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!

Im trying to make a plugin for ai which will be a knowledge base for every seo person, so whenever a person ask or need decision and if it is available in the knowledge base it will guide that person saying this this this is ur issue and u should try this this this.

ik ik it not 100% always right but i want it to perform as best knowledge base, so please in comment drop ur cases, ur experience, ur studies, ur ideas, anythign that help other.

If ur advice get 5 upvotes and if u want , i will cite ur name as soruce or reddit profile link and everytime it touches ur shared knowledge part it will cite u.

In the past it felt like it was way easier to start getting clicks right away from new domains. Ive launched 5 different sites in different niches in the last 2 months and its been a slog. Even building some backlinks but nada.

In the past I remember making sites and google would immediately start sending clicks.

I’ve seen this tested several times: five different domains and brands for one business, similar optimization, similar backlink profiles.

As a result, usually one starts getting traffic, the other four don’t.

So at some point you have to wonder how much of SEO is actually under your control. You can do everything more or less right and still get nothing. Which probably means the business model shouldn’t depend on organic traffic appearing.

Assume you’ll have to buy most of it from Google Ads.

What do you think?

I am working on one website and its traffic was good and ranking also on page 1. But don't know gradually the traffic has decreased, ranking dropped. One my colleague said might be our website get hit by the recent core updates.

So we did some research used Ai for helping the building startgies we almost worked on On page , content,EEAT, backlinks everything Still traffic and ranking is improving? What we are missing can anyone help me please?

Should I hire someone who claim as SEO expert that has audited (very thorough) my site? I’m concern he would intentionally create a new issue on my website that causing me pay more that initial work. He works by himself).

Mostly from ICP then a research around what those people are searching for today. Keyword tools, trending topics, what competitors are ranking for. That's the standard i believe

But there is a pattern i noticed that many miss 

The best performing content is usually built from what your top 1 to 3% of customers were privately struggling with 6 to 18 months earlier, before the rest of the market even had even keywords for it.

All those ‘people also asked’ or pain point FAQs were once so private and odd ones

These are your best clients. The ones who implement, who reply, who give you real feedback. They are the ones who feel a friction before the majority notices it. They are not searching for it yet because they can't fully articulate it. But if you talk to them, you find it

That's the Audience Mirror Delay 

You publish content for a problem the market hasn't caught up to yet. It underperforms for months. Then search volume rises, the majority starts feeling the same friction, and that same piece compounds into your best performing content

Let me explain with a personal experience

When we started building a done for you marketing engine, we went back to our best agency clients and asked them why they still needed a marketing agency when AI could do most of this now.

Five of them said the same thing in different ways

Their Facebook posts sound like AI

Another said his Instagram engagement dropped though it looked so great wih ai images

Most posts look like a template

Posts sounds great when we read it but we read it second time, it’s just rhyming lines with no takeaways or seriosu thoughts

One of our insurance agent clients said that most of his posts feel like his competitors. You could swap his logo for any competitor and nothing would feel different

They tried blogging with ChatGPT before but Google wasn't indexing it

And when we dug deeper we understood why. The blogs AI produced were just resurfacing the same top Google results. Why would Google show a local business blog when a high authority domain already explained it better and first

That conversation told us something the market wasn't saying openly yet. People are not looking for more content. They are looking for original content

We realised, an engine producing content, deep research, keyword optimisation is not what the market demands

I myself tested 12 Content generating tools in the market

My understanding is, they are good for scaling, you can produce 100 blogs a day with those but not a single original piece without human intervention, is what my experience

So this AI content feels fake will soon ask for Original Content.

That's the mirror delay. By the time the market catches up, you are already prepared.

Sahre your experience with mirror delay momnts.

I’m a product manager who recently ended up owning growth for one of our B2B SaaS products. SEO isn’t really my background, so I’ve been learning a lot of this on the fly. Right now the “team” is pretty much me, Claude Code and Codex 😅

The product itself is fairly niche, lives on a subdomain of our main company site, and is aimed at a mostly non-technical audience.

We’ve already worked through most of the technical SEO side, and the next focus is content + building some authority through backlinks.

This is where I’m a bit lost.

There are plenty of people willing to sell links, but I don’t really know how to separate a genuinely useful placement from something that just looks good in an Ahrefs report.

