Thanks to the best roving SEO story supremo - u/rustybrick

Google also added a new section for "Only index content meant for Search."

It says:

If your service lets users create shareable pages, generated outputs, or interactive tools, consider whether that content is meant to be found through search engines or only accessed directly by people with a link.

When pages are created for direct sharing, collaboration, or utility rather than public search discovery, apply the noindex rule (using a robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP response header) or block crawling in robots.txt by default.

Google also added:

Verify your site or subdomain in Search Console so you receive email alerts if Google issues a manual action against your site or detects security issues. Also check the Page Indexing report and Search performance report regularly for unexpected spikes in indexed pages, impressions, or queries that don't match your platform's purpose.

Track platform-level creation and indexing metrics, and set up alerts for anomalies such as spikes in newly published public pages or a small number of users generating a large share of indexable URLs.

TL;DR: Two of my websites dropped from 20K+ monthly users to a few hundred after introducing AI content, but improved on Bing and other search engines. Meanwhile, a new AI-built website is ranking well on Google. What’s your experience?

I’ve been doing SEO for years and run my own agency with several long-term clients.
Recently, I started experimenting with AI on my personal projects, with very mixed results.
Two established websites lost almost all their Google traffic after introducing AI tools, despite improving their rankings on Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.
However, a new personal website I built almost entirely with AI is actually gaining visibility and traffic on Google.
Because of this, I’m still cautious about using AI-generated content on my agency clients’ websites.
I’m wondering whether Google treats established websites switching to AI content differently from AI-built websites, or if something else explains these results.
How are you using AI for SEO in 2026? Have you seen improvements or traffic losses? What tools or strategies are actually working for you?

Relatively new to SEO here, so be kind...

I'm a senior software engineer with a ton of practical web experience (having built sites with search engine friendly / accessible HTML) and what I believe is a good understanding of what "bad" scaled/templated content is and what "good" programmatic content is. Yet, GoogleBot has completely shunned my site.

I'm not here to plug my site - I'm here to understand what it is causing this shape in my Google Search Console (6 mo. ago to now):
______,,/\,,_______

I've seen a bunch of terrible directory sites that are getting organic traffic. There's obviously something they're doing that convinces Google they're legit that I'm not doing. I've been waiting for a few months after making a bunch of changes to get Google to like me again...

• ~17k rotating pages (events drop off) - the old pages have `noindex`.
• I'm offering unique insights that aren't available anywhere else on the web.
• Navigation, design, content quality and depth is all there.
• I am rendering affiliate links as the main CTA for most pages.

The funny thing is my site was never intended to be just a directory; it's actually a compliment to my mobile app and it has a directory component.

Anyway I look forward to yalls suggestions thanks for reading.

Hi everyone! I’m revamping my company’s website, including its structure and content, with SEO in mind where possible. I’d appreciate some advice on the homepage.

We sell a very niche product. The keyword that best describes it has low search volume, and the search intent seems mostly informational and unrelated to our product category.

Our homepage H1 currently uses a broader, higher-volume term instead. However, most of our homepage traffic comes from branded searches rather than searches for that broader term.

My questions are:

1. Why might the broader term not be driving traffic? Could it be because we only use it in the H1, or is a mismatch between our page and the search intent a more likely explanation?
2. Should the homepage H1 include the term that most accurately describes our product, even if its search volume is low? We already use this term on other pages, where it gets high impressions but a low CTR. That makes me suspect people searching for it are looking for something else. Would it still make sense to use it on the homepage for clarity and relevance?
3. More generally, how do you approach the main homepage headline? How do you balance accurately describing the product, communicating its value, and targeting relevant keywords?

Thanks for any insights!!

I’m currently working on an SEO project in the online casino niche, and it has been quite challenging.

We’ve been working on different SEO strategies, and one positive sign is that clicks to the website are improving. However, we’re still struggling to generate FTDs (First-Time Deposits).

Since the platform operates globally, we’re also dealing with the challenge of different GEOs, user intent, competition, and conversion behaviour.

I’m trying to understand where the actual gap might be. Is it the quality of organic traffic, search intent, landing page experience, trust signals, or something further down the conversion funnel?

For those who have experience with SEO in competitive iGaming or affiliate niches:

• How do you diagnose a situation where clicks are increasing but FTDs remain low?
• How do you identify which GEOs and keywords bring higher-intent users?
• What role do landing page optimisation, user experience, and conversion tracking play in improving FTDs?
• What would you prioritise first: traffic quality, content strategy, or conversion rate optimisation?

