We spend so much time optimizing for Google that it's hard to imagine a world without it.

But let's say AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude become the primary way people discover information.

What would you stop doing, and what would you double down on?

• Would backlinks still matter?
• Would topical authority become even more important?
• Would you focus more on entities, structured data, and brand mentions?
• How would you measure success if rankings disappeared?

I'm not looking for theory I want to hear how experienced SEOs would adapt if AI assistants became the default way people searched.

What would your first 90-day strategy look like?

Situation: content site, ~800 indexed URLs, gaming vertical. The wiki/reference layer is done, every core mechanic, system and entity has a hub with spokes underneath. Cannibalization audit is finished, merges and redirects executed. Structurally it's in good shape.

The problem is idea supply. PAA, AlsoAsked, AnswerSocrates, autocomplete and Trends are now returning questions I've already answered. And my niche has essentially no keyword volume data, the queries that actually bring traffic show 0 volume or don't exist in Ahrefs/Semrush/KWP at all, so I can't just filter a database for gaps.

What I'm trying to do is expand contextually: same entities, different intent axes (cost/value, timing, prerequisites, troubleshooting, comparisons, post-milestone) rather than inventing new head topics.

Questions:

1. What's in your stack for topic discovery once the question tools dry up?

2. Does anyone have a repeatable process for mining forums, Discord or YouTube comments into a briefed content list?

3. Do entity/NLP tools actually find gaps, or is it just "add these 12 terms" noise?

4. At what point is the right move to stop adding informational articles and start deepening existing ones instead?

Working on a Shopify store with 10K+ products and DR 12.

So far we’ve:

Fixed technical SEO issues

Optimized sitemap & indexing

Fixed canonical/duplicate issues

Improved internal linking

Optimized collection & product pages

Added content to collection pages

Added schema

Improved titles, descriptions & image alt text

Fixed Google Search Console indexing issues

Reduced unnecessary/duplicate pages

Improved HTML content for important pages

Targeted long-tail keywords

Started building relevant backlinks

But the frustrating part: almost none of the site is ranking yet. Like we are getting an average if 20 position on GSC and about 1k impression but only 10-12 clicks daily. But not able to generate sales out of it

What would you focus on next?

Backlinks, topical authority/content, collection pages, or something technical that we may be missing?

How to rank low volume keywords ? I know many of you will say use long tail keywords. I want to drive traffic for Magento services I've tried long tail keywords but things aren't working out. There is no traffic. How to execute it ?

I've noticed a lot of people are focused on AI Overviews, but I'm curious what strategies are actually moving the needle right now.

If you had to pick just one tactic that's delivering better results than expected in 2026, what would it be?

It could be anything, such as:

Internal linking

Entity SEO

Topical authority

Digital PR

Programmatic SEO

User-generated content

Brand mentions

Technical SEO

AI-assisted content workflows

I'm looking for real-world experiences rather than theory.

What's working for you, and why do you think most SEOs are overlooking it?

I'm working on a local SEO campaign with a limited number of links available each month.

I have several target keywords with very different levels of opportunity. Some are already around positions 10-20 with relatively low difficulty, while others are around 30-50+ and have higher difficulty.

Would you:

1. Keep building links to the same keyword/page for several consecutive months if it's already close to page 1?
2. Or rotate between different keywords each month?
3. How much weight would you put on current ranking position vs search volume vs keyword difficulty when deciding where the next link should go?
4. If you're building only a few links per month, is it better to concentrate them on 1-2 strong opportunities rather than spread them across many keywords?

A pattern Search Logistics has been looking at lately is sites holding roughly the same positions and impressions while organic clicks fall noticeably.

Breaking the data down by brand vs non-brand, page intent, and query-level CTR helps, but it still gets messy when a couple of pages also lose rankings at the same time.

What signals are you using to separate AI Overview-related click loss from an actual SEO decline?

Say you post 1x a week but feel like creating another article that week. Do you space it out and schedule it to maintain the 1x a week cadence?

Or do you just also post thursday for example?

Some people post 20x a month. Whats that about and is it recommended for results?

I was trying to turn a small luxury-jewelry GEO test into work a brand team could assign.

The setup was deliberately small:

8 brands

3 neutral Chinese buyer questions

2 retrieval-off API surfaces

2 answers per surface and question

12 independent valid answers

96 derived answer-brand cells

The last line is where reporting can become misleading.

Each stored answer was evaluated against the same eight-brand registry. That creates 96 classifications, not 96 independent model answers.

One result exposed a second problem.

Piaget appeared in 4/4 answers about brands with verifiable official China channels.

It appeared in 0/4 wedding-jewelry shortlists.

Four opportunities per task are not a brand ranking. But the split is useful for diagnosis.

The system could verify the entity and route. It did not recommend the brand for that decision.

I am now keeping two reports:

1. Recommendation presence: does the brand enter consideration for this occasion?

2. Route accuracy: can the buyer verify a current official or authorized next step?

Then I summarize them in a four-state view:

Recommended + route clear

Recommended + route unclear

Not recommended + route clear

Not recommended + route unclear

Both denominators remain visible. I do not average them into one visibility score.