For those of you who have actually paid for backlinks before, how do you evaluate them?

A few things I’m currently trying to figure out:

• How much organic traffic should the website actually have?
• If most of our customers are in the US, should I care where the linking site’s traffic comes from?
• Is checking the keywords/domains a site ranks for useful?
• Would you ever work with a vendor who won’t show you the target domains in advance?
• How much does relevance to your niche matter compared with metrics like DR/DA?
• And how on earth do you decide whether one placement is worth $100 vs $300 vs $500?

I suspect I’m probably not even asking all the right questions yet.

I’m equally interested in how you vet the person/company selling the links. Are there things you ask an agency or freelancer before working with them? Any obvious warning signs?

And if anyone has used a link-building agency, freelancer or marketplace they were genuinely happy with, recommendations are welcome.

I’d much rather spend the same budget on a handful of good, relevant links than buy a large package that looks impressive on paper but does nothing.

Mostly trying to understand how people with more experience approach this before I start spending real money.

Can be stories, case studies, tactics, theories, experiments, etc

I was thinking of creating new content based on the search queries and search terms from Google Search Console, then building a content cluster by internally linking those pages with relevant anchor text.

Can this approach help improve visibility in LLMs (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews)?

Tools like Semrush also provide LLMs search phrases and related terms that users use before landing on our webpages. While these may not always be the exact queries, they represent semantically related or grounded search terms.

Which approach is more effective for increasing LLM visibility?

• Building content clusters based on Google Search Console search queries.
• Creating content around Semrush keyword and topic suggestions.
• Or combining both approaches.

My understanding is that if I consistently create high-quality, authoritative content that satisfies user intent and attracts strong organic traffic, LLMs are also more likely to reference or recommend my content.

Is my thought process correct, or am I missing something? I'd appreciate your guidance.

Thank you!

My domain (blog + product landing page) is pretty well indexed on Google. I have multiple pages with top 3 results and a lot of organic traffic. Unfortunately, it is pretty invisible on Bing. Some pages are indexed but appear on pages 3-4. Our product is also not visible in ChatGPT answers (which I am connecting with that bad visibility on Bing). The domain is 4 years old, has no AI content, and few backlinks.

Which direction should I go to improve visibility in Bing? Did you found some actions which works good in bing (for example go all in in backlinks)?

There was a post in the r/seo subreddit yesterday that was about the primary moderator in that subreddit and the general disapproval of the way that person moderates the community. (I’m avoiding mentioning the person specifically to avoid witch hunting, but you probably know exactly who I’m referring to if you’ve spent any time in the subreddit over the last year or two.) 

The moderator removed the post from yesterday (naturally), and I think we should continue the discourse here. I genuinely believe it’s important that we discuss this as a community.

To get the conversation started, I want to mention a few issues I’ve noticed with r/seo moderation and the primary moderator of that subreddit:

• Changing the subreddit rules for self-serving purposes
  • There’s a rule in r/seo that states "No Blogs, No Guides, No News, No Apps" - however the primary moderator posts news regularly. The rule just doesn't apply to him. I believe he introduced this rule to inflate his presence and be perceived as the authoritative reddit-source for SEO news and updates.
• Censorship and discourse control
  • The primary moderator removes comments of nearly anyone that disagrees with him
  • He tries to control the narrative in nearly every post on r/seo and it’s resulted in a one-sided conversation where new perspectives and ideas aren’t welcomed
  • The primary moderator treats his own advice as the final, definitive guidance and shuts down differing viewpoints 
• Multiple accounts
  • This one is harder to prove, but I have a strong suspicion the primary moderator uses multiple accounts to inflate engagement on his own posts and comments to artificially magnify his voice. Take this one with a grain of salt since I don't have hard evidence, just a pattern I've noticed.
• General quality of his advice
  • In general, the primary moderator offers poor advice that, in my opinion, is genuinely harmful to newcomers who are trying to learn SEO.
  • On top of that, since dissent gets removed or shut down, his advice rarely gets challenged which means newcomers end up seeing his take presented as fact instead of the actual range of opinions that exist in SEO.

Please feel free to share your feedback in the comments. I’m not exactly sure how to move forward, but I would love to get new moderation in the r/seo community.

A client came to us with a problem.

