Marketing to Developers: Where They Actually Search, Hang Out, and What They Care About

SparkToro analyzed online behavior among software developers at startups and uncovered three major shifts in how this audience discovers information and makes decisions. Most strikingly, developers under-index Google usage by 14 percent while over-indexing Claude by nearly 299 percent, suggesting traditional SEO strategies miss where these buyers actually research. The report also finds GitHub is the dominant social platform for this group (64 percent over-index), dramatically outperforming LinkedIn, and shows that career-focused and AI-related content dominates their search and prompt behavior—signaling that successful developer marketing requires presence in entirely different channels than standard B2B playbooks assume.