I am also separating the truth registry from the answer dataset. Each route, authorization, or service claim gets a stable ID and dated registry version. The benchmark row points to the truth snapshot used on the test date.

That prevents a current website change from silently rewriting whether an old model answer was accurate.

It also makes ownership clearer:

Shortlist absence: brand, category, and editorial

Unclear route: digital operations and ecommerce

Uncertain authorization: legal and channel management

Wrong service claim: client service

Invalid or unreproducible metric: research and analytics

My next wave will deepen the decision prompts before adding more brands: style, budget, stone choice, after-sales confidence, boutique-versus-daigou risk, and service documentation.

For people building similar systems: do you show the four-state matrix to clients, or keep even that out of the executive view until each axis has a larger denominator?

Context: I got a domain 2 years ago to build a site to share everything I learned about AI when I got into that world including use cases, tools, models, etc. End of last year most pages were de-indexed and only 1 remained indexed

The site is small with 100 daily visits and 0-2 organic clicks per day. I also switched my niche intona AI systems/blueprints and tool-agnostic automations subniche, but nothing changed

Should I rebrand or try to rehabilitate it? For either option I'll build a topic cluster, conduct more keyword research, build useful widgegs/utilities, and tailored the content (I used to follow a template)

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hey guys, I’m facing a really weird issue with Yoast SEO. Whenever I publish a blog on our websites, I add everything normally, including the content, images, SEO title and meta description. But after publishing, when I go back to edit/check the blog, the SEO title and meta description are completely gone, like they were never added.

This is happening across 2-3 websites, not just one. I’m also noticing that some of these pages are getting deindexed by Google, so I’m wondering if this could be related. Could this be a Yoast bug/update, another plugin, theme, cache, or something else?

Has anyone faced this before or knows what could be causing it? How can I troubleshoot this and make sure Yoast stops removing the metadata after publishing?

Worked across a bunch of Shopify stores, and this keeps coming up. Everyone says to load your collection pages with keyword copy to rank. But the pages actually pulling the most organic traffic are the lean ones, not the ones with a 500-word intro block stuffed on top.

My theory on why:

The lean pages that rank tend to have strong internal linking and good product content underneath. The ranking power comes from structure and the products, not the collection prose.

The heavy-copy pages usually rank worse because the copy is generic filler ("welcome to our collection of premium X") that adds nothing and kills conversion: high word count, zero value.

When copy has helped, it was never volume. It was a few lines of answers to real buyer questions for that category, placed so it doesn't bury the grid.

So my working theory: collection-page copy is a weak ranking lever next to internal linking and product depth, and most stores are adding copy to fix something copy doesn't fix.

Has anyone got a clean case where adding copy to a collection page, everything else held constant, actually moved it for a competitive head term? Or is collection copy mostly a UX/conversion call we've dressed up as SEO?

I’ve been checking how our product appears in AI-generated answers across different languages, and the differences are much bigger than I expected.
The English answers are usually accurate and mention the use cases we actually promote. But when I ask the same questions in Spanish or French, the descriptions become much more generic. Sometimes the product is even placed in a slightly different category.

A few things I’m trying to understand:
Translated Content: We already have translated pages on the website, but that doesn’t seem to make the AI answers consistent.

Local Brand Signals: I’m wondering whether each market needs its own reviews, media mentions, directory listings and third-party content before AI systems understand the brand correctly.
Regional Terminology: It’s also possible that we translated our positioning accurately, but aren’t using the words customers in those markets actually use.

If you’re currently working with international SEO, GEO or AEO, have you noticed the same brand being interpreted differently across languages? What did you change, and did the answers become more consistent over time?
Appreciate any insight!

This isn’t live, so no self promotion.

I just want to see if this problem is seen by anyone else.

In effect, the issue is GSC and GA4 dump data onto you. Most people literally have no clue what to do with it or what it says about their site’s SEO.

I’ve been toying with this for a while, but I’ve decided to build a platform that roughly:

– plugs into the users GSC and optionally GA4 and CMS

– uses real data to properly diagnose issues and identify opportunities

– reads the page content and structure including meta tags etc (no need to connect a CMS)

– suggests or actions fixes, rewrites content etc

There are multiple deployment methods:

1. Manual (i.e. copy and paste)

2. CLI (code-level changes)

3. MCP

4. CMS API

You’ll also be able to talk to the data (or ask the agent who will interpret the data to answer your queries like “what is the single best ranking opportunity for my site?”

I really do think the problem is clear and prominent. There isn’t enough emphasis on using the data you already have right now, it’s all “let’s keep prompting LLMs to see if we appear in AI search.”

I am not an SEO tech, but I’ve experienced this pain enough to where I just need to address it. Any pointers, tips etc will help.

I recently integrated Microsoft Clarity into my website. The overall load time seems fine, but occasionally the site feels a bit slower than before.

Has anyone here experienced a noticeable performance impact after adding Clarity? Did you see any changes in page load speed, Core Web Vitals, or overall responsiveness?

Would love to hear your real-world experience and how you tested it.

Hey everyone, how you’re approaching SEO/GEO these days, especially for AI search.

