.

The method

1. 01

   Check whether your audience actually uses Google as much as everyone else before you make search the centre of the plan.

2. 02

   Optimise for the specific AI tool your audience over-indexes on rather than for the one everybody names.

3. 03

   Write about pay, careers, remote work and tooling if that is what your audience actually searches, not the topics you wish they cared about.

4. 04

   Keep the career and compensation hooks running even for a senior audience, because seniority does not stop people evaluating their next move.

5. 05

   Skip search as your first channel when nobody types a query for the problem you solve, however good you are at it.

What it returned

• 81.9

  SparkToro found 81.9 percent of software developers at startups using Google against 95.5 percent of the US population, an under-index of 14 percent, for people who are online for a living.

• 34.2

  ChatGPT sat near the national average at 34.2 percent for this audience while about 21 percent used Claude, an over-index close to 299 percent or roughly four times the national rate, with Perplexity up 63 percent, Brave 43 percent and DeepSeek 22 percent plus a tail of tools like Kagi and Phind.

• 94

  The leading AI prompt topics for this audience were remote developer roles at 94 affinity, the US startup ecosystem at 91, best remote employers at 85 and a salary guide at 83, with keywords including a startup equity calculator and big-tech versus startup pay, and r/cscareerquestions the top subreddit at a perfect 100 affinity.

• 6

  Roughly two thirds of this audience had between 6 and 20 years in the field, which SparkToro flags as sitting in tension with search behaviour that reads entry-level.

Sources

• How We'd Market to Software Developers at Startups - SparkToroSparkToro · sparktoro.com · Insight #1: This audience uses Google less than the average American — and has already gone AI-native · 2026-06-04
• SparkToro's Year One Retrospective - SparkToroRand Fishkin · sparktoro.com · A Look at Marketing & Traffic · undated