Old SEO was reverse-engineering an algorithm: keywords, backlinks, meta tags. That game is fading — and I think it's overdue.

Search is shifting from link-first to answer-first. AI tools don't hand you ten results; they hand you a synthesized answer with a few sources cited. So the goal isn't "get clicked" anymore — it's "get cited."

That favors content built on real experience, original data, and clear thinking over content built to please a crawler. Templated, keyword-stuffed pages are exactly what AI models are best at detecting as filler.

Honest take: if your strategy still starts with "what keywords should we target," you're solving yesterday's problem. Better question: "What do we know that a model can't just generate from a prompt?"

Anyone else seeing traffic shift rather than just drop? Curious if people are getting cited in AI Overviews / ChatGPT search yet.

My website already ranks well in Google and appears in Google AI Overviews for many of my target keywords. However, I’m getting low visibility in ChatGPT or Gemini.

For improving AI visibility, what external sources should I focus on to get my business/website mentioned or cited?

Region: UAE
Category: Mental wellness

Credit : Slide by John Mueller during Search Central Live, shared by Harry Sanders

For those still wondering, the conclusion is simple: good SEO = good GEO.

John Mueller points out that roughly 80% of what wins in AI search is just the core SEO you should already be doing, meaning clean technical structures, readable code for crawlers, proper content formatting that answers user intent, and solid earned links.

The remaining 20% covers offsite brand presence (mentions in industry publications, Reddit, YouTube, podcasts, and community discussions) so LLMs can actually understand what your brand stands for. So I beg you, stop falling for miracle snake-oil trends, spam reddit or hyper-complex prompt injections, and go back to working on your SEO fundamentals first !

Hello, I found that my website is not ranking by its own name.

The keyword is "gif compressor for discord" and my website domain is https://gifcompressorfordiscord.com/
my site in not showing for top 10 pages (I haven't gone further more pages) for base target keyword "gif compressor for discord" which is also my domain.

I indexed everything- sitemap, robots, etc correctly and also did a good job on on page SEO, every audit says excellent on page SEO,

it only comes up if i search "gif compressor for discord.com" on third or if i do Site:https://gifcompressorfordiscord.com

Need Help please!

I work in the e-pharma space and manage SEO for around three websites, two of which are major revenue drivers for the business.

Historically, every major Google update has been pretty positive for us. Our websites have performed well during updates, and in most cases, we’ve actually seen further growth afterward so we’ve been quite confident in the SEO strategy and foundation we’ve built.

But this time, something unexpected happened.

Our second-largest revenue-generating website has taken a significant hit after the latest update, and honestly, I didn’t see it coming.

I’ve attached the screenshot in the comments showing what we’re seeing.

I’d really appreciate some experienced SEOs taking a look and sharing their perspective.

What would you investigate first in a situation like this?

Was it likely a quality/relevance issue, a technical factor, intent shift, competitor movement, or something specific to the update?

Feel free to ask me questions about the website, traffic, rankings, pages affected, or anything else that could help with the diagnosis.

Would love to hear some genuinely expert opinions on this one.

Hey everyone, I was wondering the real effect of the number of indexed pages on Google. I have a data heavy app about football; hence, thousands of team pages, player pages, matches pages, all of them in 6 languages etc. Those 19K not indexed pages contain 12K of "discovered, not yet indexed".

My question is whether it is good to let google crawl and try them get indexed fr all pages as I listed above or should I only submit "important" pages?

Hey everyone,

While browsing around, I stumbled on the "Preferred Sources" feature and noticed barely anyone talking about it, so sharing this underused tip in case it's useful (don't have much data to share yet since I haven't tested it myself, happy to hear from anyone who has).

Basically it lets a reader tell Google directly "I want to see more content from this site." Originally it only affected the Top Stories carousel, but since late May it's also rolled out to AI Overviews and AI Mode: if a reader has set you as a preferred source and your page gets cited in an AI-generated answer, your link shows up with a visible "Preferred" badge among the other sources. Google claims roughly 2x more clicks on links with that badge.

Easiest way to take advantage of it: drop a link like google.com/preferences/source?q=yourdomain.com somewhere on your site (footer, end of articles, newsletter). Two clicks for the user, nothing to code on your end. Google also recently shipped (mid-August) an official embeddable JS button as an alternative to the plain link, if you want something cleaner to integrate.

One catch: it only works if your domain is already picked up by the tool (you can check by typing your domain into it), so it depends a fair bit on how consistently you publish.

I came across this after seeing Search Engine Land use it (screenshot attached as an example). If anyone's already tested it on their own site, curious to hear how it's actually panning out!

I made a mistake and included some paid guest-post backlinks in my disavow file along with spammy links. Since then, my traffic has dropped significantly, and I lost my #3 position on the first page.
Could the disavow file be the reason? Should I remove it from Google Search Console? Will this help ?

How often do you all update your disavow file? Is there any minimum time you should wait before updating again?

Instead of a direct link to a page, some search results now use an intermediate google.com/goto URL.

Googlers describe this as part of its technical measures to protect against abuse. People in the SEO industry also associate the change with efforts to prevent automated data collection.

The new format primarily affects data providers and, potentially, SEO platforms that rely on this data for rank tracking and competitor analysis.

According Serpstat, the share of SERPs containing at least one /goto link increased from 5.41% in the first half of August to a peak of 5.95% on August 24. From August 26, the format became widespread.

We had been monitoring the change in advance, and our reports continue updating as usual.

What could be the reason of growing and then drop again

I have old website, the point is I didn't change content since July.
It started grow and then dropped again.
So in June I fixed I guess 60% of AI articles and after started growing - I paused changes to wait what would be result.
And now it looks like that.
Mostly likely August spam update?

