I have been working on local SEO for a while now, but progress has been slower than I’d hoped. I’ve tried optimizing my Google Business Profile, publishing content and building citations, but I’m still not seeing consistent results. What ended up making the biggest difference for you? I’d love to hear what actually worked based on your own experience

A piece of advice for any newbies starting in AEO... the schema and FAQ playbook that gets recommended a lot on Reddit is not a differentiator.

The main reasoning being that those tactics were built to optimize for SERP features like featured snippets, PAP etc not for how ChatGPT and Perplexity select citations. Answer engines synthesize from passages that match prompt intent so the citation logic is about retrieval not ranking.

The focus should be more so on measurement. As in, which prompts is your brand eligible for and whose getting cited in your place when you're not showing up.

What's moved citation rates for you vs what just improve snippet capture?

I'd been reading these AI visibility studies and something bugged me. They're all run in English, on US brands, and then we cite them like they apply to a business in Bogota or Valencia. I went looking for the Spanish-language version and found nothing, so we ran it ourselves.

I picked a market with plenty of real players, marketing agencies in Argentina, and wrote 100 searches the way an actual person would type them. I ran them across four engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview and Perplexity. And here's the part almost nobody does, I repeated the same 100 searches three times, same day, without changing a single word. That's 1,200 queries in total.

The first thing that came out already felt big. Two AIs agree on average on just 9.6% of the brands they recommend. So out of every ten brands that show up, nine don't repeat in the other model. And when I pooled everything I ended up with 932 distinct agencies, of which 81% appeared in a single engine and in none of the other three.

But hold on, because that still wasn't the thing that broke my brain. Before comparing the models against each other I asked the obvious question. If I run the same search on ChatGPT three times in a row, same day, do I get the same brands?

And the answer is no. ChatGPT agrees with itself just 26% of the time. The most stable, AI Overview, reaches 39% and even that doesn't clear half. Meaning three out of four brands it names change between one answer and the next.

And that one finding breaks half the study, mine included. Because two models can't agree with each other more than each one agrees with itself. That 9.6% doesn't mean the AIs think differently, it means a big chunk of what looks like disagreement is actually noise.

One last thing I didn't see coming. Perplexity plays a different game, it recommends global networks like VML, Ogilvy or Dentsu, while the other three reward local agencies. One example, the same agency that shows up in 70 of the 100 searches for Gemini shows up in 9 for Perplexity.

What I take from it is simple. Measure all four engines separately because one doesn't predict the others, never trust a single query, and if your brand is local start with Google, since AI Overview and Gemini are the closest pair.

Required disclaimer, I work at CreceRank and we ran all of this on our own tool, so it could be biased. And the worst part is I've got nothing to compare it against, because there's nothing like this done for the Spanish-speaking market. If anyone has data that contradicts me or wants to rip the methodology apart, please do, that's the most useful thing for me.

I'm looking for specific SEO guidelines for an informational blog that relies primarily on Google AdSense for revenue. I'm not interested in generic SEO tips—I want practical, up-to-date advice on content strategy, site structure, internal linking, topical authority, EEAT, indexing, Core Web Vitals, and anything else that helps maximize organic traffic while staying compliant with Google's guidelines. What best practices would you recommend for this type of website?

I've spent the last few years building content architectures for clients — SaaS, ecom, local, a couple of affiliate sites. The single most common situation I walk into looks like this:

100–400 published articles

Decent writers, decent content

Traffic grew for 6 months, then flatlined

Competitor with a third of the content outranks them across the board.

Almost everyone diagnoses this as a quality problem or a backlink problem. In my experience it's usually neither. It's a structure problem, and I want to explain the mechanism rather than just say "build topical authority" like that's an instruction.

The mechanism.

Google doesn't evaluate your article in isolation. It evaluates how well your site covers a subject. When your 40 articles are scattered across nine loosely related subjects, you're a generalist in nine areas. When a competitor's 40 articles saturate one subject with clear relationships between them, they're a specialist in one. The specialist wins every query in that subject, including the ones they haven't written yet.

This is why "just publish more" stops working. Every additional off-topic article dilutes the signal instead of strengthening it.

