Writing your own listicles has a big trap, because you have to add some of your competitors to make it relevant.

Every time you create such a page, you create value for other sites too, and it may feel like an activity with zero value.

To avoid this, I recommend following 3 rules:

1/ Consider each listicle you publish as a potential to get brand mentions from 5-10 sites you mentioned

2/ Define 1-2 of the closest competitors you won’t mention in your own listicles;

3/ Consider all other brands (including indirect competitors) as partners for brand mention exchanges and build long term partnerships with them.

It helps to avoid sending too much weight to brands you compete with and get much more value for your own brand.

The one and only reason Google goes all-in blocking scraping

No matter what you are using for Google SERP tracking, I bet your tool probably isn't working well either. Yesterday we talked about it with u/DmitryOk.

We were discussing what’s happening and where things are headed.

https://preview.redd.it/roscwyajt1th1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=4532ea8bee6eb2052a75bd5bccd8781f0a873bd1

I remained neutral, confident that data providers would find a way to fix this, just as they had hundreds of times before when Google created new obstacles to SERP scraping.

But Dmytro took a fatalistic view. He said it looked like the end of SERP tracking, because the stakes are much higher for Google now!

Before the rise of AI chatbots, Google didn't worry much about rank trackers, as they posed no real threat. Now, however, the primary threat to Google is AI chatbots scraping search results, and the company will do whatever it takes to protect its "data moat."

The main risk for Google lies specifically in the data AI chatbots use to generate answers directly within the chat interface. Yes, AI models are trained on massive datasets and can provide many answers without performing a search. However, the real world is constantly changing.

If you strip AI chatbots of the ability to access the search engine's index, the quality of their answers will inevitably deteriorate.

Google's goal, therefore, is to leverage its index so that the disparity in answer quality (between AI Oveviews, Gemini, AI mode from one side and Claude, ChatGPT on other side) becomes obvious, clearly favoring Google's own products.

What Google will do next?

The fact, that a court dismisses Google’s DMCA claims against SerpAPI doesn't matter. Google attempted to defend itself legally as an immediate measure. However, this loss does not prevent them from creating additional requirements for viewing SERPs.

They already added a lot of restrictions. Each new restriction makes the scraping more expensive, but still possible.

At least, Google doesn't hide answers to a question how do they block SERP tracking :)

Dmytro also shared an interesting thought with me:

>SERP scraping originates from logged-out Google accounts. However, in reality, the majority of users are logged into Google when search something. Consequently, Google deals with a relatively small pool of IP addresses, making it easy for them to detect suspicious behavior.

Even logged-out users rarely view all of the top 100 search results or enter 1,000 search queries a day.

So, the biggest leverage Google has in the fighting with scraping tools is a requirement of login. Google can play with simple restrictions now, but at the end they can decide to limit any logged out session to only top 10 snippets and only 10 search queries per day.

It will make SERP tracking so expensive for providers and as a result for end users, that it will definitely will change the behaviour of entire SEO industry.

How SERP tracking tools can adapt to a new reality?

Here is what we plan to change at r/Sitechecker and what I propose to do for any rank tracker.

1/ Accept the new reality and don't expect it to ever be fixed

The new reality is that the cost of SERP tracking will be 2x-10x more expensive that it was. This means users have to decide what is more important to them:

• scraping the top 100 for the same set of keywords but much less frequently
• or scraping only the top 10–20 but doing so every day.

The best tools will allows users to choose between these 2 options.

2/ Use the potential of Google Search Console data to the full

Yes, Google Search Console doesn't replace traditional Rank Tracker because:

• you don't have SERP data
• you don't have position data for today
• you won't see top 50-100 positions for many keywords
• you won't get position data on some days for many keywords, because of low search volume
• you can't track position in local search

However, average position data by keyword is still very valuable because you can catch the bigger picture of what's going on with rankings of YOUR website, tracking it daily by 1k keywords per project easily!

An example of what you'll see in GSC Rank Tracker

I wrote about this idea in February 2026, but we didn't implemented it yet, because of working on AI search visibility tracking. Not it's definitely time for this feature.

So, I think that the best rank tracker should use GSC data for daily keyword ranking tracking and allow to scrape SERPs only once per week or on request.