I’d love to hear practical insights, real-world experiences, and strategies that have worked for you.

Looking forward to learning from the community!

Genuinely asking because I just spent 2 months fixing every technical thing I could find on my own site (pre-rendering, canonical/redirect loops, hreflang, internal linking, sitemap) and indexed pages stayed stuck at exactly 2 the whole time.

Turned out Googlebot was rendering the pages fine — a chunk of them just had never been crawled at all, weeks after being in the sitemap. The domain had migrated earlier this year and has almost no backlinks outside a few self-referential ones.

So now I’m wondering if that’s the actual bottleneck — Google not prioritizing crawl on a low-authority domain — rather than anything technical. Anyone else run into this on a migration? Did building real backlinks end up mattering more than expected?

What the report covers

Citation sources are explicitly Microsoft Copilots and Partners. That means:

• Microsoft Copilot (including copilot.microsoft.com, Bing-integrated experiences, Edge, Windows, etc.)
• AI-generated summaries in Bing
• Select (unnamed) partner AI integrations

Your Grounding Queries

Queries where your site is already being cited, with exact counts. The top one (“geo search tracking ai search monitoring provider…”) alone accounts for 754 citations — a clear strength. Other solid performers include “bing search console,” “top experts in generative engine optimization,” etc.

Opportunity Query

Queries in the same topic where other sites are cited and yours is not (shown as ranges). These are the gaps: things like “seo services llm integration visibility” (5K–10K), “u.s. companies geo ai visibility optimization,” AI search visibility tools, etc. These are the clearest content/opportunity signals the report provides.

Some person who knows nothing about SEO sent me this - voluntarily.

The fight against purposeful disinformation isn't over yet!

Hi all! I’m not an SEO expert, more a general web dev/designer but my company is severely lacking in SEO so I took up the mantle in order to secure a promotion/raise lol the previous “seo strategist” said that we should strongly encourage practices (veterinary practices) with multiple locations to have separate sites. I know that’s wrong but I guess I just want validation that that’s not correct before bringing this up to managers. The previous person had the title “SEO Strategist” and I’m technically just “Senior Website Support Specialist” so I guess I want some backup before officially bringing this up 😅.

The correct strategy is to have one main site with location specific landing pages but have Business Profiles for each location? If there’s say a general vet that also does boarding or grooming, those can be separated because their technically different businesses but if it’s just a vet office with a couple locations around town, they don’t need separate sites. Correct?

What tools do you use to track AI search visibility?

I tried several (ranketa, seranking, peec.ai) but they all show different results.

I do not need a tool that has good numbers to make shareholders happy. I need a tool with acurate data

Soy de Venezuela y estoy cansado de trabajos esclavizantes que pagan 240-300$ mensuales, se siente frustrante trabajar y trabajar y no tener dinero para la cesta básica alimenticia y mucho menos para otras cosas.

Tengo 28 años, hace aproximadamente 8 años estuve leyendo sobre SEO y noté que era una época de auge ya que todo el mundo estaba trabajando en conseguir "nichos rentables" y eso. Ahora veo que con la llegada de la IA todo ha cambiado.

Quisiera aprovechar que conseguí este foro en Reddit y seguro que hay muchos expertos aquí, en una escala de dificultad del 1 al 5 qué tan difícil creen que sea conseguir unos ingresos de 300$~ mensuales con una web ?

Para otros países fuera de LATAM puede que 300$ no sea mucho dinero Pero aquí es el primer paso a la libertad 🗽

Hi all long time reader first time talker. So I've got an issue with my site, to cut a long story short this site was formally built on squarespace (I know I know I was new don't judge). The beginning of this year I moved the site to Wordpress, first by building a staging site using breakdance as the builder and eventually porting the domain. For a first time site I don't think I've done bad but there's no doubt in my mind that you guys will probably notice issues.

My business is in a pretty niche industry and in a rural setting so the competition is mostly old unoptimised sites, which has me wondering why am I barely ranking on google. I've hired an SEO company who are charging me £360 a month for 3 article style paid backlinks each month plus some polish on the site here and there. But I'm not really noticing any change in ranking.