What a topical map actually is Stripped of jargon: it's a plan that decides, before you write anything,

What your site is about (one clear subject, defined precisely enough to avoid drift)

Every subtopic required for complete coverage of that subject

What order to publish in

Which page owns which query (one query, one page — this is your cannibalization firewall)

How pages link to each other

That's it. It's not exotic. Most people just skip straight from keyword research to a content calendar and lose the middle three.

The parts people get wrong

Publishing order is not arbitrary. If you publish the money page first and the supporting context later, the money page ranks with nothing behind it and stalls. Foundational, definitional content first — it builds the context the commercial pages inherit. This one change has produced more of my clients' turnarounds than anything else, and it costs nothing.

Coverage means the entities, not the keywords. If you want to rank for "estate planning," Google expects to see probate, living wills, trusts, tax implications, executors. Not because those are high-volume keywords — because a genuine expert on estate planning would obviously cover them. Missing entities read as missing expertise. Pull them from Wikipedia's contents, PAA, and what the top 10 all mention that you don't.

Internal linking should mirror the hierarchy, not your recent-posts widget. Supporting pages link up to the pillar, siblings link across when contextually relevant, pillar links down. If your linking is random, you've told Google your topics are unrelated.

One query, one page. Most flat-traffic sites I audit have 3–5 pages semi-targeting the same intent, splitting signals and confusing which one should rank. Consolidating those usually produces faster gains than any new article. It's unglamorous and it works.

Timelines, honestly

The map takes days to weeks. The results don't. Realistic expectation from what I've seen and what's broadly reported: early movement around 60–120 days into consistent publishing, meaningful authority in 3–6 months, competitive niches 6–18 months. Anyone promising faster is selling something.

Also worth saying plainly: a topical map is not a ranking factor. It's a planning framework. It doesn't rank you — it stops you wasting budget on content that was never going to rank, and it makes every article you publish reinforce the others instead of competing with them.

On AI-generated maps

I use AI in my own workflow, so this isn't purism. But generated maps have a specific failure mode: they look complete. You get a tidy hierarchy of plausible topics, and nothing in it reflects your actual competitors' gaps, your revenue model, or which topics need to exist before which others. The errors don't surface for six months, which is exactly how long you'll have been publishing in the wrong order.

Use it for entity brainstorming and first-pass clustering. Validate the rest against live SERPs yourself.

If you want to try this on your own site

Write one sentence:

"This site is the best source on ___ for ___." If you can't, that's your first problem.

List every subtopic a genuine expert would cover. Use PAA, Wikipedia TOC, and the top 10's shared coverage.

Assign one intent and one owning page per subtopic.

Sequence: foundational → supporting → commercial.

Map the links before you write.

Audit what you already have against it — merge the overlaps, prune the orphans.

Happy to answer questions in the comments, including on specific niches. Curious whether others here have seen the publishing-order effect as strongly as I have, or whether that's overweighted in my sample.

Pay Per Leads / Lead Generation Service

what's everybody's opinion on service business using paper lead services or SEO services charging per lead?

in the past I've used SEO with mixed results so I'm looking into this kind for my local service business?

Hey! I’m looking for a solid SEO specialist to help us out.

Definitely need someone with real experience under their belt and if you’ve handled SEO for MNCs or large brands, that’s a huge plus.

If that sounds like you, drop me a message with a quick background and any past results/case studies. Let’s talk!

hello guys, I am working as an SEO for a new site and the client want the projection for the SEO KPIs. Its a SaaS based project, where we will be doing 30 blog posts per months targeting long tail and low KD keywords. Also, we will be doing outreach campaigns for backlink opportunities. However, i dont have a clear idea on the projection of SEO KPIs like impression,cliks,and CTR after 3 months. how should i estimate that??

Hi everyone,

I'm helping a relative with their SEO and content, and I'm trying to figure out the best approach to building backlinks.

On one hand, the general consensus is that you shouldn't buy links and that it can harm your rankings. But on the other hand, their direct competitors have 500-1,000 backlinks, while we only have 3.

I don't think it's realistic to start cold emailing websites for links, as the response rate is usually extremely low.

So, what is the right way to go about this today? How can I realistically acquire at least 5-10 quality links a month for this site?

The company I work for has held the top organic search position for the keyword we care most about for the last couple of months. Suddenly, in the last week, our position dropped from #1 to #26. No major updates to the website that I'm aware of. Anyone else seeing this or know why this could have happened?

