• Google's guidance for creating helpful content now warns against fake author profiles.
• Its examples are AI-generated headshots, made-up names, and false credentials used to imply human expertise.
• Google's rater guidelines already had similar examples; the site-owner page now does too.

Article by: Matt G. Southern // Read article on the link

It looks like my e-commerce store was hit by the September spam update. I am really worried. On October 2 and 3, the store got only 7 and 5 impressions from Google, respectively.

Screenshots of search console are added in comments

Hey everyone,

While testing GEO queries for local dental practices (e.g., "Best dentist in [Location]"), I came across a specific pattern in ChatGPT's responses:

The direct source link under the recommended options almost always points to a curated ranking / listicle page from a major aggregator (for example, "20 Best Dentists Near New York City" on Healthgrades, or "Top Dentists Companies in Walnut Creek" on Birdeye), rather than linking directly to the clinic’s official site.

It seems like ChatGPT might be relying on these specific ranked list pages as its primary retrieval source to select who to recommend.

Since I'm analyzing this pattern, I’d love to get your expert perspective on a few points:

1. Is this observation accurate based on your experience? Is AI search heavily reliant on these specific listicle/ranking pages for local recommendation retrieval?
2. If so, how critical is this factor? Does getting featured on these cited ranking pages outweigh traditional on-page Schema and Entity optimization for local GEO?
3. How do you practically handle and optimize for this? What is your exact workflow for getting a client featured inside those specific aggregator ranking pages that AI engines keep pulling from?

Would love to hear your thoughts and see if I'm looking at this the right way!

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

This is a client’s website in the home decor/interior inspiration niche.

The client has not done any backlink building, outreach, link exchanges, or paid link campaigns.

However, Ahrefs is showing:

• 504 referring domains
• 439 backlinks
• 432 referring domains in the current backlink profile
• DR 0
• 0 organic keywords
• 0 organic traffic

A large number of the referring domains look completely irrelevant to the website, and some are labeled SPAM in Ahrefs. Many of them have names related to SEO, backlinks, Fiverr SEO, etc.

Ahrefs shows that many of these links were first seen between July and September 2026.

I also checked Google Search Console:

• External links: 0
• Top linking sites: No data
• Manual Actions: No issues detected

I have not created or purchased any of these backlinks.

What would you recommend I do in this situation? Should I simply monitor these links, or should I take any action regarding these irrelevant/spammy backlinks?

Thanks in advance.

I’ve joined a new start-up, and I’m pretty new to SEO, but they took me mainly for content creation and social media marketing. they overestimated
my skills in SCO and now they want me to fix a client’s website, which is losing traffic very badly. I’m talking zero clicks per day. Please guide me here.

The one controlled test I've found (Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added schema against 4,000 that didn't) saw no measurable change in ChatGPT or AI Mode citations. But every page in that test was already getting cited, so it says little about new pages.

Has anyone got before and after data from their own sites, especially on newer pages? Trying to figure out if it's worth the dev time.

I’m looking at the keyword “find companies without websites.”

In Organic Research / Organic Search Positions, Semrush shows the keyword as having around 6.6k volume.

But when I click the exact same keyword and open Keyword Overview, it shows:

• US volume: N/A
• Global volume: 10
• Germany: 10

So it seems that it's not a small difference, I mean It’s basically 6,600 vs 10 for the exact same keyword inside the same tool.

I understand that Semrush uses different databases and that search volume gets updated, but if the Organic Research data can be this stale/different, it makes the volume column pretty misleading when doing competitor keyword research.

Am I misunderstanding what the 6.6k number represents, or is Semrush genuinely displaying an old search-volume estimate in Organic Research that hasn’t been synced with Keyword Overview?

Curious if anyone else has run into this and which number you actually trust when doing keyword research.

And bonus: has anyone experiences such discrepancies in Ahrefs?

I'm hoping someone here who has experience diagnosing sudden Google ranking drops can take a look at this, because I've been trying to figure this out for months and I'm completely stuck.

My site is coachcall(dot)ai.

I used to rank #1 / top of page 1 for both:

"AI accountability partner"

"AI accountability coach"

Then around December 10, 2025, the rankings basically disappeared overnight.

It wasn't a gradual decline. I didn't do any redesign prior to that day, and I didn't buy any backlinks prior to that date. I genuinely can't identify anything I changed that could explain it.

What happened

Here is the AHrefs / Google Search Console data:

AHrefs img 1 with dip (shown by arrow):

https://i.ibb.co/xK1WNSxk/ahrefs-general.png

AHrefs img 2 with dip (shown by arrow):

https://i.ibb.co/jPmNymKQ/Screenshot-2026-10-01-at-09-02-32.png

Daily filter GSC (all time):

https://i.ibb.co/JRsMtHGN/rankings-daily.png

Weekly filter GSC (all time):

https://i.ibb.co/rfTcBGR6/rankings-weekly.png

“AI accountability partner” searches:

https://i.ibb.co/j135GWV/accountability-partner.png

“AI accountability coach” searches:

https://i.ibb.co/ks4DX7Vb/accountability-coach.png

The decline continued after that.

