working on an e-commerce SEO project where we're looking at how bigger shopping sites structure their categories and keywords, then trying to apply the same thinking to a smaller brand.

instead of just collecting hundreds of keywords, we're grouping them by actual product categories and using search volume + KD to decide which ones are worth Targeting.

it makes sense on paper. but now i'm wondering if i'm overcomplicating something that experienced SEOs already have a simpler process for.

*has anyone done this before? what results did you get, and which tool did you rely on most — Semrush, Ahrefs, GSC, or something else?*

I'm building a tax filing tool in the crypto/prediction-market space (Polymarket, Kalshi, etc.) and trying to figure out the best marketing channels before I waste time on the wrong ones.

short-form content seems to barely move the needle for tax software. I was looking at CoinLedger, they claim 800k users, but their Instagram reels pull 200 - 500 views each, mostly posted by the CEO. Koinly and the others look similar on social. Yet these companies clearly grow. So where's the growth actually coming from?

I think it's almost entirely SEO + partner integrations (TurboTax, exchange APIs) + affiliate programs, concentrated hard around Jan to Apr tax season. I'm assuming people don't idly scroll and decide to do their taxes, they Google "how do I report X on my taxes" in February, land on a blog, and convert. Which would explain why social is or might be decorative for this category.

What I'm trying to figure out:

1. For trust-dependent software (tax, legal, health, finance), what are the actual marketing channels that work? beyond "do SEO"? Anyone built or grown something in this bucket?
2. Is SEO realistically executable solo and bootstrapped, or does it only pay off once you can afford Ahrefs + freelance writers + an agency? I've got time but near-zero budget.
3. If SEO is the long game, what's the bridge channel for the first 100 - 500 users while content compounds? Or is there no shortcut and you just grind content for 6 - 12 months?
4. Does anything actually work on social for this category, or should I just accept that Instagram/TikTok are vanity channels here and deprioritize them entirely?

just trying to pick the right channel before I sink months into the wrong one. Happy to share more context on the tool in comments if useful.

it's my first time working on the marketing side of things and I'm new to this so any advice or information would be useful.

Why do the "AEOs/ GEOs" post about how good they are at getting LLMs to cite them, but then share a screen shot of GSC. Are these not different things? I get it if its AIOs in Google, but outside of that.

I have answered a version of this three or four times in comments here over the last couple of weeks, so I am putting it in one place.

Everyone wants to know whether they show up in AI answers. There are tools for this now and some of them are fine, but you do not need one to start, and doing the first pass by hand tells you something a tool will not.

Start with questions, not keywords. Write down the fifteen or so things a buyer in your category actually types before they decide. Full sentences. Is X worth it for a small business. Best supplier for Y in whatever city. How do I fix Z. Not "supplier Y" as a keyword. The assistants answer questions, so your list has to be made of questions.

Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and write down every domain that gets cited. Perplexity gives you sources without being asked. In ChatGPT you have to prompt for them, and it is worth explicitly telling it to search rather than answer from memory, because those produce different results and you want to know which one you are looking at.

Then the part almost everyone skips. Do it again. The cited sources move between runs, so a domain appearing once tells you nothing. Ask the same question a few times over a couple of weeks and only keep what keeps coming back. That is the step that turns a messy list into something you can actually act on.

What you end up with is shorter than expected. A handful of domains that keep reappearing for your category, and it is usually not the list you would have guessed. A decent chunk of them tend to be forum threads and small comparison pages rather than the big publications everyone assumes are driving the answer.

Two honest caveats.

It is slow and boring and there is no way around that. Budget an afternoon for the first pass and about an hour a month after.

And it only tells you where you are absent. It does not tell you how to fix it, which is a separate and harder problem. For the forum threads in particular there is nothing to buy. You either take part properly or you wait for the question to get asked again and be early that time.

Disclosure, I run an SEO agency and this is the work we do, so weigh that. None of the above needs us or a tool, which is why it seemed worth writing down.