I've been iterating with Claude but not coming up with anything very conclusive.

Our team has curated this week’s most important SEO updates so you don’t have to, from Google’s landmark DMA compliance to major shifts in AI-driven search:

AIO / AI Mode

• AI Overviews will now generate custom images with the Nano Banana model

Google is bringing native image generation into AI Overviews, using the Nano Banana model to turn text prompts into high-quality custom visuals inside AI Overview responses. 

Rolling out over the coming weeks in English, in regions where AI Mode image creation is available. 

• Google clarifies that low-quality AI content can trigger "crawled – currently not indexed" and site-wide crawl slowdowns

On the latest Search Off the Record podcast, Google explained that pages showing up as "crawled – currently not indexed" or "discovered – currently not indexed" in Search Console are often flagged for quality reasons, not technical ones—and low-quality AI-generated content is a common trigger. 

Sites with widespread quality issues also see cumulative effects—if Google develops strong concerns about a domain's overall quality, it will crawl and index less across the whole site, not just on the offending pages. 

Worth checking Search Console's indexing report if AI-assisted content is a significant part of the content strategy.

• Top Stories carousel now fully live inside AI Overviews for US mobile users

Google confirmed the Top Stories carousel is now fully rolled out inside AI Overviews for mobile searchers in the US, with plans to expand to more markets. 

First previewed at Google I/O in May as part of the broader "fresh perspectives, new updates and prominent links" push, the carousel surfaces timely news articles alongside AI-generated summaries—integrating with Preferred Sources so users see their marked sources highlighted when they appear. 

• Google brings third-party Connected Apps into AI Mode

Google is expanding Connected Apps in AI Mode to third-party services—starting with Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music—letting US users securely link accounts and act on their queries directly inside a Search response. 

Rolling out through the week of July 16 in English, with more partners and countries planned.

Source:
Google Search Help
Martin Splitt and John Mueller | Search Off the Record podcast
Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Land
Google | The Keyword blog
_________________________

SERP features / Interface

• Google Images gets a redesigned browseable homepage on its 25th anniversary

Google has replaced the classic clean search-box homepage with a dynamic gallery of images pulled from across the web, updated in real time and personalized based on user interests. 

Rolling out over the coming weeks on desktop in the US in English, and requires a signed-in Google account. 

Source:
Brad Kellett | News from Google
_________________________

Tech SEO

• Google adds self-referential canonical recommendation to official documentation

Google updated its canonical help document to explicitly recommend adding a rel="canonical" link that points to the page itself on canonical pages. 

The advice isn't new—Google has been saying this since 2011—but it's now formally in the documentation. 

Two lines added: one telling site owners to include the tag on the canonical page itself, and one reinforcing the recommendation later in the same doc.

Source:
Google Search Central
_________________________ 

Local SEO

• Google Business Profile's "Collected Info" section is now visible in the wild

The Collected Info feature is now starting to appear inside Business Profile dashboards. It shows a business owner what data Google has automatically collected about their business from phone calls, chat interactions, and third-party sources, along with the source and the date it was collected. 

Owners can delete individual pieces of info from Google's records. Rollout is still limited, so most accounts don't have it yet.

Source:
Darren Shaw | LinkedIn
_________________________

Tidbits

• Microsoft Clarity launches Topic Insights, extending its AI Citations feature with topic-level competitive data

Microsoft Clarity added Topic Insights, a new layer to its existing AI Citations feature that groups content into topics and shows how each topic performs in AI-generated answers. 

It sits inside the same free Clarity dashboard that already surfaces AI bot activity and robots.txt violation tracking. 

Topic Insights is available now to all users, no paid tier required. 

• EU orders Google to share search data with rivals and open Android to competing AI assistants under the DMA

The European Commission issued two binding decisions under the Digital Markets Act, forcing Google to expose parts of its Search and Android platforms to competitors. 

Starting January 2027, Google must share anonymized search data with rival search engines and AI chatbot providers on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. 

Starting July 2027, Google must open 11 Android features currently reserved for Gemini so that competing AI assistants can plug into voice activation, on-device shortcuts, and other core functions—meaning Android users will be able to trigger a rival AI assistant with a voice command the same way they trigger Gemini today.

