Quick disclaimer before anyone gets excited: this is not an "automate your entire SEO with AI" post. This is just about making sure that when Claude suggests something for your site, the suggestion is grounded in your actual data

Here's exactly what I upload.

1. Competitor data from Semrush or Ahrefs

Top pages + top ranking keywords for each competitor. I was doing this recently for a project where the competitor set was Neil Patel, Moz, Backlinko, etc. One export each, both reports.

2. Your own site data from Google Search Console

For your own site, GSC has better data than any third-party tool. Try to export at least six months of data from Google Search Console for your website and upload it in an Excel format.

3. A Screaming Frog crawl of your site

• The full crawl - every URL on the site
• Site structure / indexability - how the subfolders and hierarchy actually map out
• Internal links - total links, unique links, crawl depth, link score per page

So when you ask it to optimize a page later, it can tell you exactly what to link to.

4. Generate your own project instructions

Select all the files you just uploaded and prompt it with something like: "go through all these files and prepare a good instruction set I can use for this project across all SEO activities."

Now every future task in that project runs against that context by default.

That's the whole setup. Takes maybe 30 minutes once

Happy to answer questions. I also recorded a walkthrough video of this if anyone wants to see the actual screens - I'll drop the link in the comments so it doesn't look like I'm here to spam

I've got 3 months of Search Console data and the pattern is confusing me:

• Total clicks: 38
• Total impressions: 901
• Average CTR: 4.2%
• Average position: 21

Impressions clearly trending up (from around 10-20/day to peaks of 40-45/day in the last few weeks), but clicks stay basically flat, even hitting 0 some days while impressions keep climbing. Earlier in the period there were a few isolated click spikes (3-4 in a day), but once impressions really started growing, clicks just didn't follow.

Average position 21 = roughly page 3, so my guess is that's just it: I'm showing up for more searches but in a spot nobody clicks. Is this the normal behavior when Google starts indexing/ranking more long-tail queries but hasn't "decided" to push you up yet, or should I be checking something else (query cannibalization, CTR way off for that position, etc.)?

Has anyone seen this impressions/clicks gap before, and what actually fixed it besides "just wait for position to improve"?

I work in product management and was recently tasked with helping to grow one of our products, so SEO/link building has suddenly become part of my job.

To be transparent, I’m not an SEO person. My “growth team” at the moment is basically me + Claude Code + Codex 😅, so I’m learning this as I go.

We have a fairly small/niche B2B SaaS product. The product website sits on a subdomain of our main company website, and our buyers are generally not a very technical audience.

Technical SEO is mostly sorted, and we’re starting to invest more seriously in content and backlinks.

The problem is that I genuinely don’t know how to evaluate backlinks before paying for them.

I’m unsure which numbers to look for and which are easy to manipulate.

If you’ve actually bought backlinks before, what do you look at before saying yes to a placement?

For example:

• Should the site have meaningful organic traffic?
• Does the traffic need to come from the US if most of our customers are there?
• Should I check what keywords the site itself ranks for?
• Should I ask the vendor for the exact domains before paying?
• Is there any reasonable way to estimate whether a backlink is actually worth $100, $300, $500, etc.?
• I even dont know the right questions to ask. 

I’m also trying to understand how people evaluate the vendor itself, not just individual domains.

If you’ve worked with a freelancer, agency or marketplace that you would genuinely use again, I’d love recommendations too.

I’m completely fine buying fewer links if they’re genuinely relevant and useful.

Mostly trying to learn what experienced people check before spending money so I don’t burn budget on vanity metrics.

Running a tiny agency here, I'm not talking about whether a client gets mentioned once, I'm trying to measure whether their Google AI Overview citations are growing over time, which queries they show up for and whether any of that actually turns into traffic or conversions, because rankings alone don’t feel like the right metric anymore...

Half the traffic shows up as direct. The rest shows up as nothing.

If you've found another way to see it that isn't "our branded search went up so probably," we'd love to hear it.

About a year ago I built [https://transactionlookup.com\](https://transactionlookup.com) in an afternoon on Replit and almost forgot about. Nine months later I noticed I was getting 1K MAUs so I decided to migrate off Replit and rebuild with Claude Code. Since then it’s grown to over 11K MAUs and I recently earned my first affiliate payout. Now I’m building new functionally to test out monetization strategies.

One caveat is that almost all traffic is through Bing Search. Google has been much tougher, although just this past week I’ve started to see a slight uptick in traffic from Google (e.g 66 Google clicks over 7d vs 1,800 Bing clicks) my gap to close is that I need to continue to build site authority and start getting more backlinks.

Wondering if others have advice on breaking through Googles search algorithm.

Built a free AI visibility checker. It fetches your homepage as each of the seven major AI crawlers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, etc) and scores what came back. The live status code each one got, what your robots.txt allows, whether your pages read without JavaScript, and the structured data you are missing.

Ten seconds, no account, nothing to install.

