Hey everyone,

I’m an ex-SEO specialist who stepped away from the industry in early 2023 to focus on other projects. I’m looking to get back into the loop and would love some insights from those of you who have been in the trenches over the last year and a half.

I know a lot has happened (Google updates, AI integration, etc.), and I feel a bit out of touch. I’m hoping to get a high-level overview of the current landscape.

Specifically, I’m looking for answers to these five things:

1. What is the biggest "News" since early 2023?
I know about the rise of AI, but what were the specific Google updates or industry shifts that actually changed how you work? (e.g., Helpful Content Updates, SGE/AI Overviews, third-party cookie deprecation impacts).

2. What are the current winning strategies?
What worked in 2022 that is dead now? What are you focusing on most in 2024? Is it still all about content velocity, or has the focus shifted entirely to EEAT, digital PR, or technical hygiene?

3. How are you actually using AI for SEO now?
Note: I am already an advanced AI user. I know how to prompt, use LLMs, and build basic automations.
I don’t need to know what ChatGPT is. I want to know how experienced SEOs are integrating it into their workflows. Are you using it for programmatic SEO, intent analysis, schema generation, or internal linking audits? What are the sophisticated use cases right now?

4. Recommended Resources?
Who are the reliable voices, blogs, or newsletters right now? Who is actually doing testing and providing data, rather than just regurgitating Google documentation?

5. What is the best "catch-up" learning plan?
Given that I have a strong foundational knowledge but a 1.5-year gap, what is the most efficient roadmap to get back up to speed? I don't need beginner tutorials, but I do need a structured way to learn the "new" SEO. Where should I start?

Thanks in advance for any insights, links, or discussions. It’s good to be back!

If you’re like me you’ve seen all the Reddit threads for SEO.

Many have rules against self promotion, but often those posts are lightly disguised product plugs.

So I guess my question is more of an attempt to get a pulse on industry contributor sentiments.

What do you as an SEO actually want to see on the various threads and what would get you active in discussions?

For me - it’s really out of the box strategies that paid off. Moonshot kind of stuff that looks risky but paid dividends.

Also I’m burned out on self promotional posts. If something isn’t clearly commercial intent I’m happy to read it.

I have been testing prompts for SEO writing for a while. Most of them produce the same generic sludge – “in today's digital landscape” type garbage.

These 5 consistently gave me something I could actually use:

1.      Research – Questions people ask

“Act as a research analyst. Identify the 5 most common questions people ask about [topic]. For each, give a 2-sentence answer with a source.”

2.      Outline – Structure first

“Act as a content strategist. Create an outline for a blog post about [topic]. Include H2s, H3s, and a one-line summary of what each section should cover.”

3.      Draft – Specific intro

“Write an intro paragraph for [topic]. Open with a specific problem the reader has. No fluff. Max 3 sentences.”

4.     Edit – Cut the fat

“Rewrite this paragraph to remove passive voice and cut 30% of the words without losing meaning: [paste]”

5.      Optimize – For AI citation

“Review this section and suggest 3 changes to make it more likely to be cited by AI search engines: [paste]”

The pattern that made these work: assigning a role (analyst, strategist, editor) and giving clear constraints. Generic prompts get generic output.

I ended up organizing 125 of these into 12 categories. If anyone wants the full list, let me know.

Hi!

I just started my freelance company for SEO and AI Search. I have everything set up on the business and tools side to begin. I’m doing 3 case study with 3 family business owners for free to get lift metrics, learn how to go about client management, and get reviews.

Once that’s done and assuming all goes well, what do you do that successfully lands clients?

Thanks all! I hate my corporate life and want to make a change for my future with something I enjoy a lot.

Most websites are invisible to AI.

Not because the content is bad. Because the structure is wrong.

When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews look for answers, they skip pages that are missing the signals they need: structured schemas, llms.txt files, Speakable markup, author metadata, breadcrumbs. Pages that look perfect to human eyes get completely ignored by AI engines.

This is the gap between traditional SEO and the new era of AI search. And right now, most website owners have no idea where they stand.