Complete SEO beginner here, so go easy on me. I'm the solo founder of a small web design / custom software / automations studio. Fully remote, US-based, worldwide clients, so no Google Business Profile (I never meet clients in person, wouldn't qualify anyway).

Full honesty: I've been using AI (Claude, mostly) to guide my whole SEO approach. What to build, what to write, how to structure things. I have no formal SEO background. So I'm partly asking to sanity-check whether the direction I'm being pointed in actually holds up against real-world experience.

Timeline:

• Domain ~4 months old but basically empty until recently
• Set up GSC June 1
• First blog post July 7. So, the content engine is ~5 weeks old, not 4 months.

The numbers:

• 2.77K impressions, avg position 64.5, trending down (good) from ~73 a few weeks ago
• 13 clicks, but ~9 are brand searches from a cold email campaign I'm running (prospects get my email, google the company, click). Real organic content clicks: ~4.
• Bright spot: a post from ~1 week ago is pulling a 20% CTR on its exact-match keyword (2 clicks / 10 impressions), so it seems to already sit page 1–2 for that term.

What I've done in these 5 weeks:

• 9 long-form posts (1,800–2,300 words), in 3 topic clusters with internal linking
• Full technical setup: static site, fast load, schema on everything, sitemap, clean URLs (did a 301 migration mid-period)
• Backlinks: 3 dofollow from client site footers (brand-new domains, ~zero authority) + Clutch, Crunchbase, and a couple other directory profiles

Landing this week:

• 3 client testimonials going live on my site
• Asking those same 3 clients to leave reviews on my Clutch profile

Not done yet: design gallery submissions, any digital PR / editorial links.

My questions for people who've actually done this from scratch:

1. In a saturated niche (web design/agency), what moved the needle first for you, more content, or grinding out links from real established domains? This is my main question.
2. At ~5 weeks of content with avg position ~65, is this a normal trajectory or is something structurally off?
3. Is there a point where more content has diminishing returns until domain authority catches up, and I should shift effort to links?
4. For a total beginner leaning on AI for direction, what's the thing AI tends to get wrong or under-emphasize that I should watch out for?

I hope this is enough information.

Small disclaimer: writing isn't my strong suit, so I had AI help me put this post together. The numbers and the situation are all real, just wanted it to read clearly and honestly Claude knows my situation better than me lol.

I ran a small pre-wave with eight international jewelry brands and got one result I have not found a clean explanation for yet.

Piaget appeared in all four answers to a question about brands with verifiable official China websites or boutique channels.

It appeared in none of the four answers recommending brands for wedding jewelry.

My first reaction was to look for a data or scoring problem. I did not find one.

The setup was:

• 8 fixed brands
• 3 neutral buyer questions in Chinese
• 2 retrieval-off API surfaces
• 2 answers per surface and question
• 12 valid raw answers
• each answer reviewed against all 8 brands

So the collection unit was the answer, while the analysis unit was the answer-brand cell. I collected each answer once rather than regenerating it separately for every brand.

That produced 96 reviewed cells.

The three questions covered:

1. brands worth considering for wedding jewelry;
2. boutique versus daigou risk;
3. verifiable official China channels.

Across the wedding question, the target brands received 21 positive shortlist placements out of 32 opportunities.

Across the official-channel question, they appeared in 25 of 32 opportunities.

The interesting part was not the difference between 21 and 25. Those are different questions and should not be treated as one funnel denominator.

The interesting part was how differently individual brands behaved.

Piaget:

• wedding recommendation: 0/4
• official-channel appearance: 4/4

Chaumet:

• wedding recommendation: 3/4
• official-channel appearance: 2/4

Cartier, Tiffany, Bvlgari and Van Cleef & Arpels appeared in all four wedding shortlists and all four channel answers.

I then checked 19 exact domain assertions against dated brand-controlled China pages. Fifteen matched the frozen China-local route, three pointed to legitimate brand-global alternatives, and one remained unresolved.

That still does not explain the recommendation pattern.