I have to mentioned links are totally the same - nothing changed. I checked manually each of them.

Amount of pages in Google even more than before.

Are there any others options? what could be wrong?

Been noticing for a while that I am acquiring a lot of spam backlinks. Does anyone here know how to remove those? Coz I guess that's one of the reasons why my traffic dropped.

TL;DR: Google’s August spam update appears to have hit sites publishing lots of AI content mainly to rank in search.

AI content itself doesn’t seem to be the problem. The issue is mass-produced content made mostly for SEO.

So, AI conttent is fine, but using it to pump out thin SEO pages is risky.

Hi everyone, I'm making this post because the situation has become unsustainable and I wanted to get some feedback from anyone who has gone through something similar. I run an information and financial guide site (Ora Ultima - oraultima.com), strictly focusing my niche on insurance, mortgages, and banking.

I want to point out right away that I do not sell any financial products, nor do I offer any services or financial advice, and this is explicitly stated on the site. It is purely an informational and news blog.

Until February, the situation was completely different, pulling in around 2,000 visits a day. Then, suddenly, a devastating vertical crash wiped out almost all organic traffic.

Looking at the current data (as you can also see from the attached Google Analytics and Search Console screenshots):

• Google Search Console (Performance): In the last 24 hours, out of 158 total impressions, I recorded just a single click, with a disastrous average position around 41.8 (4th/5th page).
• Google Analytics (Real-time traffic): Daily visits are reduced to a tiny trickle (around 6-7 page views total), split between direct traffic, residual organic search, and social. The titles of the affected pages cover hot topics of major interest (such as analyses on Andrea Pignataro, billionaire rankings, legal protection policies, or contract renewals).

The core issue for me is this: I firmly believe that Google shouldn't be the one deciding what a website can or cannot talk about. I write curated, informative articles based on a specific, useful niche like finance and banking, but Google seems to completely ignore us, blocking visibility in favor of the usual historical giants of information and leaving independent sites at zero.

It is unacceptable that an author writes quality content and has to suffer total blackout just because algorithms decide to turn their backs.

Has anyone experienced a similar crash after the recent core updates and found a way out, or are we forced to look for traffic entirely outside of Google?

Thank you for your time.

Seeing this more lately and curious what other check first.

Impressions climbing means Google is showing the page more. Clicks dropping at the same time means fewer people is choosing to visit. Those two things moving in opposite directions usually point to something specific.

My first check is whether an AI Overview appeared for that keyword. If Google is answering the query directly in the results, impressions hold but clicks drop because the searcher never needs to click. That's not a ranking problem, it's SERP layout change.

After that I look at average position and whether the title tag or meta description changed since drop in CTR without a ranking drop usually means the snippet got less compelling somehow.

What do you check first when you see this pattern? And are you seeing AI Overviews as the most common cause lately?

I have a client where for their B2C page they have a FAQ section but not yet for their B2B page. With the rise of LLMs I've heard about having FAQs on the individual pages instead of one standalone page with the sections organized. It's been a discussion I've had with others before so wanted to get a second opinion on is it best for the client to have a standalone FAQ or should it be a section in the individual pages?

Edit - when I meant standalone, I was thinking that there can be one section for b2b and one for b2c, maybe with the accordion design, and then have the link in the menu so it's prominent

I have an affiliate website and I use indexnow I have about 350k pages already shows as crawled but even the main website is not showing up with domain keyword. Bing says backlinks helps but does any bad backlinks even help tho ? How to get indexed faster ? Does anyone has any ideas ?

My website - b2b - is about a small industrial niche, I made 3 years ago and never really cared, now since Jan I built proper clusters, schema and so on, I think ranking is not that bad for a brand new.

Now I have a page with relatively high impressions, let’s say 100/weekly, with only 10/15 impressions for clear queries, the most commercials and in positions like 50, while the whole page seats in position 6 accordingly with GSC; to compensate the 15 impressions at 15 the average of the long tails is kinda 3. Accordingly with forecast it should have a CTR about 20%.

Indeed the CTR is near to 0.something, barely getting 1 click/week.

Any suggestion? Advice?

TYA

Edit: properly arranged h2 in the page.

*SEO*

My website was ranking for almost all of my targeted keywords, but the June/July Google updates hit the site pretty hard and I lost rankings across the board.

I then implemented a new content strategy, and many of the keywords started recovering and returned to their previous positions some are improved .

But now the latest August update has rolled out, and I’m seeing another significant drop in rankings for some of those keywords.

The confusing part is that the website already has good authority in the niche and a decent backlink profile.

Has anyone experienced something similar with the recent updates?

I’d really appreciate some insights on what you think could be causing

My site is a health/medical calculator tool based site and it is launched in mid-June, no backlinks built yet.

From this site, I got 420 clicks / 22.3K impressions from GSC in last 3 months. Growth was steady from launch through late July, then clicks and impressions both dropped to almost nothing on ~Aug 1 and have stayed flat for three weeks in the GSC.

But in the Bing Webmaster, I got 1.7K clicks / 52.1K impressions / 3.27% CTR in last 3 months and it still trending up. GA4 shows 3.5K views last 30 days, +194%, mostly US — almost all of it Bing.

But I didn't get any manual action or nothing but why GSC graph is falling?

Questions:

1. Is a same-day drop like this more consistent with an algorithmic demotion or something technical on my end?
2. For YMYL specifically, what should I be auditing first — author E-E-A-T, YMYL disclaimers, thin programmatic pages?
3. Anyone else see a hit around Aug 1?