During loan audit engagements, review workflows involved extensive manual verification, fragmented documentation across multiple files, and repeated completeness checks performed by different stakeholders.

These workflows required auditors to consolidate loan-level data, validate supporting documents, and ensure consistency in credit assessment outputs such as impairment calculations and risk classifications.

Despite an abundance of crypto educational content, many beginners still struggle to understand how crypto systems actually work. The real problem wasn't a lack of content — it was having no clear path through it — content that assumed prior knowledge, introduced jargon without context, and lacked progression between beginner and intermediate concepts.

Problem-first storytelling — each chapter began with a real-world problem before introducing technical concepts, helping learners understand why blockchain systems were created before how they work.

Interactive over passive — chapters were designed as screen-by-screen flows combining storytelling, simulations, quizzes, diagrams, and practical exercises.

Trust-focused framing — content included book references, cited sources, and explicit discussion of limitations, keeping things honest rather than hype-driven.

Surfaced is an SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) platform that helps small businesses improve both Google rankings and AI search visibility. It audits websites, identifies issues, generates implementation-ready fixes, and provides a step-by-step growth roadmap — with all code generated by Claude.

Most SEO tools were built for agencies, not operators. They surface data but leave interpretation, prioritization, and execution entirely to the user. For a small business owner without a technical background, a crawl report full of issues is not a roadmap — it is a list of things to worry about.

At the same time, AI-powered search platforms — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — are becoming primary discovery channels. Most affordable tools address one or the other. Enterprise tools that address both start at $295 per month.

While managing websites for businesses across Singapore, Indonesia, and the Netherlands, I kept running into the same problem: tools could identify issues, but rarely explained how to fix them. I often had to interpret reports, decide what mattered most, and translate technical recommendations into actionable tasks — for every major algorithm update.

I wanted to explore whether a single product could help businesses identify issues, generate fixes, and improve visibility across both SEO and AI search.

Deterministic Scoring
Early versions asked Claude to estimate the SEO score — which produced different results on every run. The fix was to calculate scores entirely from real crawl data before Claude sees anything: title tag presence, H1 coverage, meta description quality, HTTPS, schema, canonical tags, image alt text ratios, and internal link counts. Claude writes the analysis. The numbers come from the data.

Parallel Crawling Within Serverless Constraints
Vercel Hobby plan functions time out at 10 seconds. Crawling pages sequentially would exceed this for any site larger than two pages. The solution was to crawl up to 9 pages in parallel using Promise.all, keeping total execution within the limit while still producing a representative site-wide audit.

International Character Encoding
Auditing Dutch, Japanese, and Korean websites introduced non-ASCII characters into crawl summaries that broke JSON parsing. The fix required sanitising all crawled content before sending it to Claude, and sanitising Claude's response before parsing — stripping non-ASCII characters from both the input and the output.