I’ve used Product Hunt for years and always believed it was a place where real community support mattered. But our recent launch made me question whether the platform still reflects genuine engagement.
We brought more than 4,000 real users, received over 150 thoughtful comments, and added hundreds of new followers. Yet only a small fraction of that showed up in the final score. Many of our users told us their comments or reviews never appeared publicly, even though they could see their posts when logged in. That was discouraging for people who took the time to register and give real feedback.
It increasingly feels like Product Hunt heavily weights long-time PH accounts while discounting thousands of real supporters who join for the first time. The result is that a smaller group of insiders can outweigh a much larger external community. That doesn’t feel like discovery anymore.
Support responses were generic and didn’t explain what actually happened. I even tried raising this in the forum, but the post never passed review despite being factual and non-abusive.
I still believe Product Hunt could be an important platform for makers, but it needs far more transparency about how votes, comments, and trust weighting work. Real users shouldn’t feel invisible. And founders shouldn’t leave launch day feeling confused about why genuine engagement doesn’t count.
Right now, it’s hard to tell whether Product Hunt is still serving makers — or slowly drifting away from what made it valuable.
Product Hunt
We've been prototyping this internally for a while, but this is our first public feature for searching and exploring Product Hunt's data with AI. It's informed not just by launch traction and discussions, but also by hundreds of thousands of reviews, including over a hundred thousand founder reviews, so you can find the best products for you. Try it out and let us know what you think!
@rajiv_ayyangar This has been a long time coming, and it’s awesome to finally see it live. Just used it to look for an invoice generator and already discovered a bunch of great options.
This will make product discovery easier on Product Hunt. Many congrats Rajiv and the team on shipping this!
Ovren
@rajiv_ayyangar Really like this.
The best product discovery UX is increasingly becoming intent-first, not filter-first.
This feels like the right direction for Product Hunt.
@rajiv_ayyangar Yep I did like it a lot ! I wanted to find the dev tools that launched today and it was very informative.
RiteKit Company Logo API
Good catch on the dead products issue—that's definitely something worth refining as the model learns which listings are actually active. You're right that limiting to 5 results feels arbitrary; hopefully they expand that as people use it and provide feedback on what's most useful.
this will help a lot, small feedback i tried search for open source tools that are launched this week but it was not sure and show only couple of tools but PH has a open source tag why its not showing the relevant tools?
Product Hunt
@gamifykaran good catch! I think we can work on this - cc @lagap
Product Hunt
@gamifykaran Thanks for flagging this! We've fixed this, so you'll actually get open source results.
@lagap thanks for quick fix really appreciate it man
This was one of the missing feature on PH. I believe you guys will make improvements soon on this, such as I see results bringing dead products (not operation). Also there can be more than 5 results.
Anyways, thanks to everyone behind this feature 👍
Product Hunt
@ihsany which products did you find that are dead?
@rajiv_ayyangar thank you for your follow-up.
Not exactly remember the product names, but I made a search with "automated cryptocurrency trading", and I tried to reach their products via the link in PH, 4 of those websites was not accessible.
I know there are good products related to my search query in PH, but I couldn't see them.
Again, thank you everyone behind this great feature!
Product Hunt
I'm so stoked to be part of this release! How many times have you tried Googling (or even asking ChatGPT) with a specific pain point only to fall short of the solution or end up comparing multiple products, eventually either giving up or choosing one out of frustration.
Ask Product Hunt is the first step to reducing a lot of that friction! Simply ask what you're looking for and BOOM - instant results that will help you achieve what your trying to do and.... you can instantly compare different products in the same chat.
Checkout the other demo vid on X!
https://x.com/ProductHunt/status/2047600502003933535?s=20
tbh this wouldve saved me a few evenings of manual digging before my own launch. hows freshness handled, does a 2022 product w/ strong traction outrank something shipped last month?
thats usually where category-scoping searches fall apart imo. bookmarking either way
ProdShort
@rajiv_ayyangar Tried it, really great, very useful. Any plan to bring this into private collections? I save many products there, so having this inside collections would be very useful.
Product Hunt
@amraniyasser can you say more about what you're trying to do? and how you envision using ai in collections? Like...are you trying to search your collections?
ProdShort
@rajiv_ayyangar I'm very often on Product Hunt and see a lot of launches, so I started saving many tools into my collection. But I realized I almost never go back to them. Being able to use this AI to search inside my collections would be very useful.
When I save a product into my collection, it means it already caught my attention and I kind of remember it, but finding it again later can get messy (scrolling into my collection, re-reading launches, trying to recognize the right one). So having this AI that can search inside private collections would be extremely useful. Sometimes I remember a tool that does something very specific, and I know I already saved it in my collection, but finding it again can be a bit annoying.. Being able to describe what the tool does and quickly find it would make collections much more powerful.