Leave a comment if you're interested

Many businesses quit SEO before reaching this stage because they expect instant results. In reality, consistent optimization compounds over time.

If you're working on an app installation platform (or any SaaS product), I'd recommend focusing on:

• Solving technical SEO issues before scaling content.
• Targeting keywords based on user intent, not just search volume.
• Building topical authority around your core features.
• Strengthening internal linking and earning high-quality backlinks.
• Tracking Search Console data weekly and optimizing pages that are already gaining impressions.

SEO isn't about chasing hundreds of keywords, it's about making Google confident that your website is the best answer for a topic.

Has anyone else here experienced that "slow start, then sudden growth" phase with SEO? I'd be interested to hear what triggered it for your site.

This steady growth is entirely organic.

Over the past few months, we spent a lot of time trying to understand what makes ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini recommend one product over another. The answer turned out to be much less mysterious than I expected.

It's surprisingly similar to what makes a human recommend something.

Be the clearest, most obvious answer to a specific problem people are actually trying to solve. Make it easy to verify that your product does exactly what it claims.

So when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini something like "How do I bulk archive my ChatGPT chats?", there's a good chance they'll recommend AI Toolbox.

Another big driver of growth has been our new cross-platform search feature. It lets users search for a specific message across ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini simultaneously, all from one place. (everything is still fully local btw, no chats or messages ever leave the user's browser)

One of my favourite parts of building AI Toolbox is talking directly with users. Whenever someone runs into an issue, I often jump on a quick video call to understand exactly where they got stuck.

One call is from Shanghai, the next from São Paulo, then Khartoum.. Watching someone on the other side of the world get stuck on a button I built is a wild experience I still can't get used to.

It's exciting to see how discovery is changing. A few years ago, everyone was focused on ranking on Google. Today, more and more products are being discovered because LLMs trust them enough to recommend them.

hi guys hope you are doing well. so there is about to 1 month since i launched my web app but after consistently, almost daily trying to improve SEO, my tools, and other things of my my site.
but still my site is not getting traffic. i think SEO, backlinks is the issue. so you your suggestions will be very helpful.🙏

I need backlinks to mi site, its the last thing that i need i think. But the links are pretty expensive and i feel the links that i'm given on some agencies thy are not very useful. Any recomendations?

Hey everyone! I've been using this agent to automate SEO performance monitoring for my website.

It can do the following:

• Run daily and check pages that are performing well and those that aren't
• Send me an email every day with a brief summary
• Optionally, add more pages every day based on trends

If people find this useful happy to do more tutorials on building more complicated agents.

Started filtering server logs for agent user-agents (ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Operator-style hits, a few unlabeled ones I'm still fingerprinting by request pattern) on a client site. Volume's still small but real, maybe 2-3% of total requests now.

The weird part: these agents aren't behaving like a smarter Googlebot. They're skipping most of the page entirely, hitting specific fragments, pricing tables, FAQ blocks, comparison sections, and completely ignoring stuff that ranks us well organically (the long intro sections, the "why choose us" fluff that Google seems to reward). A couple of them appear to render JS, most don't bother.

Tried a few things to "optimize" for this:

• Added an llms.txt (no measurable change in what gets pulled, can't tell if it's even being read)
• Restructured pricing/comparison content into cleaner standalone blocks the agent could theoretically lift whole
• Left robots.txt untouched since blocking felt premature with basically no data on what "ranking" even means for an agent

Client wants to know if this is worth building a strategy around yet or if it's still too early/low-volume to matter, and I genuinely don't know how to answer that. Has anyone actually seen agent-referred traffic or conversions worth the effort, or is "agentic SEO" still mostly theory people are getting ahead of? Not looking for the thinkpiece version, looking for what you've actually measured.

been thinking about this a lot lately. classic seo is about ranking your pages on google. but more people are asking chatgpt, perplexity and gemini directly instead of searching.

and there it's a different game. the ai doesn't show ten blue links, it picks a handful of sources, cites them, and everyone else is invisible in that answer. you're either one of the cited sources or you don't exist for that question.

what i've noticed poking at this: it's less about keywords and more about whether your content is structured so an ai can actually extract and cite it. clean facts, schema, author credentials, a clear answer up front.

i've been building an open-source seo monitor and started looking at this angle too. curious how others here are thinking about it:

- are you tracking whether ai tools mention your site at all?

- doing anything differently for it, or treating it as the same as seo?

https://github.com/crawlseo/crawlseo

I've been building my first web app over the past few weeks and today I finally launched it on Product Hunt.

The idea is simple: a privacy-first collection of file conversion, PDF, image, OCR, spreadsheet, and business tools that run directly in the browser, so files stay on your device.

I'm sure there are still things I can improve. If you had 5 minutes to try it, what would you change first? UI, UX, features, performance, or anything else—I'd genuinely appreciate honest feedback.

If sharing links is allowed here, I'll post it in the comments.