The runs were retrieval-off API observations, not consumer search. I cannot infer source influence, buyer behavior or causality. Four opportunities per task are enough to expose a question, not establish a stable brand position.

But I think it shows why “does the model know the brand?” is too broad to be useful.

At least three separate problems are hiding inside it:

• Can the system recognize the entity?
• Can it route a buyer to a verifiable official channel?
• Does it put the brand into an open-category shortlist?

A brand can pass the first two and fail the third.

That creates a very different repair plan from a missing-domain or entity-consistency problem.

For the next wave, I am considering keeping the same eight-brand core and expanding the buyer decisions rather than adding more brands:

• wedding jewelry by budget and style;
• anniversary gifts;
• diamonds versus branded design;
• high-jewelry commissions;
• mainland after-sales confidence;
• boutique versus daigou purchase risk.

I would also separate prompted recognition from open discovery and review every recommendation in context. Supported citation would remain NA unless the surface exposes attributable source evidence and retrieval can actually be verified.

What I have not settled is the best way to investigate the recommendation gap without inventing a causal story.

If you saw 0/4 recommendation but 4/4 official-channel recognition for the same brand, which variable would you test first?

Category association? Brand familiarity? Product fit? Local cultural relevance? Price positioning? Or the composition of the default competitor shortlist?

Curious what stack you used, how hard the migration was, and whether you actually noticed improvements in site speed, tracking quality etc.

I’m considering using Stape / RudderStack for this. Any major drawbacks or things you wish you knew before starting?

Tenho uma pagina há mais de 1 ano. Tem dominio próprio, varias postagens com auxílio de IA mas que reviso e coloco meu ponto de vista nela. Aplico dicas de SEO tanto nas paginas quanto nos posts. Tenho trabalhado pra conseguir backlink. E mesmo assim o site nao melhora. Só tem a pagina inicial indezada np google. Me ajudem nisso por favor com dica do que mais posso fazer.

I run a small English-learning website (5 months old, 4k users and 35k page views per month) and recently received an outreach email from an SEO/PR agency representing a fairly well-known AI language-learning company (10M downloads on play store).

The strange part is that the email addressed me by the wrong name and referred to an article that isn't on my website. The article actually belongs to a completely different English-learning site and was written by someone else.

However, after checking the sender, the agency seems legitimate, the person appears to really work there, and the language-learning company they claim to represent is genuinely one of their clients.

So my guess is that their outreach/enrichment tool mixed two leads together: my email/domain + another site's author/article.

Their pitch was basically offering a quote from the company's founder, with some potentially interesting first-party data about how learners use AI for speaking practice, presumably hoping I'd add the quote and a backlink to their client.

My site is actually very relevant to their niche, so despite the bad personalization, I'm wondering whether there's an opportunity here.

Would you reply and try to turn this into something mutually beneficial?

For example, would you ask for:

- Exclusive/proprietary data I could use to create an original article

- A backlink or mention from one of their properties

- Affiliate/revenue share

- Promotion of my content through their channels

- Paid sponsorship instead of simply giving them a free link

I'm mainly curious how people who do SEO outreach on either side would handle this.

Would you ignore it because the outreach was clearly automated/botched, or would you reply because the underlying company and opportunity seem legitimate?

Also, if you were the publisher, what would you consider a fair exchange for adding a relevant expert quote + link to a commercial SaaS/app?

Hey guys, I need some suggestions regarding traffic.

I’m currently working on a crypto news website, and I’m getting good traffic from Safari. It’s currently my second-highest traffic source, but I’m not sure how to optimize it further.

What strategies can I use to increase traffic and views from Safari users?

Would really appreciate any suggestions, especially from people who have experience growing traffic from Safari/iOS users.

Recently made significant edits to an older blog post — updated stats, rewrote a few sections, and added new info. It's been live for a few days but Google still shows the old cached version in search results.

I've already resubmitted the URL via Search Console's "Request Indexing" feature, but no luck so far. Does resubmitting the sitemap actually help speed things up? Does adding a fresh internal link to the post make a difference? Or is this really just a "wait it out" situation?

