u/Aromatic-Pineapple79

In my experience, SEO conversations in 2026 are stuck on the wrong question

Everyone is asking "how do i rank for this keyword." The question that is actually moving numbers right now is "how do i become the entity that AI systems retrieve when this topic comes up"

These are completely different problems.

Basic SEO things like technical health, crawlability, intent matching, that's still the entry ticket i would say but it is no longer the differentiator, is what i noticed.

What is actually helping visibility right now is brand mention velocity and topical ownership. Ahrefs analysed around 75k brands and found that web mentions correlate three times more strongly with AI Overview and ChatGPT visibility than backlinks do. Three times!! That number should change how you think about off page strategy entirely

So getting your brand named in industry publications, expert roundups, podcasts, YouTube transcripts, relevant reddit threads, review platforms, even unlinked mentions, that work is now more valuable than pure link building for AI visibility. But remember mot instead of links,in addition to. 

The content side has also changed. More blog post is just noise now, anyone can create 100 blogs a day with a deep research api. Deep topic clusters with original data, clear definitions, comparison tables, and direct answer blocks works now. The content has to survive machine scrutiny, verifiable claims, named expertise, consistent entity signals. Refreshing existing strong pages for extractability is also working in terms of higher ROI than publishing new ones, is what i observed.

Zero click rates are now consistently above 60% when an AI answer appears. So clicks still matter but brand recall and citation share are now the primary outcomes for a large part of the funnel.

So in short, I would say, don’t treat SEO, PR and brand building as separate disciplines. They are all optimising for the same underlying signal. Consistent, corroboratable authority on a defined set of topics.

Curious if others are seeing the same shift or something else you noticed.

Hi everyone,

We designed a complete homepage in pure HTML/CSS for a client. On WordPress we usually just convert the HTML using an AI tool and drop it in, but this client is on HubSpot CMS and we’re a bit stuck.

Is it possible to take a fully designed HTML homepage and implement it on HubSpot?

A few specific questions:

• Can we replace the existing homepage with custom HTML?
• Do we need to convert everything into HubSpot modules/templates, or is there a way to upload/import raw HTML?
• What’s the best approach if we already have a finished HTML design?

Any advice from people who’ve done custom homepage builds on HubSpot would be really appreciated

I get this question a lot recently, what actually changed after you started using AI in content marketing. So here is what I observed and follow.

What is off my plate now

First draft work from an outline. A long form piece that used to take me 4 to 6 hours to get to a usable draft now takes 30 to 60 minutes of prompting and structure, then real editing. 

Research and competitive analysis. Pulling competitor angles, summarising reports, clustering keywords, turning a messy brief into a structured outline. It really saves a lot of time.

Repurposing. One blogpost into LinkedIn posts, FB Posts and FAQ expansions.

Meta titles, descriptions, heading structure, basic internal linking suggestions. I provide a brief of intent, what angles we should try, our AI engine will handle the rest.

Around 6 to 8 hours a week recovered on pure production. That time moved into strategy and original research, we use it listening industry expert’s podcasts and reading some paid articles..

What i expected AI to take over that it still hasn't is

Proper strategic judgment. AI remixes what already exists very well. Deciding why this angle, for this audience, right now, in a way that actually feels sharp, that's still entirely human.

Authentic voice. You can get clean on brand copy. Getting the specific lived experience detail, the slightly uncomfortable observation, the sentence that makes someone stop scrolling, that's still on me and on our writers.

Reliable research without fact checking. i still verify every non obvious claim. The models confidently invent plausible sounding details and that hasn't changed enough to trust it unsupervised.

The people pulling ahead are the ones who got better at directing the tools and protecting the human layers that still matter, strategy, voice, and deciding what is actually worth publishing.

How does this match what others are seeing in 2026?

I’m Curious what ai actually taken off your plate?

After AI, one of the biggest challenge is finding sources for better content, no matter where you go- Meidum, Linkedin, Blogs, everywhere AI, and same old wine in different bottles.

This si where, i observed, podcasts are really helpful, there people share unique expeiences, and I started treating podcasts and long form interviews for creating better SEO research documents.

When i listen to an industry podcast now i keep notes open. Not for those big ideas or questions, even Claude will give you the same. I wait for the small ones. The moment the expert says "something I noticed recently...." or "what nobody tells you is..." Those are content gaps or some rare experiences.

Another thing is, this helps you with better search or query terms, the language used by host for follow-up questions is actually the most valuable part. Also the way an expert explains something to alayaman is almost exactly how that non expert will search for it later.

Another thing i noticed is that the partially answered questions are where the best content angles live. In really deep or strong niche podcasts, the host asks something interesting, expert gives a surface answer and moves on. That gap is usually a whole article that we can write and get indexed as a top ranking article because of 0 competition.

Once the notes are ready, take those exact phrases to search console and google autocomplete before doing anything else.

Podcast language is qualitative signal do not treat as a proof of demand. Most of it won't have volume. But when it does, and when it matches the real phrasing from the conversation, that's the content opportunity most keyword tools will never surface, is what i observed.

Recently for a healthcare client, i used a podcast series by Dr Gopinath, and it gave me a month of content ideas that feel genuinely original because they came from how real people actually talk about their problems, and a doctor's real observations.

Curious if others are doing this systematically or just picking up ideas informally while listening.

Or if you have any other sources or strategies to stand out from AI noise?

After the entry of ChatGPT my feed has been flooded with posts that sound great with ehyming punchlines and excellent frameworks for everything. Same structure and transitions for most of them, but only the industry changes.

I read that linkedIn is now blocking hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts every day. When everyone automates every action, the only differentiation left is originality

But, linkedIn's -Seems like AI slop- will matter only if it rewards authenticity over frequency.

After the entry of ChatGPT my feed has been flooded with posts that sound great with ehyming punchlines and excellent frameworks for everything. Same structure and transitions for most of them, but only the industry changes.

I read that linkedIn is now blocking hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts every day. When everyone automates every action, the only differentiation left is originality

But, linkedIn's -Seems like AI slop- will matter only if it rewards authenticity over frequency.

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.

How we prepare a content strategies?

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 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.

Please share your insights