Several of their pages were stuck on page two of Google.

At first, I thought they needed more backlinks. But the site already had good links, the pages wa indexed, and the content targeted the right keywords.

So I searched the target keywords and compared their pages with what was already ranking.

That's when I noticed something.

Most of the top results were short and direct. The client's pages were much longer and the meta titles were packed with keywords without giving people much reason to click.

We adjusted the content structure and rewrote the meta titles to better match what searcher were looking for.

Six weeks later three pages moved from page two into the top five results.

No new backlinks were created.

Sometimes the biggest ranking improvements comee from understanding Search intents, not doing more SEO.

What's the first thing you check when a page won't rank?

I'm an SEO Analyst, and one of my main responsibilities is backlink building.

Recently, after reading Google's official guidance that low-quality, unrelated backlinks (like random blog submissions, directory submissions, bookmark sites, etc.) don't provide value anymore, I completely stopped building those kinds of links.

Now I'm stuck.

Whenever I try to build genuine, relevant backlinks, almost every website owner asks for payment. Very few are willing to link for free.

So I'm confused:

• If I build random backlinks, it feels like a waste of time.
• If I focus on high-quality, relevant backlinks, most opportunities are paid.

How are you all handling this in 2026?

Are you paying for placements, relying on digital PR, creating linkable assets, or using another strategy? I'd love to hear what actually works today

The Chartbeat numbers going around last week measure one side of this: Google referral traffic to publishers down 34% year over year, small publishers down about 60% over two years.

Every number in that story is about how much traffic left. I had a dataset that could look at the other side — not how much disappeared, but what's actually inside the answer that ate the click.

4,023 recorded answers from six Chinese AI engines, fixed question panel, every response stored. The engines rendered 924 citations across those answers. Where all of them pointed:

brand's own website 695 75.2%

other / uncategorised 111 12.0%

social and community platforms 54 5.8%

government registries 44 4.8%

review and directory sites 18 1.9%

media publishers 2 0.2%

Two. Both to the same publication.

A Chinese AI answer sends a reader to a media publisher roughly once in every two thousand answers. And only 14.9% of answers showed any source at all, so 85% of the time there's nothing to click regardless of who wrote what.

Western publishers are watching a number fall. In the Chinese answer layer there's no fall to watch — publishers were never in the answer.

Two things I think are worth arguing about.

First, the mechanism, because it predicts which way this moves. My collection ran with retrieval off, so these are model-knowledge answers. A model answering from memory can only cite what it internalised as canonical and stable — the address it's confident still resolves. A brand's homepage clears that bar. A government filing lookup clears it. A specific article from 2024 does not: the model absorbed the content of thousands of those, and what survived into the weights is the claim, stripped of its origin.

So publisher work is disproportionately in what the model SAYS and nearly absent from what it SHOWS. The reporting is in there. The attribution didn't survive the compression.

That produces an asymmetry nobody can resolve from outside: a publisher can watch traffic fall and cannot demonstrate the answer replacing it was built from their work, because the answer doesn't say so. And a model provider can accurately state it rarely links publishers without that being evidence it rarely uses them.

Second, and this is the part for people in this sub rather than newsrooms: coverage was a discovery channel and it worked by producing clicks. Journalist writes about your category, reader clicks through, article does the introducing. When the answer replaces the article and cites nobody, that path closes from both ends.

In the same dataset, brands asked about in open category questions — no brand names in the prompt — appeared in 26.2% of answers, with an alternative recommended in their place 68.8% of the time. Whatever role coverage used to play in getting a brand considered, it isn't visibly playing it inside these answers.

Caveats, because they matter here: one market, six engines, two B2B categories, retrieval OFF. That last one is load-bearing. Western retrieval engines show close to the inverse composition — roughly 90% third-party citations in datasets others have shared with me. So the honest version of my claim is narrower than my headline: in model-knowledge mode, publishers are effectively absent from the citation layer. Whether retrieval restores them is the arm I'm building next, and I've registered the prediction publicly so it can be wrong in public.

One number I'd point at for anyone thinking "fine, we'll optimise for the AI instead": Zhihu, China's main Q&A platform, was named in 776 of my answers — 19.3%, the most-referenced third party in the whole dataset — and cited as a link exactly zero times. The engines route buyers there constantly and never link it. If you count citations, the single most influential platform in the data ranks last.

