It's 2026 and Google Search Is Totally Broken I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project I built an open source project called NanoClaw. It has 18,000 GitHub stars. It's been covered by CNBC, VentureBeat, The Register, and others. When you Google "NanoClaw," a fake website ranks #2 globally, right below the project's GitHub. My actual website doesn't show up. Not on page one. Not on page two. Not on page five. I'm losing the SEO battle for my own project to an imposter site, and there's nothing I can do about it. And it's putting the public at risk. I launched NanoClaw on February 2nd. It took off fast. I was focused on shipping features, merging pull requests, building community. I didn't have a website. The GitHub repo was the project. That's how open source works. Around February 8th, someone grabbed nanoclaw[.]net and threw up an auto-generated site scraped from the README. People started mentioning it to me. I didn't think much of it. It was a bit weird but linked to the correct GitHub. Whatever. I had code to write. The project kept growing. More stars. More press. More people messaging me: "Hey, there's an error on your website." "Your site has ads on it?" "Why does your website look like that on mobile?" It wasn't my website. I didn't have one. But thousands of people were finding this site and assuming it was official. Their first impression of NanoClaw was a shoddy, ad-covered page with inaccurate information about the project. Every single day. So I built a real website. That was two weeks ago. Since then I've done everything you're supposed to do and more. Linked it from the GitHub repo. Proper SEO. Structured data. Submitted to Google Search Console probably 15 times. NanoClaw got covered in The Register (https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/01/nanoclaw_container_openclaw/…), VentureBeat (https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/nanoclaw-solves-one-of-openclaws-biggest-security-issues-and-its-alreadyventurebeat.com/orchestration/nanoclaw-solves-one-of-open...), The New Stack (https://thenewstack.io/nanoclaw-minimalist-ai-agents/…), all linking to the real site. Published a blog post that hit #1 on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47194611). Translated the site into 15 languages. Every social profile points to nanoclaw.dev. Filed takedown notices with Google, Cloudflare, and the domain registrar spaceship.com. Every single signal on the internet points to nanoclaw.dev being the real website. Every single one. Meanwhile nanoclaw[.]net is showing factually wrong information about the project, and falsifying its publication dates. Google ranks it as the #2 result for people specifically looking for the official website.

Here's the thing that makes me want to scream. Go to our GitHub repo (https://github.com/qwibitai/nanoclaw), which is the #1 result on Google for "NanoClaw." It's the project this entire fake website is about. Look at the website field. It says nanoclaw.dev. The NanoClaw project itself, the thing Google ranks #1, explicitly points to the real website.

And Google still chooses the fake website over our website. This isn't an SEO problem. This is a Google problem. I've been told by SEO experts that I just need to "beat them in SEO." That I should take out Google Ads. For my own open source project. That I should keep optimizing meta tags, keep building backlinks, keep playing this game. No. I didn't sign up for an SEO war. I want to build open source software. I want to be in my terminal and in the discord, not in Google Search Console. Here's where it gets serious. I built NanoClaw security-first. Every agent runs in an isolated container. We obsess over making sure agent runtimes are safe and sandboxed. Security is the foundation of everything we do. And right now, our biggest security vulnerability is Google Search. The person running nanoclaw[.]net can put anything they want on that page tomorrow. A crypto scam. A phishing page. Malicious download links. They could fork the GitHub repo, inject malicious code, and link to it from the site that Google is telling thousands of people is legitimate. Whatever they want. And Google will happily serve it to everyone searching for my project. This is a live, active security risk that Google is enabling right now. Even if I win this SEO game in two or three weeks and finally dislodge them, by then, hundreds of thousands of people will have already visited that site. Already seen wrong information. Already formed wrong impressions. Already associated my project with a spammy, broken experience. There is no way to undo that. And every single day it stays up, the damage grows. If Google can't figure out which website belongs to an open source project, when the project itself is screaming the answer, how can we trust them with any query? We trust Google to surface reliable information about elections. Vaccines. Medical conditions. Financial decisions. And they can't get this right? A question where the answer is unambiguous, where every signal agrees, where the authoritative source explicitly declares the truth? I don't want to be playing this game. I want to be writing code, building community, pushing features, fixing bugs. We need to stop blaming ourselves. Stop obsessing over whether we got the meta tags perfect. Whether the favicon is the exact right format. When Google has abundant, unambiguous signals pointing to the right answer and still gets it wrong, that's not our problem. That's a Google problem. If Google wants to continue earning its position as the gateway to the internet's information, they need to be able to get things like this right. I'm Gavriel Cohen, creator of NanoClaw. If you've visited nanoclaw[.]net, that's not us. The real site is nanoclaw.dev (https://nanoclaw.dev/…). The project is at github.com/qwibitai/nanoclaw (https://github.com/qwibitai/nanoclaw).

A dedicated member of the community surprised us with a Product Hunt launch as a way of helping boost the legitimate website. Don't know for sure whether it will help but dropping a comment there definitely can't hurt https://www.producthunt.com/products/nanoclaw…

producthunt.com/products/nanoc…

NanoClaw: A lightweight alternative to OpenClaw, runs in containers. | Product Hunt