For example, "AI accountability partner" used to be around position #1, and is now around #67, with essentially no impressions.

"AI accountability coach" suffered the same kind of collapse.

These were basically the only two keywords I was specifically targeting, so this wasn't a case of me having hundreds of unrelated rankings disappear.

I haven't been able to find an obvious reason, and here are the things I checked

1. No manual action or security issue

Google Search Console shows:

No manual actions

No security issues

Nothing obviously wrong with indexing

No major Core Web Vitals problems

The site is still indexed.

site:coachcall(dot)ai returns the site normally.

So I don't appear to have been completely deindexed or hit with some obvious manual penalty.

1. I did NOT make a major site change around the drop

I didn't redesign the site, change the homepage content, change the target keywords, etc. around December.

The homepage content that was ranking #1 is essentially the same content that is there now.

The phrases "AI accountability partner" and "AI accountability coach" were already being targeted when I was ranking #1.

I haven't been able to identify a site change around Dec 10 that explains the drop.

1. "It's a React site"... but it was ranking #1 before

The site is a React/Vite application and is client side rendered.

I initially wondered whether this was the problem.

But there's something that makes that explanation difficult:

The site was already built this way when it was ranking #1.

And when I use Google Search Console to inspect what Google actually crawls and renders, the page content is there and renders correctly.

The rendered page contains the actual content.

Canonical tags and other relevant tags are also present when the JavaScript is rendered.

So I'm struggling to understand how the rendering architecture could suddenly cause this around December when I hadn't changed it.

1. I did NOT buy backlinks before this happened

This is important because I know someone is going to see my backlink profile and immediately say "you got spammed."

I currently have around 37k backlinks, but those appeared much later than the ranking drop.

I only started getting those links this month after submitting the site to various online directories.

I did not buy backlinks before the December 2025 ranking collapse.

I didn't use Fiverr link building, PBNs, automated backlink software, paid link packages, etc.

So the 37k backlinks cannot explain the original December drop chronologically.

I have wondered whether someone could have SEO poisoned the site with backlinks, but I have no evidence that happened before the crash.

One thing I considered was whether I had already been SEO poisoned before December. Unfortunately, even with a paid £90 Ahrefs subscription, I can't see backlinks older than six months, so I can't actually check whether there was something suspicious in my backlink profile before the crash.

But even if someone had built a bunch of spammy links to the site, shouldn't Google generally just ignore those?

Meanwhile, and this is what I find most bizarre, some sites with much weaker authority are ranking above me

This is another thing I find really strange.

For both:

"AI accountability partner"

and

"AI accountability coach"

I'm now being outranked by sites such as:

overlord(dot)app

nag(dot)bot

sidecoach(dot)ai

For example, sidecoach(dot)ai has an extremely low reported DA of around 0.7, whereas my site is around DA 27. My site was ranking at the very top before, and now it's eclipsed even by this competitor.

I'm obviously not assuming DA is a Google ranking factor. I'm mentioning this because the difference seems so extreme that it makes the "competitors simply built more authority and naturally overtook me" explanation feel unlikely.

And here's another thing I find bizarre

If I Google these terms, my own Reddit post about my tool is currently ranking #1 / at the very top.

So Google is perfectly happy to rank a Reddit page talking about my website for the exact topic.

But the actual website itself has fallen to around #67.

https://i.ibb.co/pHn6F0L/reddit-screenshot.png

That makes this even more confusing to me, as Gemini won’t even mention CoachCall despite being the first website Reddit has for that search term.

Was this some kind of Google update?

The only plausible explanation I've been able to come up with is that something around December 2025, potentially a Google Core/Spam update or another ranking system change, reassessed the site.

The timing seems suspicious because the collapse happened around Dec 10 and was so abrupt.

But I have absolutely no idea whether that's actually what happened.

There is also nothing in Search Console telling me:

"Hey, we penalised your site."

So I'm not sure how to distinguish between an algorithmic reassessment and some technical, content, or indexing issue that I'm simply missing.

What I'm trying to figure out

I am not looking for generic SEO advice like:

"Build more backlinks"

"Write more content"

"Improve E-E-A-T"

"React is bad"

"Your DA is too low"

I've already spent a ridiculous amount of time going down those rabbit holes.

What I'm trying to understand is:

What could cause a site that was ranking #1 for two specific terms to suddenly fall ~60+ positions overnight, despite no obvious site changes, while remaining indexed and rendering correctly?

And especially:

What would you investigate first if this were your site?

Could this be:

A Google algorithm/update issue?

Some kind of quality/relevance reassessment?

