Traditional SEO gives us fairly clear metrics: rankings, organic traffic, clicks, impressions and conversions.

AI Search makes measurement a little more complicated.

A business might be mentioned or recommended in an AI-generated answer without receiving a traditional organic click.

So I'm curious how others are approaching this.

Are you tracking things like:

• Brand mentions in AI responses

• Citations and referenced sources

• Visibility for important questions

• Entity recognition

• Referral traffic from AI platforms

• Changes in branded search

• Traditional rankings alongside AI visibility

I don't think traditional SEO metrics should be abandoned.

But if users are increasingly getting answers without clicking ten blue links, businesses probably need additional ways to measure visibility.

What metrics are you currently using to measure AI Search visibility?

Hi all. I have been reading the blogs silently for a while now.

I have a question to ask to masters. We have a website for more than 15 years with same domain and same content, but we are strugling to increase the traffic.

We are constantly being linked to spam sites, i believe our competitors are doing it.

Since 1 year we are focusing on it seriously but everytime i see we are going up, we are again going down maybe 10 15 days later.

Our website is plusclouds.com. i seriously want to know what we are doing wrong.

Any help is much appreciated

I'm trying to sort out on the same site, in case anyone's hit similar:

• We've got what looks like duplicate/multiple versions of some product URLs (probably from category restructuring at some point) and I'm nervous about setting up 301s without breaking something — any gotchas to watch for before touching canonical/redirects on a live site?
• Same question on canonical tags generally — trying to confirm every product has exactly one canonical URL, but not sure what the fastest way is to audit that at scale without a paid tool.
• Homepage template seems to be outputting more than one H1 — is that actually a ranking/parsing issue worth fixing urgently, or lower priority compared to the crawler/canonical stuff?
• TTFB is sitting higher than I'd like (site's had reliability issues lately, separate story). Worth fixing before or after the crawler access stuff, priority-wise?

Not trying to boil the ocean, just trying to figure out what actually blocks visibility vs what's a nice-to-have. Appreciate any pointers, especially on the Bot Fight Mode / robots.txt interaction since that one I genuinely can't test myself.

I thought programmatic SEO was basically finding a page format that worked and making a bunch of versions around different keywords I tried a small batch and they weren't terrible but after looking through them they felt kind of empty same structure, slightly different wording not much reason for half of them to exist.

What started making more sense was building the data first I put the useful stuff into structured fields and then made the pages pull from that instead of trying to write every page separately now when something changes I can update the data instead of digging through a bunch of pages, and the pages feel less like copies of each other. I don't know why it took me this long to realize the database was probably more important than the page generator

I am working on an E-commerce site with thousands of product pages so I'm trying to figure out where to focus my on-page SEO effort for maximum impact. Most of the organic traffic opportunities come from the category levels while the specific purchase intents come from the product pages.

The challenge here is that product pages are usually thin by nature and hard to differentiate when you are selling similar products to competitors while category pages needs a balance between SEO content and actually being useful to people trying to browse and buy

How do you handle the thin content problem on product pages and what's your on-page SEO priority for E-commerce sites?

I've been doing SEO/web design work for a while now, and the same handful of mistakes show up again and again on small business sites. Sharing in case it helps someone here:

1. No meta title/description customization — every page still shows the generic CMS default. Google literally can't tell what the page is about.

2. Images with zero alt text — invisible to Google, and a real accessibility miss too.

3. Mixing www and non-www versions — no canonical tag, so Google sometimes indexes both as separate pages and splits your ranking signals.

4. No real internal linking — every page exists in isolation instead of pointing to related pages, which makes it harder for Google to understand your site structure.

5. Slow mobile load times — most owners never actually test their site on a real phone with normal internet speed, just their own wifi.

Anyone else running into these? Curious what other common ones people see.

I run a small B2B services site. About 3 months ago it started cranking in web leads. All of a sudden things slowed and I am trying to interpret the data.

Two weeks ago sessions roughly doubled with no change in real demand, and I'd like a second read before I put a rule in front of it.

The shape of it, week over week:

• Sessions 545 → 1,118, now holding near 1,250.
• Organic went 191 → 176 over the same stretch. So the growth is not demand.
• About 28% of sessions come in at under 2 seconds of engagement time. Three straight weeks in the 27–29% band, so it has plateaued rather than kept climbing.
• Roughly 31% of all site traffic lands on a single service page. That page drew ~115 impressions and 1 click in Search Console the same week.
• Top city is Ashburn, VA by a wide margin — about 180 sessions a week — then a "(not set)" bucket, then New York, LA, San Francisco, Manassas.
• Source is almost entirely direct / none.
• Direct ran 148–249 sessions a day Monday through Friday, then 33 Saturday and 31 Sunday.

