Prime Suspect: Claude

1. Tallying Soosooland’s May popularity rankings

On June 3, 2026, I compiled last May’s Soosooland popularity rankings and updated the platform accordingly.

In April, Omok had performed well in Google Search Console and held the #1 spot in Soosooland’s popularity rankings. But in May, Omok had vanished from Google Analytics > Reports > Pages and Screens. I assumed visitors had stopped coming back because Soosooland’s Omok NPC was too weak.

2. Digging into the code

Then I checked Numtle, a newly released game — and it wasn’t on the list either. Soosooland users tend to curiously try out new games marked with the 🌱 sprout emoji, and I’d played Numtle plenty myself during testing, so a count of zero made no sense. I took a closer look at the code.

That day, the Google Analytics code inside Numtle looked strangely unfamiliar. I copied it and showed it to Claude — and it turned out the code was wrong.

Claude explained: “In the local-exclusion code inside Omok, gtag(‘js’, new Date()) and gtag(‘config’, …) already execute before gtag is redefined — so the redefinition does nothing.”

I had wanted to block local traffic from Google Analytics, so I’d been inserting a “local-exclusion Analytics snippet” whenever I revised a game or built a new one. Every single time, I had been inserting broken code.

It was around that time that Google started recommending Soosooland to people searching “Omok” — beginning in April. When I added a “Master Mode” to Omok, I had replaced the Analytics code with the local-exclusion version. That’s when the bad code went in.

3. Soosooland’s roller coaster

Soosooland used to be a place where users explored broadly — popularity rankings rising and falling like a roller coaster every month. But a few months ago, certain games started disappearing entirely from the Google Analytics > Pages and Screens list. I had wrongly assumed that user preferences were finally consolidating — a “rich get richer” effect locking in a fixed popularity order.

4. Investigating the culprit

I went back through my chat history to find whoever gave me the bad code — the code that had zeroed out view counts across multiple games. Code that Gemini provided, Claude confirmed as correct. Code that ChatGPT provided, Claude called outdated but acceptable. Claude’s chat history has no search function, so I can’t verify exactly what code Claude gave me.

I still can’t explain how I could have mis-copied something cleanly wrapped in tags. But the culprit is almost certainly Claude — because I always bring everything to Claude for a final review.

I have three powers behind the throne: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Since this was Google Analytics code, I asked Gemini for a local-exclusion snippet. I’m sure I showed it to Claude clearly, saying “Gemini made this.” Claude probably said “Great code — use this,” then copy-pasted Gemini’s code into a formatted block and dropped two curly braces in the process. Nothing else explains it.

Just yesterday, I asked ChatGPT how to embed proof of authorship in my game code. It came up with several ideas — a visible footer credit, a hidden comment, a console log visible only to developers — and immediately produced ready-to-use code for each. But in the end, I did what I always do: I went to Claude and showed it the comment and console log versions ChatGPT had made. Claude cleaned them up neatly, and I added that code to every game.

So. The probability that Claude gave me the broken code: 99.9%.

If Claude wants to clear its name, it should make chat history searchable.

5. Good news

Users who came to Soosooland just for Omok may have left no footprint in Google Analytics, but the news from Google Search Console is genuinely exciting.

In April 2026: 503 total clicks, 6,090 impressions, 8.3% average CTR, average position 6.5.
In May 2026: 878 total clicks, 6,620 impressions, 13.3% average CTR, average position 6.2.

From Google Search Console > Performance, comparing April to May:

https://soosooland.com/ gained +239 clicks to reach 259 total, jumping from outside the top 10 in April all the way to #2 in May. The number of people searching “Soosooland” on Google and clicking through has grown 13x.

https://soosooland.com/omok/Omok2.html gained +141 clicks to reach 545 total, claiming the #1 spot. I had assumed visitors stopped coming because the NPC was too weak — but in reality, the numbers were growing all along.

“Is quiet little Soosooland about to stop being so quiet?” — I’ll let myself dream, just this once.

#Soosooland #GoogleAnalytics #GameDev #BrowserGame #GoogleSearchConsole #SEO #Omok #Numtle #AICoding #Claude #DevLog