Source:
Microsoft Clarity Blog
European Commission | Digital Markets Act announcement

I keep running into this with clients and I still don't have a clean way to call it, so I'm curious how people here read it.

The pattern: organic clicks are down, but the brand shows up MORE in AI answers (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity). The knee-jerk reaction is panic — "traffic is dying." But sometimes revenue is flat or even up, which makes me think the clicks that vanished were the low-intent ones the AI now answers directly.

So before touching anything, I've started trying to separate three very different causes of a click drop:

• AI cannibalization: AI is answering the query before people click — often NOT a real problem if buyers still convert.
• Content decay: The content genuinely fell behind competitors — a real problem.
• Technical issues: Something broke (migration, indexing, canonicals) — also real, and usually the most fixable.

The hard part is telling them apart, because the traffic chart looks identical for all three.

What I can't figure out cleanly: what's the fastest signal you use to tell "AI is just answering the easy stuff" from "we're actually losing ground"? Do you watch conversions/revenue holding steady, branded vs non-branded splits, something else?

Genuinely asking — half the time I suspect we're all pattern-matching on noise.

Hey everyone,

I’m running into a baffling issue with a handful of important pages on my health-care site and wanted to see if anyone else has been hit by this recently, or if there's an ongoing algorithmic filter I missed.

Around the 6th–7th of this month, several key pages completely vanished from Google SERPs.

The weird part: Google Search Console shows them as "Indexed" with absolutely zero coverage errors, mobile usability issues, or indexing warnings. They are also indexing and performing completely normally on Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Here is everything I have already checked and verified:

Basic Tech Check: No noindex tags, robots.txt is clear, and XML sitemaps are updated/resubmitted.

Canonical Tags: Self-referencing canonicals are in place, and everything looks correct on the frontend.

Manual Actions: GSC "Security & Manual Actions" tab is completely green/clear.

Despite forcing a priority recrawl via GSC, they are still invisible in live Google search results—sometimes even when doing an exact site:URL search.

Since the technical basics are covered, I'm trying to figure out what Google-specific quality or algorithmic signals could cause a live, indexed page to be completely suppressed from the SERPs overnight.

Has anyone experienced a similar drop around early July?

Could this be a lag in GSC reporting a soft-404 or algorithmic quality filter?

Are there any advanced technical checks (like Google-selected vs. User-declared canonical mismatches) that I should dig into next?

Appreciate any insights or similar experiences!

My main page targeting a head term will not get indexed. GSC shows "Discovered, currently not indexed", last crawl N/A, so Google has never even fetched it.

What I have tried: Live Test is green (URL can be indexed), self canonical, in sitemap, internally linked from nav, footer and body, requested indexing multiple times over weeks, and recently got an dofollow backlink from a real agency blog pointing directly at the page.

The odd part: I have a city-specific page ("keyword + city") that is indexed, ranks well for its own city keyword, and even shows up occasionally for the plain head term, even though it is clearly city-targeted and the head term is not. So Google seems to prefer serving my city page for the generic query instead of crawling the page actually built for it.

Competitors in my niche have both indexed side by side: a city page ranking for "keyword + city" and a separate page ranking for the head term. So it clearly works.

Possibly relevant: the stuck page came out of a consolidation, another page that accidentally ranked for the head term was deleted and 301'd to this one. Since then, nothing.

Is this cannibalization blocking the crawl? Has anyone actually broken a page out of this state, and what worked?

Potentially a hot take, but I think most ChatGPT citation research is measuring the wrong thing.

Domain authority and word count tell you what got cited historically. They don't tell you why your brand isn't showing up in the prompts your buyers are typing. I

I'm obviously not saying the on-page stuff is completely useless. Clear structure absolutely helps. High authority domains do show up as top cited domains in AI responses and long form content over 2.9k words does outperform.

But optimizing for all that without knowing which prompts are citing your brand is just guessing with extra steps.

From my experience what does help is running a fixed prompt set weekly, logging which sources get cited and tracking share shifts against named competitors over time.

Have you found authority signals or content structure matter more in your own citation data?

Hi, any advice on getting Google to acknowledge a new domain for an existing website?

We switched domains a few months ago, and didn't do it in the best way, honestly. We fixed a lot of things retroactively, and Bing has already indexed our new domain and it shows up in search, but Google, for some reason, refuses to do that.