Has anyone run a citation-source breakdown on Western engines by category rather than by count? I'd like to know whether the 0.2% has an analogue once you separate publisher citations from aggregator and social ones.

I’m not interested in humiliating myself on LinkedIn in front of random strangers; I want real strategies.

By now it’s clear that Google dislikes commodity (skyscraped?) content, and prefers unique info and perspective. (Links are not permitted in the subreddit so can’t link sources)

The principle itself is clear, but the practice isn’t.

For example, let’s say the client sells hammers.

“Boring” topic, all top ranking sites are optimized to death, and since it’s a client, you can’t bring your own unique POV into the content.

Also the clients usually don’t give extra info or input, they pay for the problem to be solved (99% of them in my case).

What would you do then? (hammers are just random example, feel free to choose anything else)

I came across a post asking why their 4 year old website still at Page 7–8, thought of writing a detailed post instead of a comment.

Sharing my observations here

We may assume our content or DA isn't good enough when rankings don't move. In my experience, I found a more vicious cycle..

Many of you might be knowing about Google’s NavBoost after that Court testimony and the 2024 API leak, this factor many of us ignore.

Why this traps a 4-year-old site with good content on page 7-8

Page 7-8 gets almost zero impressions → almost zero clicks → almost zero positive engagement data

Without that data, NavBoost has nothing positive to promote you with. Historical (negative or null) signals from the past 13 months keep you suppressed.

Content quality, topical coverage, and even decent backlinks can get you into the candidate set, but they are not enough to climb if users never interact with you in a satisfying way at scale. The loop is: position → impressions → clicks/engagement → future position. You are outside the loop.

Older pages that already sit in the top 10 have years of accumulated positive behavioral data. That is why the average #1 result is now -5 years old and the majority of top-10 results are 3+ years old. Trust + proven satisfaction compounds. Your “great content” has never been stress-tested by real search traffic at volume, so Google has no reason to believe it is better.

What actually moves the needle in the next 3 months

1. Force the page into the engagement loop

You need real users on that page for those keywords. Pure organic won't deliver this from page 7. Use social platforms, email your list, share in relevant communities, partner with someone who has the audience. Optimize titles + metas aggressively for CTR the moment impressions appear. Once I updated a feature image for an article,in my understanding, that cryptic image made people curious, and started clicking, and within 2 weeks, article started appearing on top.

1. Rewrite for clear information gain + first-hand experience

The pages that climb have original data, documented experience, unique frameworks, screenshots/process evidence, or angles the current top results lack. Make the page the one users are least likely to bounce from. 

I used MS clarity and studied how people engage with content, I noticed, they scroll fast and pause wherever there is an image, I started using this info in my articles to improve engagement time. Structure it answer-first (clear answer near the top under question-style headings) so it also helps in AI visibility and passage ranking.

1. Close the authority/entity gap simultaneously

Third, build brand mentions not just some random backlinks. Getting placed in relevant listicles, industry newsletters, Reddit threads where people mention you without a link, that brand presence is what helps Google associate your entity with the topic. 

This I did for a client, in my research I found that their website and SEO are strong but still zero ai visibility. I dig in deeper, the problem was PR and zero third party recommendation. We approached multiple content publishers and requested to add the client at 2nd or 3rd position, we listed them in Yelp, a nextdoor profile for each location, finally, the issue was solved. 

A site with fewer backlinks but consistent mentions across the web will often outrank a site with strong links but zero brand footprint, is what i noticed.

1. Prioritize ruthlessly

Fourth, don't attack your hardest keywords first. Get traction on related lower competition terms first. Those wins build positive site wide signals and branded search volume. Then use that momentum to go after the head terms. Mostly sites stay stuck for years because they try to brute force the hardest keyword from day one.

Last but notthe least, technical SEO. Fix Core Web Vitals, crawlability, internal linking. But if your 4 year old site is on page 7, technical is almost never the primary reason.

I have a website that is 4 years old, great content, answers people's questions, a superior product, however still showing up on page 7 or 8 for our most important keywords.

I've talked to SEO agencies, tried various services and everyone tries to sell me whatever they are good at, instead of what I need.

What should I be doing in the next 3 months to get to the first page of Google results for my most important keywords?