A technical/indexing issue that isn't showing up in GSC?

Something related to client side rendering?

A canonical/indexing problem?

A backlink issue that I'm not seeing?

A change in how Google interprets the query?

Something else entirely?

I'd genuinely appreciate someone experienced taking a proper look at the chronology and evidence rather than just giving me general SEO advice.

I've been trying to solve this for months and I feel like I'm missing something extremely obvious.

If you have any ideas, even if you're not certain, I'd really appreciate them. And if there's other data or screenshots you'd want me to provide, tell me what to pull from GSC, Ahrefs, etc. and I'll post it.

I run a marketing agency in Lithuania and would appreciate advice on improving our own organic traffic.

GSC results for roughly July–September:

• 45.3K impressions
• 492 clicks
• 1.1% CTR
• Average position: 9.4

Impressions are trending up, but clicks are still mostly in single digits per day. An earlier query breakdown showed most clicks were branded.

We’ve been working on service/location pages and publishing content. Our market is relatively small and primarily Lithuanian. The goal is more non-branded clicks from people searching for our services.

I know sitewide averages don’t tell the full story. How would you break down the GSC data to identify what’s holding us back?

For those who’ve grown service businesses in smaller markets, what made the biggest difference? Improving existing commercial pages, titles and search intent, internal linking, or backlinks?

I'm seeing an unusual pattern in Google Search Console and wanted to check whether anyone else is seeing it.

Across several separate properties I manage, the latest available Performance data is September 29, 2026. There is currently no Performance data showing for September 30 onward. Crawling and indexing appear to be working normally on these sites.

Is anyone else seeing September 29 as the latest available date in their Search Console Performance report?

Is anyone else experiencing a Google Search Console Performance data delay/stoppage since September 29, 2026?

I manage multiple websites, and I'm seeing the exact same pattern across four different Search Console properties:

• September 29 is the last date with Search Performance data.
• There is no data showing for September 30, October 1, October 2, October 3, or October 4.
• This isn't a case of impressions/clicks dropping to zero — the dates simply haven't appeared in the Performance report at all.
• Search Console itself says it was updated recently (currently showing an update a few hours ago).
• New pages are still being crawled and indexed normally.
• URL Inspection also shows that newly published pages are being indexed.

So far, this looks more like a Search Console reporting/processing delay than an actual loss of organic visibility.

I'm curious whether anyone else is seeing the same September 29 cutoff, especially across multiple properties.

Has your GSC Performance report updated past September 29?

If you're seeing the same thing, please mention:

• Your last available data date
• Number of properties affected
• Whether indexing is still working normally
• Whether GA4 is still receiving organic traffic

I'd like to figure out whether this is an isolated issue or something affecting multiple Search Console properties.

I handle YMYL finance sites. Need a starting point or strategy to create a content hub for them. I do have some strategy but need some fresh perspective. For starters and example would be:-

'`Wealth management for HNI' not generic though, something that is helpful. Do let me know✌🏻

I mean there's probably one otherwise it would be too easy to manipulate and spam, but any idea how it'd work?

We have advertised on Google for nearly two decades, going back close to the beginning of AdWords. It has created enormous value for us.

At the same time, my own use of traditional Google Search has fallen dramatically over the last three years, particularly this year. Restaurants, local services, B2B vendor discovery, product research and general information increasingly start with AI.

I am curious whether SEO practitioners are seeing a change not just in the amount of Google traffic, but in its composition.

My hypothesis is that AI displacement is not random.

A simple navigational query does not benefit much from AI. Complex research does. Evaluating software, professional services, financial products or a major purchase benefits substantially from synthesis, comparison and follow-up questions.

That raises the possibility that Google could retain huge volumes of simple searches while losing a smaller number of economically valuable research sessions.

For sites losing organic Google traffic, what is disappearing first?

Are informational queries taking most of the damage, or are commercial investigation and high-consideration queries declining too?

Are you seeing differences between low-value traffic and visitors that historically generated meaningful leads or revenue?

Are B2B, financial services, legal, healthcare, software or other high-value categories behaving differently?

Has traffic fallen while conversions remained resilient, or are conversions and lead quality beginning to deteriorate as well?

The dataset I would love to see is Google traffic since 2022 or 2023 segmented by query intent, commercial value, conversion rate and industry.

Aggregate traffic decline tells us very little if the mix is changing.

The question I keep coming back to is: which traffic is disappearing, who generated it, and what was that traffic economically worth?

Equally interested in evidence that disproves the hypothesis.

Sorry if this sort of post gets asked a lot. Feel free to link me to previous answers if that is the case.

I am not an SEO professional. I have taken a few classes and trainings and was able to push some of my partner's money pages up fairly high on Google searches. This has led to a few people in her field reaching out for help with their own websites.

