Fable spotted a revenue leak on a site that Opus 4.8 missed
A developer who maintains lightGallery, an open-source JS gallery library funded by s, saw revenue slide for about a year. Total traffic was down only 10%, so the drop was assumed to be reduced demand for gallery libraries because of AI, and it went uninvestigated. With some Fable credits about to expire, the developer exported and and asked for a full SEO audit.
Instead of looking at total traffic, Fable split into three buckets on its own: brand searches, developer searches, and searches for free tools on the site. Brand searches fell from 6,016 to 2,873 (down 52%), developer searches fell from 7,759 to 3,875 (down 50%), while free-es rose from 2,221 to 9,562 (up 330%). Overall traffic looked like only a 12% decline, but the searches that actually drive revenue were down by roughly half, with two opposite trends canceling out and hiding the real problem for a year.
Notably, the developer had accidentally run the same data and prompt through Opus 4.8 first, thinking Fable was selected, and it did not surface this breakdown.
Key points
- lightGallery's revenue slid for about a year while total traffic dropped only 10%, so it went unexamined
- Fable automatically split into brand, developer, and free-tool buckets
- Brand searches fell 52%, developer searches fell 50%, free-es rose 330%
- Overall traffic looked down only 12%, but revenue-relevant searches were down roughly half
- Running the same data and prompt through Opus 4.8 first did not surface this insight