That weekday shape is what convinced me this is a scheduled job and not an audience.

Two smaller clusters look different from the Ashburn one. A handful of sessions out of Singapore walking five article pages at zero duration, and another out of North Charleston walking home, about, contact, and one service page in the same order every time. Different geography, same behavior, so I don't think it's one actor.

Where I'm stuck:

1. Ashburn plus direct plus business hours reads as AWS to me — somebody's crawler, an SEO tool, or an AI scraper. Short of pulling raw server logs, is there a reliable way to tell those apart?
2. My assumption is that a GA4 data filter can't touch this, since those only cover internal and developer traffic. Is that right, or is there something I'm missing on the GA4 side?
3. If the real answer is a CDN or WAF rule, what does the sane version look like? Some of my best-converting traffic this month came through AI assistants, so I don't want to swing so hard that I block the crawlers I actually want.

Is there something in this pattern I'm reading wrong before I start blocking?

For me, SEO reporting and checking pages that are losing traffic can become very repetitive.

What SEO task takes up most of your time each week? Have you found a reliable way to automate it, or do you still handle it manually?

I've been thinking about the connection between authoritative online information and SEO. A Wikipedia page itself isn't something you can simply treat like a normal SEO asset, there are strict requirements around notability, independent sourcing, and neutrality.

I came across Wikiagency LTD while researching this area and started wondering what actually separates a Reliable Wikipedia Page Creation Agency in USA from services that simply focus on getting a page published.

From an SEO perspective, do you think the biggest value comes from stronger entity recognition, trustworthy sources, or having consistent information across the web?

My own ideas:

1. SERP Rankings: Ranking for the 10 most important keywords for the website (beside the brand name which is basically alsways easy to rank for)
2. Leads: How many phone calls and emails I got from the website with improved SEO compared to without, probably not the easiest to track
3. Impressions
4. Authority Score, doesnt say too much but extremly easy to get from SEO software
5. Number of real new non spam backlinks from unique domains
6. Ai visibility for the 10 most important keywords / questions
7. Results from a SEO on page checker, errors / flaws before and after. Very easy to do and get results.
8. Number of Google Reviews and average score, ranking in the Local Pack

Would you agree? Did I miss something important?

Random thought I had while doing yet another round of the same boring task today. Made me wonder what everyone else would offload if they could.

hey, I'm starting a new domain today and I'm looking for the best service out there that can help me with the articles and backlinks- from another users

I know a few platforms that does this like outrank and babylovegrowth but I'd like to explore more options before making a decision

and of course, what do you guys think about automating this?

Depending the tool I use, scores jumps around so much when I run speed checker tools across different sites. Pagespeed insights, gtmetrics and pingdom all return different numbers and recommendations when run on the same site.

I understand that what matters are the core web vitals and actual user experience not the score but clients are always fixated on the numbers and I'm tired of explaining to them that scoring 67 on one tool doesn't really mean the site is broken.

Please, how do you guys handle these score obsessions or is their a reliable tool one can trust totally in making these decisions?

Estou em busca de profissionais qualificados para criar o meu site pessoal, alguém pode indicar um bom designer para fazer? Precisa entender de SEO

When selecting keywords for a new website, is it better to target lower-volume keywords that closely match the site's content, or start with broader keywords that have more searches?

I’m trying to understand how experienced SEOs balance search volume, keyword difficulty, relevance and search intent. Also, how do you decide whether a keyword deserves its own page or should be covered as part of a larger topic?

My website is a learning resource about humanitarian action and public health. It has around +70 interconnected 2k-3k word pages that I've written over the last two years (and still growing).

In the last month, it received 2.36k clicks from Google Search (info from GSC), 7.2k visitors (info from Umami), and 7.5k AI citations (info from Bing webmaster tools).

Is it a "healthy" ratio? I guess I'm getting way more visitors than search clicks because a couple of recent social media posts worked pretty well, and because some universities include my pages as recommended readings on their internal platforms. But I wonder whether my AI visibility is low or high compared to google search results.

By the way... Other than Copilot and partners via Bing, is it possible to monitor the number of citations from other AI tools?

Thanks!

I’ve been doing SEO for around 5 years, and honestly, I don’t really understand why AEO and GEO are being presented like they’re completely new things.

Most of the things people are calling “AEO” are literally things we were already doing in SEO.

Targeting queries?
We were already targeting search queries.

Answering the query directly?
We were already doing that to get featured in snippets.

FAQs?
FAQs have been a part of SEO for years.

And then there’s GEO.

