14 days ago, my project was called Copywritee.
I’d spent a year building it. I had some authority, a bit of awareness, and some sweat equity. But the data was screaming one thing: The name was a bug, not a feature, which i now know but changing a domain name could result to some dangerous consequences like ____________________________ yeah. a flat line of traffic
The Dilemma
People saw the name and assumed I was building a ChatGPT wrapper for blog posts. In reality, I was building a heavy-duty OCR engine that converts:
Messy, handwritten cursive tables → Formatted Excel files.
Handwritten notebooks → Word Documents.
Live PDF editing and cloud storage.
I was at a crossroads. Do I stick with "Copywritee" (after all, Apple doesn't sell fruit)? I use that to deceive myself, but then again, Apple has earned its name with years of work, so that's off the comparison table. Or do I risk a year of SEO work to pivot to something niche?
Well...
I killed the old name and rebranded to NoteOCR. I handled the 301 redirects, updated the metadata, and braced for a crash.
Instead, my traffic doubled in 7 days. (I expected a crash)
Why it worked (The Technical "LLM" Twist)
The most surprising part? My #1 referral source isn't Google, it's ChatGPT. Here is why the rebrand triggered the "LLM Referral Engine":
Semantic Clarity: "Copywritee" was abstract. NoteOCR is high-intent. When an LLM crawls my site, it no longer has to "guess" my niche. My "relevance score" for handwriting-to-text queries shot through the roof.
The Metadata Match: I stopped trying to rank for broad terms like "AI Writing" and went deep on "Handwritten OCR." By aligning the domain name with the primary
and description tags, I became the "Authoritative Answer" for ChatGPT Search.Directory Synergy: I listed on specialized AI directories. Because the name is surgical, the backlink profile became much more "topical," which tells AI models exactly when to recommend me.
The Lesson for Founders/Devs
We often get attached to our "clever" project names. But if your name forces you to explain what you do, it's a bottleneck. I killed a year of branding to let the product breathe.
The result? A 2x jump in traffic in a week and a product that finally "makes sense" to both humans and AI.
Check out the new engine: noteocr.com
Top comments (0)