u/New_Nail_9457

There's always that one thing. You explain it, you send them an article, you even show them data, and somehow three months later they bring it up again like it's brand new information.

For me it's the "just add more keywords and we'll rank higher" belief. Doesn't matter how many times I walk through intent and content quality, it always comes back around.

Curious what everyone else deals with. Is there a myth you've basically given up trying to correct and just work around instead?

Was talking to someone new to the field last week and realized how much of the standard advice I was repeating to them is stuff I have not actually questioned in years. Made me wonder how much of it is still true versus just something that got copy-pasted from blog to blog until it became gospel.

Curious what people here think is genuinely outdated at this point, or maybe was never even that true to begin with:

1. Is there a specific ranking factor everyone still obsesses over that barely moves the needle anymore?
2. Any content or keyword advice that made sense years ago but actively hurts now?
3. Something you were taught early on that you've since completely reversed your opinion on?

Been thinking about this after cleaning up my tool stack recently there is always some tool everyone in the industry swears by you pay for it expecting it to change everything and then six months later you realize you are barely opening it

curious what people's experience has been:

1. which paid tool genuinely disappointed you compared to the hype around it?
2. what free alternative ended up doing the job just as well if not better?

Doing digital marketing for a while and now this same question keeps coming up with clients- rankings is fine so why is traffic dropping? Pretty sure it's AI Overviews grabbing clicks before people even hit the site but I wanted to know how people here are actually dealing with it not just the theory.

Few things I'm genuinely curious about:

1. Are you writing/structuring content differently now to get showed up in AI answers or still optimizing the old method for SERP rank?
2. Has your traffic mix shifted at all more coming from Reddit, YouTube, forums instead of straight Google organic ?
3. Is anyone tracking AI citations as an actual metric or is it still too hard to measure properly ?