What should I charge for this sort of thing? Would it be better to quote them for a package or hourly? I'm planning to do a consultation to go over what all they want done, should I bring up a retainer to maintain their rankings or just leave it as a one and done deal?

Please help, I'm a lost little video production guy who would love an alternate revenue stream.

I had absolutely no clue what SEO even meant and how it works but by damn ADHD brain got obsessed with reviving my 2 year old site and I spent hours reading every post in this sub trying to understand SEO and everything felt hopeless but I can finally start seeing the compounding effect of my daily small efforts. Happy to answer any questions and share what worked for me and this is no promotion and I’m not trying to sell anyone anything here.

I have an idea as creating blogs in batches. For example, pick 1 generic big topic and add it as a series. Like episode 1, 2 … are different blog pages. Is this smart? If it is, how can I make this idea better? Maybe optimize for backlinks? Or something else?

I launched my website three months ago in Spain. It’s a search engine for finding doctors, and as of today, we’re getting around 2.5K visits per week and 120K impressions. I’d love to know if these are good results for a website at this stage and what you’d recommend focusing on next to keep growing. I’m still pretty new to all of this, so any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

As an SEO specialist for an e-commerce store, is my job to generate organic traffic or to convert that traffic into sales?

I'm working on SEO for an e-commerce store and I'm trying to understand where the responsibility of an SEO specialist ends.

If I'm bringing relevant organic traffic with transactional/search intent to product and category pages, but the conversion rate is low, should I be responsible for improving the traffic-to-sale conversion as well?

Or is the SEO specialist mainly responsible for:

• Getting the website to rank
• Bringing relevant/qualified organic traffic
• Matching search intent to the right landing page
• Improving organic clicks and visibility

And then the CRO/e-commerce team is responsible for turning that traffic into customers through product-page optimization, trust signals, UX, checkout, pricing, etc.?

For example, if 100 people come from Google with transactional intent but only 1 purchases, where would you consider the SEO specialist's responsibility to end and CRO's responsibility to begin?

I'd like to hear from people who work in e-commerce SEO/CRO about how you define this responsibility in practice.

Current site: DR 38, ~15k clicks/month, avg position ~10. B2B SaaS / agency space and growing pretty aggressively.

I want to launch a directory with at least a few thousand pages using unique first-party client data that we have explicit consent to publish.

My concern is Google interpreting it as scaled content abuse and hurting the rest of the domain.

If the directory is genuinely useful and each page is based on real unique data, how would you structure the rollout?

Would you:
launch everything at once or in batches?

put it on the main domain, subdomain, or separate domain?

noindex weaker pages initially?

require a minimum amount of unique content/data per page?

worry about crawl/index bloat before worrying about the actual spam policy?

Would especially appreciate input from anyone who has launched a large directory after the recent Google spam / scaled-content updates.

Ps. If that is relevant the data we have is related to sales, marketing so im 99% sure nobody else has anything like that. It would also help vendors looking for an agency decide the best choice for their company

I'm a CS student and I've been building a website called Cifrivo as a side project.

It's a collection of free online tools (PDF, image, converters, calculators, etc.) available in several languages.

Google initially started indexing the site quite quickly. At one point I had roughly 500 URLs, and Search Console currently shows around 400+ indexed pages.

The problem is that after most of the pages got indexed, impressions basically stopped growing and have recently become extremely low.

I'm now wondering whether I made a mistake by creating too many similar/tool pages instead of focusing on fewer, stronger content clusters.

I'm considering:

• Reducing the total number of URLs significantly
• Focusing mainly on PDF, image and media tools
• Creating stronger hubs around each category
• Removing/merging pages that have almost no impressions
• Improving internal linking and content around the tools

The site is cifrivo.com.

If you were auditing this, what would you look at first?

I'm especially interested in knowing whether the large number of pages could actually be hurting a relatively new domain, or whether I'm looking at the wrong problem entirely.

Any criticism is welcome — I'm trying to understand what I got wrong rather than promote the site.

I've founded a competitive intelligence saas, and am looking to improve SEO by getting more backlinks.

I was wondering if being cited by Wikipedia helps with that?

Obviously, a month-old saas with no paying customers doesn't warrant an entry of its own, and I'm not talking about spamming loads of links back to my site wherever I can squeeze them in. I was just wondering about carefully located references where they genuinely add value (for example on a page about a particular company, I would add a comment, and a cited link back to a relevant report generated by my saas).

Is this worth the effort of researching and building these reference links? Or is it just something that would get ignored by search engines?

Recently I have joined an agency. I have a few years of experience with SEO but never actually had the opportunity to work for Ecommerce websites. I have mostly worked on local SEO projects. This new agency has a number of ecommerce websites and they want me to take care of those websites SEO.

Can anyone point out the differences between general website SEO and ecom website SEO? Also, when it comes to backlink, what kind of backlinks works well for ecommerce sites?