My assumption is that this is the best possible way to adapt, I don't see another way. However, I may miss something. Please, share your thoughts.

1/ They want to make reverse engeneering of what works for growing AI visibility harder. As Google did with backlinks, often delaying the impact of a backlink for a week/month.

2/ They want to add more trust to responses, because corporate blogs looks more serious, in the users' eyes.

Which one do you you think is right?

From one side, it's cheap in execution, because you don't need a lot of unique data to make it good enough for indexing and citation.

From other side, you have to add your competitors to make the listicle complete, and this decrease the value of this method, because you want to be recommended as the only and the best desicion.

How to solve this contradiction?

I'm preparing an article on this topic. Share your thoughts and questions if you have. Best thoughts will be included as quotes into my article.

I have a question to local SEO agency owners. I've been building SEO platform for agencies for years and found that local SEO agencies have the biggest retention and LTV among all agencies we serve.

I found it just a week ago and it was a huge insight for me, so I've dug deeper and asked what are their biggest pains of current customers now.

All of them talked about the limitations of Google My Business analytics:

1. Data is only available for the last six months
2. You can't build aggregated reports for multiple locations
3. You can't compare it week-over-week or month-over-month data
4. There is no good enough native connector for Data Studio.
5. There is no one tool that connect GSC / GA4 / GMB / local rankings in one tool for well.

At first, this feedback inspired me. Have I really found a huge pain point that our app can address better than the others if we fix this pain points?

Then I found, that market isn't empty. There are BrightLocal, Whitespark, AgencyAnalytics, Semrush Local and so on.

So, I need more feedback from you:

- Do all issues I mentioned resonate with you? What is the biggest pain for you?
- What's your current toolset and what feature / pricing model can make you switch to other tool?

Hey, guys and girls. I have a question to local SEO agencies owners. I've been building SEO platform for agencies for years and found that local SEO agencies have the biggest retention and LTV among all agencies we serve.

I found it just a week ago and it was a huge insight for me, so I've dug deeper and asked what are their biggest pains of current customers now.

All of them talked about the limitations of Google My Business analytics:

1. Data is only available for the last six months
2. You can't build aggregated reports for multiple locations
3. You can't compare it week-over-week or month-over-month data
4. There is no good enough native connector for Data Studio.
5. There is no one tool that connect GSC / GA4 / GMB / local rankings in one tool for well.

This feedback really inspired me. Have I really found a huge pain point that our app can address better than the others if we fix this pain points? However, the market isn't empty.

There are BrightLocal, Whitespark, AgencyAnalytics, Semrush Local and so on.

So, I need more feedback from you:

- Do all issues I mentioned resonate with you? What is the biggest pain for you?
- What's your current toolset and what feature / pricing model can make you switch to other tool?

You've probably seen news about that. Profound raised $180 in Series D at $1.8bln valutation.

It looks too optimistic as for a such tool as for me. My hypotheses how they did it:

1/ Profound convinced most big US enterprise companies that proper AI search tracking cannot cost less than $100k a year.

2/ Profound convinced marketers at big US enterprises that they can build agents only in Profound, and this is a completely different thing from building it yourself in Claude/ChatGPT.

It doesn't matter what the truth is here. Big companies will track AI search anyway, and if you can convince them of something and they believe you -> you are fucking great marketer.

Remember, big companies think less about the ROI of each app they buy and more about risk reduction. If big guys choose your software, other big guys see it as a huge trust signal.

After some time, your SDRs don't talk about features at all on sales calls. You share a fact about Sequoia as an investor and the % of clients from the Fortune 500. That's it, closed.

From the other side, Airops decided to switch to the agency model, because knows well where are the biggest margins lie.

It should be an epic battle, like between Semrush and Ahrefs. Who are you betting on?

Think about building the subreddit seriously from day 1.

You don't build only a place to impact LLMs. You build a place where your current customers can ask questions, suggest product improvements, discuss use cases with other people, and actually complain about something.

That's why, at my agency, when we start to work on Reddit for a customer, I recommend:

• add a link to your Reddit community on the website/app
• add a link to your sub in an email and product onboarding
• invite your most active customers and influencers for AMA sessions
• consider any content your team publishes on other channels as a source for posts on Reddit

The more you invest in making your community successful using your current audience, the more attention and real users you'll get from Reddit itself.