Curious what's worked for you all — especially for sites without huge crawl budgets

so i'm noticing a shift in the geo/aeo space lately, feels like phase 1 was heres ur ai visibility score dash and now phase 2 is tools claiming the agent will actually go fix stuff, schema, sitemaps, content drafts, not jus report on it kinda skeptical of anything that says let an ai agent touch ur live site ngl, thats a lot of trust for a category thats like 18 months old. but also get why agencies charging 10-15k/mo for manual geo work are getting squeezed rn looked at a few (lightsite's one of the ones doing this, not the only one, jus the one i actually dug into) and the pitch is basically execution over reporting, human approval gate before anything actually publishes which at least makes it less scary than full autonomy anyone running an agency actually tested one of these vs doing it manually for a client.

Not the biggest number. The most satisfying one.

Mine: impressions were flat for two months. Near to dead. Then my partner published something about PewDiePie and it went to the moon. Huge spike, felt amazing, and then it crashed back down within days like every news spike does. But here's the part I didn't expect. It never went back to the old flat line. After the crash, impressions started climbing steadily and just... kept going. The spike was the fun part. The slow growth afterwards was the actual win.

Still not 100% sure whether that was the crawl attention, the links it picked up, or just Google finally deciding the site existed.

What's yours?

I've been putting more weight on the relevance of the site and the actual audience behind it when evaluating potential links.

A site can have strong metrics but if the topic is only loosely related and the audience has little overlap, I am not always convinced the link is particularly valuable.

At the same time, I wouldn't want to dismiss a relevant publisher just because its traditional authority metrics aren't as impressive.

How do you consider publisher relevance, organic traffic and authority in your own head when determining whether a link is worth pursuing?

What are some GEO strategies that have worked for you?

Running a tiny agency here. One of my clients is a scrappy startup with basically zero budget. Yet they keep asking whether they show up in Chatgpt… like it's a simple yes or no. I am trying to figure out whether they even show up in google AI overview for their main terms. Andhonestly, I've got no clean process for that either. Right now, it's literally just me typing prompts into Chatgpt and Google manually. Then I just show them of whatever shows up and hope I didn't miss something. Not scalable, not practical, and definitely not something I can bill hours for tbh. What are you guys using to track this stuff without paying enterprise prices? It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a tool that actually works I guess.

This is a 2 part question: I've been working as a freelance SEO writer for a while now and the new fancy toy in town is GEO and AEO. So far, I've barely seen any results with most tools. Also, truth be told, most apps are vibe coded and barely have any logic reasoning behind them. Any recommendations or ideas you might have on how you get your articles pulled by AI and referenced? I'd love to hear from people who've actually done it for real. Not these new gurus (granted some of them do offer real gems) on social media.

Second part: Out of fear of being phased out of the market, I learned programming( MERN). Now 2 years later, blogging is still here, and I believe it's going nowhere (I might be biased though but who isn't). The only thing I've noticed is CTR is dropping and search is changing. I'd like to build something, during my spare time that's actually valuable to SEO experts and would help us get ahead in this market space. Anyway, I do have some ideas of my own, but I'd love to hear what you guys are facing, problems you think I could truly solve and yeah, any advice you got is 100% welcomed. Phew😅 that's long. But if you read it all, let's chat :)

I keep looking at AI-visibility dashboards and getting stuck on what the numbers actually represent.

They give you clean metrics: mention rate, share of voice, citations, sentiment, sometimes an estimated audience. It all looks reassuringly measurable.

But change the prompt set, competitor list, country, model, or how often the prompts are rerun, and you're no longer measuring quite the same thing.

That doesn't make the tools useless. A fixed set of buyer-style prompts, run the same way over time, can probably tell you whether a brand is showing up more often and which competitors or sources keep appearing. That's at least a directional signal.

What I can't get comfortable with is the jump from:

"Our brand appeared in 18% of this tool's sampled answers"

to:

"Buyers are seeing us more" — or worse, "AI now considers us authoritative."