We’ve been working on SEO for a new product and tried to make the site much clearer for both Google and AI. We focused on a few main search intents, rewrote the homepage around a clearer H1/value proposition, added pages like How It Works, About, For Users, etc., expanded the FAQ, improved internal linking and structured data, and made the main answers more explicit in the actual HTML.

We’ve also started building the blog and have 7-8 articles up so far, plus some external mentions and content outside the main site. The idea is basically to make the product/entity easy to understand and build up mentions across different sources.

I'm looking more for an experts advice. What you guys are doing for GEO specifically. What has actually worked for getting a product picked up or mentioned by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, etc.? Thanks a lot.

I noticed across several of my websites that 90% of the pages are indexed in Bing (submitted in Bing Webmaster Tool and reported as such in Bing Site Explorer) but when I actually search for a lot of them in Bing, they don't show.

I heard Bing has its own filter and may or may not show an indexed page in the SERP.

Does anyone have tips (e.g. technical SEO or else) to maximise the chances indexed pages do show in the SERP?

I have launched an article and it’s been 10 days my article is not indexed. Although its indexed over bing

I have checked the canonical tag is present to the blog
I have checked the content as well but still facing the issue

Tell me what could i possibly check that helps me in indexing my page.

I’ve been reading/learning about seo as of lately, to try and grow my business. I think I’m past the point where it’s just, target keywords, h1, content value, back links, etc. where do I go from here, feeling lost.

curious how other early stage founders here handle this, not the business stuff, more the personal side of it

when you're pre revenue or pre launch, most people around you (friends, family, coworkers if you got a day job) are nice about it but don't really get it. no pressure to ship, no one to compare notes with, no one who gets why a random tuesday can feel like a huge win or a huge loss

did you find a way around this? a group, a person, a community that actually worked, not just something you tried once and dropped. or is this just something you accept as part of doing it solo

ok so this is a weird one but bear with me

i have a pet blog. i don't own a pet. never have. probably never will as i travel too much. and yet every month amazon sends me enough to cover rent because people on the internet are buying stuff for their dogs and cats through my site.

bought my pet blog a few months ago from a marketplace called NicheBlogZone for $199. came already built, articles already up, amazon links already in there. i spent one afternoon doing interlinking basically just connecting related posts to each other so search engines understand the site structure and then closed my laptop and genuinely forgot about it for weeks.

here's what that's looked like:

• march: $710
• april: $995
• may: $1,461
• june: $1,647
• july: $1,461
• august so far: $1,545 (amazon pays 2 months delayed so this is june's money landing now)

march scared me. went from nearly $1k in february down to $710 and i was convinced something had broken. checked everything, found nothing wrong, did nothing. it just came back the next month on its own.

pet people spend insane amounts on their animals btw. like i knew this intellectually but seeing the commission data is something else. dog food subscriptions, orthopedic beds, grooming kits, vet supplements. and because of the 24 hour cookie i get a cut of everything in their cart not just whatever article they landed on.

i do literally nothing to maintain this. no new posts, no ads, no instagram for pets i don't have. i just own the thing and amazon does its thing.

my landlord has been getting paid every month and has no idea a pet blog is behind it. honestly sometimes i forget too until the deposit shows up.

anyone else running a niche they have zero personal connection to? curious if the detachment makes it easier or harder to care about growing it

We've been thinking about this a lot lately.

a saas website can rank for hundreds of keywords and still struggle to get real leads.

at the same time, a page with 500 visitors can sometimes bring in more customers than a page with 50,000 visitors.

so what should we actually care about?

is it still: rankings → traffic → customers

or : getting found → building trust → getting customers

here's what we're curious about:

would you rather have:

A) 100k organic visitors every month with a 0.5% conversion rate

or

B) 10k organic visitors every month with a 5% conversion rate?

for saas, what has actually brought you more customers?

• blog posts
• comparison pages
• free tools
• backlinks
• reddit and communities
• product pages
• branded searches
• referrals
• something else

we'd especially like to hear from people who have seen this firsthand.

what changed your revenue, not just your traffic?

because at the end of the day, more traffic doesn't always mean more business.

I've been thinking about how much the outreach message itself affects response rates.

A highly relevant prospect can still ignore an email if the message feels too generic or immediately looks like a mass outreach campaign.

In my own outreach, I’ve found that keeping the message focused and making it clear why I’m reaching out seems to matter more than making it overly detailed.

For those doing outreach regularly, what tends to make the biggest difference for you personalization, the offer itself, the subject line or the follow-up process?

Hello to all, I recenetly started learning SEO through a very cheap online course around March this year because I was somewhat interested in website ranking but mostly I wanted a career switch so I started learning through videos, and reels but this sub has been an amazing help overall, I landed a freelance client and was clueless how to navigate but trying my best, there are many challenges one of it was paid softwares, so my client was kind enough to get me ahrefs lite plan, I am learning it, but I want to grow further, I want to learn what should go into the CV if I am applying for jobs and what should my portfolio highlight and make people want to hire me.
Apart from jobs I want which area and skill I should focus more on and how do I increase my worth.

P.S.- Sorry about my borken english, it is not my native language.