I do have a GBP with reviews, posts, photos, etc but again that's not ranking in the maps pack at all, google just seems to be Sus of me in general, so I'm left wondering what should I do? can anyone here help.

the site is: https://northwoodlandscape.com

for context this is a site based in England, I own the .co.uk domain as well but wasn't sure if activating that would help.

Hi, as the title suggests I am pretty new to the game. I have a personal dev blog running on my domain and 3 tools running on subdomains.

I started out beginning this month and impressions peaked at around 500 a day after 10 days. Over the course of 4 days my impressions decreased to 0(!) now.

Is this normal in the beginning?

Currently working on getting some high-quality backlinks

Is it normal for the Google Search Console to be behind? It's only showing data from October 18th and says only 61 pages have been indexed and 91 haven't been indexed. I counted the results from Google today and there are over 100 pages indexed so far. I used the site: function to check the indexing.

Hey everyone,

I am looking for backlinks

Compatible categories:

-Business & entrepreneurship

- Outsourcing / BPO / remote teams

-Customer support & CX

- Finance, accounting & bookkeeping

- Digital marketing & ad ops

- E-commerce & DTC brands

- SaaS & startups

- Data & analytics

- Trust & safety / content moderation

- AI & AI training services

Thanks in advance

Hello, I have a Hindi news and current affairs website. I've been using AI to write blogs for the past month and a half. Can someone explain to me whether Google ranks AI content? If not, I can try another method.

How do you compare Google Search Console’s average position with rankings reported by tools like Ahrefs or Semrush?

If you match the country, device, and date range, should the numbers be close, or are they measuring different things?

Which do you rely on for tracking SEO progress and reporting to clients?

When I started paying more attention to SEO, I realized that clicks alone don't tell the whole story.

A website can get impressions without clicks, and those impressions can reveal opportunities worth investigating.

Here are 3 things I pay attention to:

1. Impressions without clicks

I look at average position, search intent, and titles to understand why people might see a page in search results but not click it.

1. Queries with growing impressions

These can reveal topics where Google is starting to show your content. I use them as clues to identify pages and keywords worth investigating further.

1. Page-level performance

Looking at individual pages helps me spot which pages are gaining visibility and which might need improvement, instead of relying only on overall website traffic.

I've been exploring these problems while building my own SaaS.

As part of that journey, I've been working on a tool that helps website owners make better use of their search data.

You can see how I'm approaching it here: "explore my SEO and website visibility tool" (https://pagzi.online/).

I'm curious about how other SEO practitioners approach this.

Which Google Search Console metric do you find most useful beyond clicks, and how does it influence your next SEO decision?

Ive started my company and like many others I’m having a hard time with SEO. So I looked on Fiverr and seen some blog writing specialist and SEO experts. Before i proceed with any payments just wanted to get some opinions to see if Fiverr is actually helpful or not. I’m really in need of help.

Main sections/tabs shown

The new report has these tabs:

• Overview — Summary cards for Engagement (Views and Interactions, with percentage changes) and Reviews (score + count). It also includes a Google Ads promo and “Top recommendations” (e.g., monthly performance summaries).⁠
• Engagement — Breakdown of interactions such as Calls, Bookings, Directions, and Website clicks, plus a time-period graph.⁠
• Reviews — Google review score with star distribution (e.g., percentage of 5-star, 1-star reviews), plus “Top mentions” (keywords from reviews with positive/negative sentiment bars, like “service,” “quick service,” “tire repair,” “price”). Includes recommendations such as inviting more reviews.⁠X
• Search trends — List of search queries that led people to the profile (e.g., “tire shop near me,” “tire shop,” “tires”) with view counts and period-over-period comparison.⁠
• Audience — Total profile viewers plus a devices/platforms breakdown (Google Search mobile/desktop, Google Maps mobile/desktop) shown as a pie chart with percentages

Need cheapest way to get Reddit backlinks for AU based accounting firm

Hi all, looking for advice from anyone who has dealt with this.

My real estate website was hacked a while back. I’ve since cleaned it up and the site is working normally again, but Google has dropped most of my pages from the index and organic traffic is close to zero.

Current status:

• Search Console: [security issues / manual action: no]

What I’ve already tried:

• Resubmitted sitemap
• Requested reindexing for key pages]
• Removed spam URLs

Questions:

1. Is there a typical recovery timeline after a hack like this?
2. Should leftover spam URLs return 404 or 410?
3. Is a reconsideration request useful if there’s no manual action?
4. Anything else I might be missing?