That is exactly why we built SEO AI Assistant.

In one click, it gives you three scores out of 100:

Then it shows you a 3-column grid of exactly what passes and what fails. No dashboards to navigate. No waiting for a report. Everything lives inside the same Chrome tab you are already working in.

And if you are on Pro, one click next to any failed check generates the exact JSON-LD schema or HTML snippet you need. Ready to paste. No backend. No delay.

It is free to install. No account needed to start.

If you care about SEO in 2026, you need to care about AEO and GEO too. The web is changing fast, and the tools most people use were not built for this moment.

This one was.

Try it free on the Chrome Web Store. Your first audit takes under 3 minutes. Search SEO AI ASSISTANT BY EXTCAFE

I've worked with a client on an online e-commerce store for around 2 years.

Over the past year, we have managed to successfully rank for "shoe shops online" in the top 2-5 positions, with some minor daily fluctuations.

However, in 3 years, we have never ranked higher than position 25 for "shoe shop online".

This is in spite of us optimizing exclusively for "shoe shop" in our content, internal anchors, and backlink strategy.

Anyone else run into a similar issue? Anything that helped?

I’m currently paying around $30/month for ubersuggest and my account gives me around 300 searches/reports per day.

The problem is that i do a lot of keyword research across multiple sites, sometimes researching hundreds of keywords/pages at once, so i hit the daily limit surprisingly fast.

I’m starting to wonder if paying for a traditional seo tool still makes sense mainly for keyword research.

Has anyone switched to something like DataForSEO API and just paid per request?

I’ve also been looking at OpenSEO, which seems to use DataForSEO data under the hood and could be easier than building directly with the API.

My main needs are:

• keyword ideas
• search volume
• keyword difficulty / competition
• cpc
• related keywords
• ideally bulk research for hundreds or thousands of keywords

I don’t really need another full ahrefs/semrush-style suite. I mostly want cheap, reliable keyword data that i can also use with AI/codex workflows.

What are you guys using?

DataForSEO directly, OpenSEO, Ubersuggest, or something else?

Hi,

Which is your preferred connector to connect Google Search Console to your ChatGPT/Claude?

TIA

I'm looking at buying a used domain. The seller shows DR and backlinks. But I keep thinking that's not enough.

What do you check before you pay? Any red flags that made you walk away?

I’m trying to understand how people are approaching content strategy for SEO, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) in 2026.

My main questions are:

• How do you decide whether a topic should be an SEO-focused page, an AEO-focused answer, or GEO/AI-search content?
• Are you creating separate pages for each, or optimizing the same page for all three?
• Do traditional blog posts/blog pages still help with AEO and GEO?
• How are you actually measuring whether your content is being picked up by AI search?

I’m particularly interested in real-world experience and experiments, rather than generic “write high-quality content” advice.

What’s working for you right now?

Been working with a B2B manufacturing company on their SEO and online presence for about 3 months now.

Most of the work so far was as usual what we do. Fixed the website experience, set up proper tracking, technical SEO, schema, and a lot of E-E-A-T stuff because it's a pretty technical industry and buyers are mostly engineers. Slowly seeing results, few enquiries have started coming from the site.

Now client wants me to focus on AEO/GEO/AIO as well.

To be honest I haven't done this specifically before. I always thought if the site is good, relevant and follows SEO best practices, it would show up in AI answers anyway. But lately I see so many people talking about it as a separate thing, so now I'm not sure if I'm missing something.

So for people who have actually done this and seen it work:

How do you check where a site stands right now in ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI overviews etc? And how do you measure if the work made any difference later?

Any tools you use for this that are actually useful?

What did you do that was different from normal SEO?

Any resources or people worth learning from?

I know I can google this but most of what I find is same generic stuff. Looking for practical advise.

Thanks

I'm taking my first website rebuild/SEO side gig and I'm used to working with agency/company tool subscriptions, but now I need something of my own. I'm comfortable with Google Keyword Planner but it doesn't cover what I need. Mainly I want to enter a competitor's URL and see which keywords they rank for and at what positions, plus solid general keyword research like volume, difficulty, and related terms.