For 4 years I've asked Ivanhoe Digital happy customers to leave reviews on Trustpilot and reached 49 reviews.

This widget had helped me to built trust

After this announcement I'll stop doing it.

I've got this email from Trustpilot today

Trustpilot decided to remove a free plan. It may sounds logical, because every company have to spend some money on maintaining free users.

However, free users were a huge leverage of Trustpilot growth:

1. They invited real people to leave reviews.

2. They added the badge with rating and count of reviews on own websites with traffic and every website visitor saw Trustpilot brand. It built awareness, trust and actually more businesses chose Trustpilot to collect reviews.

The email above is the last straw for me.

1. Trustpilot more and more marks new reviews from real people as spam, so I can't collect reviews at all. They even remove them from the admin dashboard.

2. And now they ask me $100/mo for an option to add a widget with a rating and reviews count to the website?

https://preview.redd.it/4j4su86czhnh1.png?width=3002&format=png&auto=webp&s=49e87e75fb96e8ba694ac7f48dcc4d7e8cb5e24d

It's a joke. By by Trustpilot.

There are many testimonial platforms. I can even ask users to leave reviews via LinkedIn and X posts, and it will be enough to build trust.

Are you using Trustpilot?

I will start.

Dataforseo doubled its quarterly revenue in Q2, from €2.5M to €5.4M.

https://preview.redd.it/r2gvlr2tkgmh1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=6495427444660c25b03f93d115604582d7fe488a

It means they hit around $2mln MRR and $20mln ARR.

Now you also understand why Ahrefs added API to all paid plans and why we did the same at Sitechecker.

The demand for cutting costs and building own tools with API is huge.

There is an opinion that people will stop buying website design and development, because AI can now do everything out of the box.

This is partly true, mainly for websites:

• that are not planned as something long-term
• if the website sells something unique, and the message itself is more important than the design (very rare)
• for niches where the mere presence of the website is already a boon (local business).

But when I look at websites in the B2B, where people sell for big checks, created by Claude with one style and font, I remember the handicap theory from evolutionary biology.

In short, females choose those males who survive DESPITE certain traits that only create additional risks for males. And males are forced to develop these maladaptive traits as a form of advertising.

My prediction is that B2B sites will go in this direction.

"Yes, we can make a site with Claude quickly, but we have enough resources to spend them on a unique design and bother with details that others ignore."

This is a signal that signals to the contractor: this is not a one-day business, the owners have made a bet with money and time.

The fight for customer trust is a zero-sum game. It is important not only what you can do, but also what your competitors cannot.

If everyone can create sites quickly, then the assessment of trust simply shift to another level.

Show that you are here for the long term and that you have enough funds to stand out:

• non-template site
• paid advertising
• legal entity and more than $100 share capital
• expensive microphone and camera on podcast recordings
• and so on

It is interesting to hear the opinions of those who disagree.

2 sales for the last 3 months. In 2025, it generated $4k in revenue, for the first 8 months of 2026, only $1k.

https://preview.redd.it/z4jqrc189blh1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=425f8373cfca3589a73c454dbd63e4c11d5b77e4

It's clear the demand has fallen, even though people still use Looker Studio.

I assume the reasons are:

- Many already found templates they need.
- Many already learned on how to build templates themselves.
- Many really switched to Claude Code and ChatGPT to build dashboards.

I'm not upset that I spent time on this business, because I continue using templates as the great reporting assets to deliver SEO/AEO for my customers.

I also believe that many businesses, still don't use all opportunities of Looker Studio or don't use it at all. That's why I launch a huge 1-week long gift session.

Everybody who will comment "Looker Pack" will get a 100% discount code for all my paid templates. It's $1k+ value.

https://preview.redd.it/xr0zym6c9blh1.png?width=2744&format=png&auto=webp&s=cbf3503c49aa8bbc6618fb8c2b59f59fe6793cea

I've found this pattern growing visibility by prompts with 0 visibility before.