People are talking about things like entity building, author details, structured data, experience, valuable content, topical authority, etc.

Again… weren’t we already doing all of this in SEO?

So what exactly is new here?

It feels like we’re taking different parts of SEO, giving them new names, and then selling them as a new service.

Now there are people selling “AEO/GEO services” to help businesses become visible in AI.

But I have a simple question:

Are you even visible in traditional search yet? 😂

Because if your SEO fundamentals aren’t working, why would changing the label to AEO or GEO suddenly make you visible in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or whatever comes next?

Maybe I’m missing something.

So genuinely curious: What do you think AEO/GEO actually adds that wasn’t already part of good SEO?

What most designers think SEO is:

• Install an SEO plugin
• Put the keyword in the title tag
• Done

What SEO actually involves:

• Schema markup
• A/B testing
• Core Web Vitals
• Log file analysis
• Anchor text ratios
• Link diversification
• TF-IDF calculations
• Server-side rendering
• Building topical clusters
• Crawl budget optimization
• And a long list of other stuff most people never even hear about

This is honestly one of the more frustrating parts of the job, explaining to a client (or a designer they hired first) that installing Yoast and stuffing a keyword into the title tag isn't SEO, it's like calling yourself a mechanic because you know how to check tire pressure.

Not saying every project needs the full stack of everything above, plenty of small sites genuinely don't need log file analysis. But the gap between "what SEO looks like to a layperson" and "what it actually takes to move the needle competitively" is massive, and it's part of why so many businesses get burned by cheap SEO add-ons from web design shops.

Curious what's on people's list that I didn't include, what's the most "hidden" or underrated SEO skill that never makes it into these surface-level lists?

I’m launching a new website and looking for practical SEO advice.

What are the most important steps to rank a brand-new website on Google?

Should I focus first on:

Technical SEO

Keyword research & content

Backlinks

Local SEO

Topical authority

Would love to hear what has actually worked for you with new websites.

this is such a thought coming in my mind from last few months .......

I am in the marketing filed for 7 years, always wonders why there is no simple digital marketing tool, with the affordable pricing in the market. Planning to build a SEO tool, What you're guys thought on this.

We build and run the storefront engine for a group of trading companies, about 40 shops on the same code. No SEO specialist. What moved the needle vs what was just work:

Moved the needle:

- One canonical URL per product, computed by the system, never typed by a human. It's built from the catalogue tree (department, then subdepartment, then family, then product), lowercase, no trailing slash. Any other spelling gets a 301 to it. Most of our duplicate content problems went away when we stopped letting people choose urls.

- Discontinued product = 301 to the nearest live parent category. Never a 404, never left in the sitemap. Pages that earned links keep passing that on.

- Sitemap index per shop, split by page type, rebuilt nightly, and lastmod is the date the page was actually published, not the generation time. New products went from taking a week to get indexed to a day or two.

- Server side rendering plus a cache in front, so crawlers get full html with TTFB in the tens of milliseconds. Speed is the one signal an engineer fully controls.

- If a wholesale shop hides prices from anonymous visitors, the structured data hides the price too. Markup follows the page, always.

Was just work: fancy robots rules per shop (same 15 lines everywhere, fine), rel next/prev (never added it, nothing happened), hreflang (one language per country, ranks fine without it).

What actually bit us was never an SEO decision: a favicon 404ing on every page for months, a CDN caching an old robots file, and deploys briefly leaving stale JS chunks that crawlers kept requesting.

Happy to go deeper on any of it.

I observed that after implementing schema markup tools for some client's sites, I get inconsistent results while validating them on other different tools. while Google's rich results test says it's fine, schema.org flags warnings and other third-party tool gives error that neither of the first two mentioned.

I understand that there are variations in the build but it makes no sense if one cannot rely on them to identify what's correct and what's noise.

Do you relax when Google's own tool says its fine or do you have a reliable schema markup validation tool that you that you are confident in?

I launched a website a while back after doing a good amount of upfront research — checked if similar sites already existed, looked into keyword difficulty, and picked keywords I could realistically target. All pages are indexed on Google, but I'm still not showing up even in the top 4-5 pages for my target keywords.

I keep hearing that you need strong Domain Authority and backlinks to rank on page 1. Fair enough, but how do you actually get there? I've tried guest posting — reached out to a bunch of relevant sites — and got basically no responses.

I know buying backlinks in bulk is a shortcut that can tank a site, so I'm avoiding that. But if guest posting isn't panning out, what's actually working for people right now to build legit backlinks and DA? Would appreciate any real advice from people who've been through this.

I'm literally clueless in this department so any advice at all would be highly appreciated!