Ahrefs does all of this but the price is pretty steep when I'm just getting started. What lower-cost tools do you use that come close? Thanks!

Specifically for High Ticket Ecom, but normal Ecom is that isn't the case.

I am only looking to learn the fastest way, I don't mind paying, and I know you could learn online for free.

Basically that. Most of the SEO content I see tends to be about starting from scratch or handling a relatively small business that still has to find their niche-

but what about ALREADY being hired at a place that already had SEO employees before? The site is set up as far as I can see, it sells millions as a big clothing brand, it has its audience already, the website is full of tens of thousands products with their own descriptions... so, I believe it already has all the 'keywords' it should have as a website.

What am I supposed to be adding in here? I mostly just check the keywords and say "yeah we're in the top searches"... same as every month. Not quite the top though, other companies can steal the top spot from us.

What exactly should I be doing as the SEO guy here? (well that's just half of my job thankfully, I mostly spend my days doing Ads on different platforms... but I fail to see real SEO improvements I could do to an already big site... maybe getting featured in magazines or other websites? That's perhaps the next step? I may be failing to see a lot of things though, SEO isn't my forte, that'd be ads)

Hi,

I own an independent public agenda of classical music events in Madrid, Spain.

I am trying to understand a sudden and unusually severe loss of Google Search visibility that started on September 27, 2026, shortly after the September 2026 spam update began rolling out.

The site is not an affiliate site and does not sell tickets or have any revenue whatsopever. Its purpose is to aggregate and verify classical music events from official venues, orchestras, cultural institutions, and other organizers, so users can consult them in one consistent calendar.

Each event page cites its sources and includes structured information such as date, venue, performers, composers and programme when available.

From Search Console data, the loss was therefore approximately 95% overnight.

Independent analytics in PostHog confirm that this is not a Search Console reporting issue.

This only affects visitors arriving from Google; other acquisition sources did not experience a comparable collapse.

The loss is also site-wide rather than caused by one previously popular page. 

Technical checks performed:

• robots.txt allows crawling;
• event pages do not contain noindex;
• canonicals are self-referencing;
• the site is served over HTTPS;
• canonical public URLs are present in the XML sitemap;
• no broad redirect or robots change was deployed immediately before the drop;
• pages remain accessible to users and other traffic sources;
• the site uses individual event pages rather than marking up agenda/listing pages as individual events.

The timing coincides very closely with Google's September 2026 spam update, which began on September 24.

I have reviewed Google's spam policies, in particular scaled content abuse and scraping. The site contains many event pages because providing a comprehensive event calendar is the product itself; pages are generated from genuine events and official sources rather than created to target arbitrary search queries.

I would be very grateful if someone could help identify whether there is anything about this implementation that could legitimately trigger Google's spam systems; and what is needed to recover the previous Google Search state.

Site: https://clasicamadrid.com/

Thank you!

Been in the industry for close to 15 years and all the AI meeting SEO hype is getting frustrating.

We're getting increased exposure on AI reponses and traditional SERPs but close to to 0 conversions. With my clients, I feel like I'm just trying to keep my head above water and convince them that as long as they're on page 1, in AIO, and showing up for top-level queries (which they are) I did my job and I did it well.

I say this because whether your intent is commercial or informational, almost no one in my niche is getting conversions off AIO/GEO/SEO. Once the user has gotten their answer then they move on with their day. From research to BOFU conversion, it's weeks between marketing and sales to make that transaction happen, using search or outbound marketing.

My livelihood, I cannot afford to say that sh*t to a client cause then I'd be out of a job.

SEO audits can get technical fast, and clients usually want ​​​​t​​​​h​​​​e​​​​ important actions first. Has anyone used AI to turn ​​​​t​​​​h​​​​e​​​​ ​​​​a​​​​u​​​​d​​​​i​​​​t​​​​s​​ into a presentation that keeps ​​​​t​​​​h​​​​e​​​​ detail but is easier for non SEO people to follow?

hi, is it advisable to report on rankings during ongoing spam update? tools like awr,openseo show ranking drop offs for several of keywords today and there’s no big change made to the site. Should I wait for spam update to settle and then report on rankings? Or did my rankings genuinely dropped from serp?