It works for a few multilingual pages, but for our biggest pages in English & our blog, nothing gets indexed for the new domain.

Hi guys,

I'm launching a food blog. My plan is to publish content in French for the first 1-2 months, then start adding English content, followed by Spanish.

I've chosen WordPress with the Astra theme and one of its starter templates. I also installed Polylang, but I'm a bit unsure about the site structure.

Should I have separate homepages like mysite. com / fr and mysite .com / en ?

Or would it be better to keep the main homepage at mysite . com and only use /fr and /en for recipes and blog posts?

I'd really appreciate your advice, as this is my first time building a multilingual website.

Thanks !

I want to rank this website but don’t know where to start.

Can someone tell me what tools to buy or use? What to see? I did some keyword research while writing through dataforseo

Now I want to know what are my next steps. Which tools? What metrics? How do I judge if my content is people first.

How do I check domain ranking / authority? Technical audit ? Etc etc

Hello!

I have a website, but when I search it, other pages (eg, Instagram, Youtube, even the biography page) are all appearing before my homepage. In fact, my home page isn't even appearing on the 1st page of Google at all!

My website is Wordpress.
I have Yoast SEO, and Google Search Console.

Any help would be appreciated.
FYI, I know my way around these sites, but I am no Pro. For the most part, self-taught. So please be specific on what and where to make changes, because I may not know.

I've been watching how different websites gain visibility, and Reddit seems to play a different role than most SEO tactics. Rather than focusing on backlinks, it often provides insight into what people are actually searching for, how they describe their problems and which types of content they find genuinely useful.

Across a variety of industries, I've noticed that businesses which actively participate in relevant discussions often gain a better understanding of user intent. Those insights can be used to improve landing pages, blog posts, FAQs and overall content strategy. In some cases, better messaging appears to have a greater long-term impact than simply publishing more content.

Another interesting observation is that Reddit conversations frequently uncover content gaps that keyword tools don't always reveal. Real questions from real users can inspire articles that are both more relevant and more engaging.

I'm curious how others here use Reddit as part of their SEO process. Has it helped you improve website visibility, content planning, or search performance? If so, what approach has worked best and what lessons have you learned from using Reddit as a research tool rather than just another promotional channel?

Over the past year, I've started paying more attention to Reddit as a source of SEO research rather than just a discussion platform. One thing that stands out is how naturally people describe their problems, compare solutions and ask questions. That language can be surprisingly useful when thinking about search intent and content strategy.

Across different brands and business types, a common pattern seems to emerge: content performs better when it answers the questions people are already asking instead of relying only on keyword tools. Reddit discussions often highlight pain points, objections and terminology that don't always appear in traditional SEO reports.

I've also noticed that reading community conversations can reveal content gaps, FAQ ideas and opportunities to make pages more helpful for users rather than simply optimizing for rankings.

I'm curious how others here use Reddit in their SEO workflow. Do you rely on it for keyword research, topic validation, content planning or understanding user intent? Or do you think its value is often overstated?

I'd be interested in hearing real examples of how Reddit has or hasn't improved your SEO strategy or content performance.

Genuine question because I gotta admit I am “struggling” (maybe overthinking?) to wrap my head around how outreach is evolving. I work in the Dallas area now and do outreach type of work for a ton of clients

As we know and what everyone says the goal shouldn’t be to “earn links” anymore but to “earn trust and authority” Simply put a lot of people would say links don’t even matter (not sure I agree with that broad sentiment tho”)

My main question is what is the practical difference? How is “earn trust” any different than “earn links”. Both for local businesses and more national brands.

Just curious how others in the space are approaching this.

Hi,

So a bit of context, i did SEO improvements on my website 1 July, before that i averaged 120-175 clicks per day(growing slowly peer week), one week after the SEO improvements i peaked at 400 clicks daily, but instantly after the peak at 7 July i started to decline hard, currently I'm at just above 100 clicks daily.

I did not do anything in the period of time after 1 July.

How come this happen? Have i missed something important?

Any help is much appreciated, thanks!

Hey,

My boss has a lot of clients that are asking "what are we doing for AI".

Me and him are both getting frustrated by this question. Good SEO will always be compatible with optimizing for AI we both believe.

That said, I am curious what kind of tools agencies use to monitor AI performance (so our clients can chill out a bit about this whole AI thing).

Thanks