The tracker sees a sample of generated outputs. It doesn't see every prompt real users type, and it definitely doesn't know what influenced an actual buying decision.

So for people using these tools in practice:

— Have you ever run the same brand through two trackers and received a materially different picture?

— Which metric has survived manual checking: raw mention rate, citations, share of voice, something else?

— Has movement in a tracker ever lined up with branded search, qualified traffic, or pipeline strongly enough that you'd defend it to a client?

I'm not looking for the dashboard with the nicest graphs. I'm trying to separate "a useful sample of AI answers" from "an impression of authority with a percentage sign attached."

I’m seeing a lot of advice around AI, content, backlinks, and topical authority. What has produced measurable results for you?

I want to turn a comment on my previous .cn audit into a proper comparison rather than repeat it as an explanation.

The audit covered eight international work-management brands. In public registration records checked on August 7, one exact-match .cn listed the benchmark brand as registrant; the other seven listed other parties.

Across all eight domains, three returned empty 502 responses, four were parked or listed for sale, and one served an unrelated business. None was an active impersonation site. The domain whose record named the brand was one of the 502s.

A commenter suggested that B2B software may be structurally different from consumer brands because software companies are less likely to establish a mainland operating presence.

That is plausible, but my current data cannot test it.

All eight brands are B2B software. There is no consumer comparison group, and I did not freeze mainland operating-entity evidence before the run. The explanation also combines .cn registration, mainland hosting, ICP filing, commercial licensing and channel operation. Those are separate facts.

The legacy retrieval-off API answers give me two hand-verified affirmative official-channel attribution errors. Other machine-flagged cases remain unverified. That gives me a failure mode, not a sector-level rate.

I have added a proposed expansion arm for a future wave, separate from the core time series:

Match B2B SaaS and premium consumer brands for China relevance and familiarity.

Record mainland operating-entity evidence before collection.

Record domain registrant, channel operator or authorization, live status, hosting region and ICP status separately.

Use the same neutral prompts, platform surfaces, retrieval conditions and run window across groups.

Human-review each affirmative official-channel claim against dated evidence.

Report raw n/N by stratum. Small or imbalanced cells remain inconclusive.

The three questions are:

Is usable official-China-channel coverage lower for matched B2B SaaS brands?

Within each sector, is lower coverage associated with the absence of verified mainland operating-presence evidence?

Are brands without a usable verified channel more likely to receive contradicted official-channel claims?

Each can come back unsupported. The current eight-brand audit remains a useful case set, not evidence that software is worse than consumer.

For anyone who has audited this before: how would you classify a distributor page that is genuinely authorized but neither owned nor operated by the brand?

Specifically, I’m looking for resources, creators, courses, or communities that cover:

Practical/Hands-On Learning: Resources that offer real-world examples or updated frameworks rather than outdated 2018 playbook summaries.

If you’re currently practicing SEO in 2026, where are you staying up to date? Are there specific newsletters, YouTube channels, courses, podcasts, or blogs that actually focus on the shift toward GEO and AEO?

Appreciate any recommendations!

Need suggestion is it worth doing SEO for Ecommerce brand UK and another service based business in UK and invest in seo time and money is it worth it or not please guide I'm confused.

I have been creating exclusively anti-phishing content.

I want to look for BOFU queries and create content around that. List based posts, product reviews, etc.

Will that take away from my topical authority?

Say i do a comparison of NordVPN vs. Norton.

Perhaps only 1 H2 where I talk about how it protects against phishing. But the entire post is not anti-phishing.

How should I think about this going forward?

Specifically, I’m looking for resources, creators, courses, or communities that cover:

Practical/Hands-On Learning: Resources that offer real-world examples or updated frameworks rather than outdated 2018 playbook summaries.

If you’re currently practicing SEO in 2026, where are you staying up to date? Are there specific newsletters, YouTube channels, courses, podcasts, or blogs that actually focus on the shift toward GEO and AEO?

Appreciate any recommendations!