For this interview, I wanted to understand how SEO is changing as AI becomes a bigger part of how people search online. What I found interesting is that while AI search is changing the way people find information, the basic question for marketers remains the same: who are you actually creating the content for?
That is where StoryMint comes in. The startup, founded by Ridho Putradi S’Gara, Founder & CEO, MIftahul Khoir, Co-founder & CMO and Joe Handaya, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, is building a marketing platform that puts audience persona at the centre of the content and SEO process.
The Idea Behind Storymint
According to Ridho, the idea for StoryMint came from a tool he had previously used through his own search agency. He noticed that many marketing campaigns focused heavily on the channel, activities and messages, but often missed one important element: the audience.
“The core idea of Storymint is how every marketing channel, marketing activity and marketing message used by a business should always be tied closely to its target audience,” Ridho explained.
This is why audience persona becomes one of the first things users set up when creating a campaign on StoryMint. The persona then influences the outputs generated by the platform. The idea is relatively simple: instead of creating content first and trying to figure out later whether it speaks to the right people, marketers should start by understanding who they are talking to.
“The goal is to make sure the message doesn’t go everywhere,” Ridho said.
StoryMint launched in December 2025 and is currently being built as a bootstrap business. The company has reached 697 total users, although its paid user base is still relatively small, with many users currently registered as pre-users.
More Than Just a Content Tool
StoryMint also comes with a number of tools related to AI search, reflecting the way search behaviour is changing. Ridho does not see the shift as a complete replacement of traditional search just yet. But the change is already significant. People are increasingly interacting with AI-generated answers rather than simply going through a list of search results themselves.
In some industries, this behaviour is even more obvious. Take travel, for example. Instead of searching for hotels, restaurants and destinations separately and then manually putting everything together, users can now ask an AI engine to create an itinerary and provide recommendations. The curation process that users previously did themselves is increasingly being handled by generative engines.
“That is also an important part of StoryMint,” Ridho said. “We have tools that help businesses adjust their content approach so their content has more opportunities to appear in generative answers.”
For Joe, StoryMint is not simply about checking or producing content.
“The capabilities of the tools we have are actually not only about looking at content,” Joe said. “There are many capabilities that are closely related to AI search.”
The idea is that as businesses use these tools to improve their content and marketing approach, they have more opportunities to be visible across platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. StoryMint also covers the more traditional side of content management.
The platform offers tools ranging from content planning to publication. One of them is Trendspotter, which helps users identify what people are currently talking about and then look at how a business can tap into those conversations. The output can then become a content brief.
There are also technical SEO tools for users who are managing websites and SEO activities more directly.
SEO in the Age of AI Search
Ridho and Joe have both spent years working in SEO and marketing. Ridho has been in the industry since 2009, and the two eventually met through a community outside of work. For Ridho, SEO is fundamentally about answering the needs of users when they search.
“SEO is how we answer the needs of users when they are searching,” he said.
That means businesses need to publish content and build digital assets, including websites, that can actually answer what users are looking for. The positioning of content should therefore follow the user’s search intention. If a business understands that intention and successfully answers it, SEO can create value beyond simply appearing in search results.
This is also why Ridho says he personally prefers writing for users rather than writing purely based on SEO.
“I prefer writing not based on SEO, but for the users,” he said. “When people write, they should think about the audience first.”
There are certainly benefits to SEO tools, but Ridho believes they are not necessarily essential for everyone. Google already provides several tools that can help businesses work on SEO. Someone with a basic understanding of SEO can identify certain problems manually without paying for additional software. The issue is time.
“When everything is done manually, it takes too much time. That is where SEO tools can help the process,” Ridho said.
Where Storymint Stands Out
There are already plenty of established SEO platforms in the market, including tools that focus heavily on keywords, search volume and prompts. Ridho believes Storymint needs to differentiate itself somewhere else.
“We want audiences to understand what they are doing in marketing and understand their audience persona,” he said.
StoryMint is essentially a self-serve platform. Users can come in, create their own campaigns and manage the process themselves, following a SaaS subscription model. The company also provides agency services for businesses that want additional support.
StoryMint is designed to work across industries, although some industries have more specialised capabilities. For example, e-commerce businesses can access specific tools designed around their needs, while other industries can use most of the platform’s broader capabilities.
The longer-term goal is for StoryMint to become self-sustaining through subscriptions, which would allow the company to invest more into marketing and scale the business. Since StoryMint can support campaigns in multiple languages, the company eventually plans to expand beyond the Indonesian market.
“Marketing is all about the users,” Ridho said. “Whether marketing succeeds or not depends on how we can provide the best experience to our target audience.”
The Shift Towards AI Search
The shift did not happen overnight. For Ridho and Joe, one of the earliest triggers was the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022. But at the time, adoption was still largely concentrated among early users.
There were also limitations. People were still questioning the quality of AI-generated answers, and ChatGPT at the time did not have the web-search capabilities it has today. It relied heavily on its internal knowledge, and hallucinations were still a major issue. The bigger shift came when Google started bringing generative AI into the search experience.
“Google’s AI is one of the biggest triggers because people are already used to Google,” Ridho explained.
Because people were already accustomed to using Google, the introduction of AI Overviews gave a much larger audience the opportunity to interact with generative search without having to move to an entirely new platform.
As users become more comfortable with AI-generated answers, this also creates opportunities for other platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude. Google, however, has one structural advantage: its AI search experience is integrated directly into the traditional search environment that it has built over many years.
That combination of an existing search ecosystem and a huge native user base makes Google’s approach difficult to replicate. Today, Google has moved beyond AI Overviews with its broader AI Mode, making generative search increasingly part of the everyday search experience.
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