Below is the example:

1. I've added the prompt "best software training tools" for tracking on Aug 15, the same day as published the Medium article that target this topic.

https://preview.redd.it/asce6rdkz4lh1.png?width=2672&format=png&auto=webp&s=ecf9f24c503a834839ec94c76c94cf33889a1476

2. This Medium article started to be cited on Aug 21 (it tooks time to be indexed in Google). Starting from this day Tango visibility by this prompt has grown.

https://preview.redd.it/yolrsncoz4lh1.png?width=2668&format=png&auto=webp&s=d86d0c4224af26de6362ec84d43185b6e6fac3a1

In many cases one article won't be enough to grow visibility from 0%, but because we did more than that, the Medium article became the last stone that tipped the scales.

https://preview.redd.it/ibq31x8sz4lh1.png?width=1912&format=png&auto=webp&s=2533b1c7e0178661ee4b89731795fac251a263b1

The visibility has changed so fast only in Google's LLMs. It's both, good and bad news.

1/ Good news, because Google has a huge and growing share of AI chats' users + we can create value for our customers in 24 hours / a week.

2/ Bad news, because improving AI visibility in ChatGPT / Claude requires more time and it often means the worse attribution of what worked and what didn't.

Did you notice this pattern too across your projects?

There are a couple of interesting studies from Peec and Promptwatch about the decline of Reddit citations in ChatGPT since August 8th.

https://preview.redd.it/41h9hzhlebkh1.png?width=1102&format=png&auto=webp&s=1dd8a5b8699dca0bcb42b2eef043c5a6b32b2575

https://preview.redd.it/oj190n38ibkh1.png?width=2188&format=png&auto=webp&s=a37fbfdb9d12abb9e373ffecad1813e12f549013

Many teams think that Reddit doesn't worth to work on anymore. Here are my thoughts.

1/ We have already seen how often ChatGPT experiments with citations. The drop in citations today does not guarantee that it will be permanent.

2/ ChatGPT is the largest player in the LLM market, but Google is gradually increasing its share. Gemini, AI Overview and AI Mod continue to cite Reddit.

3/ We do not know how the story of the revision of the terms of cooperation between Reddit and Google and OpenAI will end. But Reddit is escalating the revision of the terms of cooperation, because it considers its position strong.

Reddit has indeed managed to significantly improve the work of anti-spam systems and continues to be the owner of unique data. If one of the big players refuses to work with Reddit, then the one who continues to work gets a big advantage.

3 advantages that make Reddit data unique:

• the largest database of answers by long-tail queries
• more than one opinion per thread (sites rarely interview experts and users for their content)
• much better structured data than on other social platforms

Because of this, I predict that Google will agree with Reddit on new terms.

4/ Yes, most brands have paid attention to Reddit only to improve visibility in AI.

But those who do it correctly and for long enough notice that this channel has its own separate value.

• No social platform gives as much organic reach for posts from brand pages as Reddit.
• If LinkedIn and Meta are mostly used for demand generation, then on Reddit people often search for something just like on Google and those who track such queries and participate in discussions will receive real attention from the target audience.

5/ So many people hate Reddit for spam and fake accounts, despite the fact that Reddit is constantly doing a lot of work to fix this, while on LinkedIn 50% of comments and posts are already written by AI and there is no punishment for this at all.

Last, most controversial thesis. There is an opinion that Reddit only affects queries where LLMs use RAG, and in this case Reddit affects answers, only because it is in the top of the Google SERP.

But why then would OpenAI need a separate agreement with Reddit? Until ChatGPT completely refuses to use Reddit data, it remains possible that Reddit is also used for training data. I don’t know how to check this. If you have any studies or posts on this let me know.

Do you disagree with me?

SEO: you could do both demand capture and demand generation.

AEO: you work only on demand capture

In the old SEO world, each free tool or guide actually helped to buy views from a relevant audience. You owned the page people visit and could place a banner or link to your product.

Combine some creativity and pSEO experiments, and you could generate 100K+ views every month. That's why SEO was considered so valuable for a long time.

And that's the reason why the SEO role doesn't look as fashionable as before. Demand capture is too limited, and businesses can't grow without demand generation.

Of course, because AEO is considered a new channel by many CMOs, it helps us to adapt and win their hearts again.

