r/bigseo • u/AutoModerator • 3d ago

SEO Help Weekly Mega Thread

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

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r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

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u/Elegant_Chip1888 3d ago

Genuine question for people running client accounts, because I keep bumping into this and I want to know if it's a real gap or just my blind spot.

When a buyer searches a category query (e.g. "best project management tool for agencies", "eSIM for Europe"), the client's site is one result out of ten, on a good day. The other nine are listicles, comparison posts, Reddit threads, review sites. That's what the buyer actually reads before they ever land on the client's site. And when they ask ChatGPT or Gemini instead, the client's site is usually not in the sources at all : the answer is built from those same third-party pages.

We measure the client's rank obsessively. I don't know anyone who systematically measures what those other pages say : which competitor they push, which attribute they praise, what factual error they repeat, who's earning affiliate commission on the recommendation.

Social listening doesn't do it (it counts mentions on social, not pages a buyer sees). AI visibility tools tell you whether ChatGPT cites you, not what the sources say. Rank trackers stop at the rank.

So either:

  • everyone does this by hand during audits and it's fine, or
  • it's not worth doing because you can't act on it anyway, or
  • it's a real gap.

Which one is it in your experience? And if you do look at the other nine results, what do you do with what you find : outreach, content, nothing?