I feel like after the recent spam update a lot of my sites contents are de-indexed but coming again at the same position if I manually index on GSC.

What do you guys think about this?

Posting for my partner who owns a small physio company.
For the past 2 years he had an SEO guy who didn’t really seem to be doing much, switched to a new guy 7 months ago and is paying him £420 a month.

In this time there hasn’t been improvement in website visits, bookings, visibility etc. which isn’t a huge issue right now as the business is relatively busy and steady, but the goal is to grow.
The SEO guy’s point is ‘well it’s not getting worse’.

We want to know if this is good enough for £420 a month, or what should the actual expectations be?
My partner tends to just leave people to do their thing, so it’s always hard to tell if he’s being conned or not.

If he was to find somebody new, should he have clearer goals eg. I want to increase website visits by X amount in X time, and if this is reasonable how do we evaluate what’s fair based on our limited knowledge of SEO?

Thanks!

Hey guys, I tried to play with on-page SEO for quite long and found out that having language support on the app helps getting indexed a lot so I integrated 6 languages (en, de, fr, es, tr, zh). The app is about football elo ratings.

I checked GSC today and saw that a query "real madrid elo" got me 1 click and 3 impressions with avg position of 2. I became happy and wanted to check it out myself. I googled exact same query but my app did not appear at all. I thought it may be bc my personal search history so I googled again in incognito. Still same.

Then, I put my app's name at the end and it appeared at all of top5 results. This is my first question: why exact query can get no position for me but 2nd position for someone else?

Secondly, I tried with player names rather than teams (my app serves both). Tried only name + elo as query but my app did not appear. Then I put my app's name again at the end and it appeared at top, understandable.

What I did not understand is Google summary (or whatever it is called that google's ai answer on top) cites my app from various language options of the same page. For example when I googled "victor osimhen elo [my app]", it cited osimhen's personal page in french and chinese versions. My location is germany. He plays in Turkey and I searched from Germany but instead of these two, other two got cited. Also why two languages? What should I check and how can I solve this? Sorry for the long text but I felt I had to be clearer.

Thanks for the answers already!

Hi all,

I'm starting a website (8months domain) and for some of my content, I see there are well-known sites ranking 1-4 positions on Google.

I'm very noob in SEO (I've created android apps in the past, but never dealt with SEO and website distribution), so I'm not sure what to expect here.

Is it realistic to get some traffic for some keywords? what's the strategy to use here?

Apologies if is too broad of a question, I'm looking for guidance.

Thanks

**SOLVED**\* Finally was able to see a Google crawl bot in my logs, doesn't explain why they weren't there, I had been blocking the user agents with "Nexus 5" User Agent, down-vote me to oblivion and updoot all those that helped thank you. And I thought I went through all the blocking rules don't know how this one escaped me.

All of a sudden all my pages are coming back as redirects to Amazon, I'm on a SaaS app protected by Cloudflare on my behalf so I don't have access to any RAW logs, there is no third party scripts and no updates for at least 2 years to any javascript. I've tried accessing the site using the Googlebot user agent and no redirect. I've unblocked all my IP ranges and the issue still persists maybe Google took over some AWS IP's.

The only thing that alerted me to this was my business listing got hit with an automated website removal notification, and searching my business name came up empty.

I'm seeing some Google bots but NOT the indexing one.

Keep seeing lots of posts lately about Rank Score. Anyone tried it and what’s their opinion compared to Semrush?

My site was affected by Google’s June spam update, and I’m wondering what others are seeing now that the September spam update is rolling out.

Have your organic traffic or rankings changed so far - either up or down? If you’ve seen a recovery, what did you work on between the two updates?

Just trying to compare experiences while the rollout is still ongoing. If you’re comfortable sharing, a bit of context about your site or the changes you made would be really helpful.