But if you want to truly succeed, you have to look for ways to help with demand generation too. In most cases, it means creating (and sometimes even executing) a content marketing strategy on YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn.

Do you disagree?

Many of us are skeptical about the value of TOFu content for B2B today. I was also skeptical about it for 2 reasons:

1/ Adoption of AI chats is rising, which means that even the greatest guide will be stolen by LLMs. Even if there is a citation, it has 0 value if the brand isn't recommended.

2/ It became so easy to produce good enough content for a blog. We don't feel that publishing such content is worth it if every competitor can do it.

But sometimes it's useful to question even the most obvious things.

I was wrong with these assumptions. At least partially, at least for now.

9 TOFu pages generated 38 clicks from Google in 7 days

For 6 months, r/Tango team has been publishing content only for bottom-of-funnel keywords on the website. But these keywords are gradually running out.

2 weeks ago I suggested publishing guides by "{platform} implementation" keywords. The idea was that even if they get 0 clicks from Google, it still has value as a resource for internal links for /solutions/ pages.

I didn't expect these 9 guides would generate 38 clicks from Google, 70 users overall, and the first conversion in 7 days.

https://preview.redd.it/f24ieuvdqjih1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=408da1731d5928804c464fc7849eb87da66c6977

These queries have pretty high search volume for 7 days

It means that:

1/ We may be too pessimistic about the end of the old Google SERP with blue links. And it's clear that some people still prefer to read a well-structured article on the website, not in an AI chat interface.

2/ The ability of your competitors to create similar content doesn't mean you have to avoid it. At least because:

- they also may have an assumption it doesn't worth it in a new AI world;
- they may miss or forget it;
- they may create worse content (yes, even with AI)
- they may rank lower because of a weaker domain, not enough internal links, a JS site, and other reasons.

When was the last time you published TOFu content?

I've tested a couple of popular tools in this space:

1/ To make sure I buy something from trusted companies

It's not often, because in most case I buy something from companies I already know and had good experience with them, but anyway sometimes you buy something the first time anyway. For example, courses or software.

In this case I usually run quick analysis in different tools at the same time: Google SafeBrowsing, Trustracer, Virus Total, URL Scan.

2/ To protect my own sites

2 times during 10 years my Wordpress websites were hacked and a lot of content with affliate links were generated, because I didn't have protection. After this case I set up Sucuri and Wordfence plugins for all websites I launch and it helps a lot.

My experience with running own websites shows that often the website you visit maybe unsafe not because the owner wants to deceive you. Often the issue is that website was hacked and the owner even don't know about it.

That means that checking review websites, GMB reviews and so on is important, but it doesn't mean that it's enough, you still have to check websites for viruses and malware.

What's you experince? Do you use one website safety checker for all types of audits or have specific tools for different issues?

"We tested, this channel doesn't work for us" -> You can often hear this when you communicate with the founder or CMO of a B2B startup.

I remembered this phrase because a week ago we started testing a new channel for generating demos - cold calls.

On Friday, I sat in on the first session of cold calls that our contractor did and remembered scenes from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. That same day, he booked the first demo.

We already tried to launch cold calls 2 years ago, but it didn't work then.

But we also had this with cold emails. 4 years ago, the channel didn't work, and when we launched it again a year ago, it worked.

That's why I see such a pattern. We always have a chain:

1. Offer
2. Ideal customer profile
3. Channel

When we say that a channel does not work, we should make a remark that it does not work precisely with the existing combination of these 3 variables.

It is important to understand that of these variables, what is the first thing to change and be ready to return to the channel again.

A weak or irrelevant offer is usually the biggest risk. A mistake at this level leads the entire product and marketing strategy in the wrong direction.

Therefore, it seems to me that cold emails and calls should be launched as early as possible, because this is where the fastest feedback is.

But even when you have a good offer and the right audience, the effectiveness of the channel can vary significantly depending on the level of the freelancer or agency which owns this channel.

The best performers are those who:

• aren’t afraid to share the details of the process
• share interesting insights into how this channel works for other clients and openly talk about who it didn’t work for
• help you better see the gaps in your offer

Even if the channel doesn’t work, you should gain knowledge that will make other channels more effective.

Have you relaunched some acquisition channels 2-3 times, even if they haven't worked before?