u/Rohit_Rikhari

One thing I learned after working on multiple SEO projects:

High traffic does NOT always mean good SEO.

I’ve audited pages pulling thousands of monthly visits while generating:

• almost no leads
• weak engagement
• poor retention
• near-zero conversions

At the same time, I’ve seen low-volume keywords outperform “high traffic” pages simply because the intent was perfectly aligned with the offer.

That completely changed how I approach SEO audits.

Now I focus on:

• intent match
• user journey
• internal linking structure
• SERP psychology
• topical trust
• content depth vs user expectation

before even thinking about keyword density.

A lot of modern SEO feels less like traditional optimization and more like understanding user behavior at scale.

Especially now that AI-generated content is flooding SERPs, the sites winning long-term seem to be the ones that genuinely solve the search intent better than everyone else.

Curious if others here are seeing the same shift lately.

(Always open to discussing SEO strategies.)

what do you think?

Been deep in the AI citation rabbit hole for the last several months and wanted to share what's actually working vs what's just noise. Curious if others are seeing the same.

1. Being cited by sources that LLMs already trust matters more than your own domain authority

This is the biggest mindset shift. Traditional SEO trained us to think about our backlinks. For AI visibility, what matters is whether you're mentioned on the sources the model treats as reference material — Reddit threads, industry roundups, Wikipedia-adjacent sites, niche news outlets, YouTube transcripts. Get mentioned there and you start showing up in answers even without ranking #1 on Google.

Practical version: stop obsessing over your own page and start tracking where competitors are getting name-dropped. Then go earn mentions in those same places.

2. Structured, declarative answers beat clever copywriting

LLMs lift sentences that are direct, self-contained, and factual. "X is Y because Z" structures get pulled. Marketing fluff doesn't. I've started rewriting key pages so the answer to the obvious question is in a single, quotable sentence near the top. Citations went up noticeably.

3. Perplexity and ChatGPT behave very differently

Perplexity leans heavily on fresh web results and cites generously — it's almost a search engine with a wrapper. ChatGPT (especially in non-search mode) leans on what's baked into training plus a smaller live retrieval set. Optimizing for one doesn't automatically get you the other. Worth tracking them separately.

4. The "FAQ + schema" tactic is overhyped

Lots of GEO advice is basically just rebranded 2018 SEO — slap an FAQ schema on it and pray. In my testing this does almost nothing for AI citations specifically. What works is having genuine, useful, quotable sentences in your content, schema or not.

5. Brand mentions without links are now valuable

This one's wild for anyone who came up in link-building era SEO. LLMs pick up on entity associations, not just hyperlinks. A Reddit comment that says "I've been using [your brand] for X" can contribute to citations even with no link at all. Unlinked mentions are a real signal now.

What's everyone else seeing? Specifically curious:

• Anyone tracking citation share over time with a specific tool? What are you using?
• Has anyone seen Google's AI Mode behave meaningfully differently from regular ChatGPT/Perplexity patterns?
• Is anyone NOT seeing the "Reddit dominates LLM citations" effect in their niche?

Been seeing a lot of "SEO is dead, AI is taking over" posts lately and I think people are conflating two very different things.

AI is genuinely incredible at the parts of SEO that were always kind of mechanical. Keyword clustering, outlines, technical audits, schema, internal linking suggestions, pulling SERP data at scale. That stuff used to eat hours. Now it takes minutes. Cool.

But here's where the takeover narrative falls apart for me:

Google's last few core updates have been brutal on sites pumping out high-volume AI content with no real perspective behind it. The whole E-E-A-T thing, especially the first E (Experience), is something AI literally cannot fake. It hasn't used the product. It hasn't talked to a frustrated customer. It hasn't sat in a sales call and heard the actual questions people ask.

The other thing nobody talks about: when everyone has access to the same AI tools, the baseline quality of content goes up. Which means generic, well-structured, "optimized" content stops being a differentiator. The stuff that ranks long term is going to be content with a real point of view, original data, or genuine expertise. Things AI can assist with but can't originate.

My working theory: SEOs who treat AI as a junior teammate are going to eat the lunch of SEOs who either ignore it or try to use it to replace thinking entirely.

Curious what others are seeing. Anyone here actually losing rankings to pure-AI competitors? Or is it the opposite, where AI sites are getting hammered by updates?

Something I've been noticing across multiple client accounts over the past 6 months — organic traffic from Google is flat or declining, but leads are still coming in from people who "heard about them from ChatGPT or Perplexity."

This made me dig deeper into GEO as a discipline and honestly it feels like where SEO was in 2010 — nobody has fully cracked it yet, best practices are still forming, and early movers are getting disproportionate results.

A few things I've tested that seem to actually influence AI citations:

• Entity clarity — AI models need to understand unambiguously what your brand is and does. Vague positioning kills your chances of being cited.
• Third-party mentions — Not backlinks in the traditional sense, but genuine brand mentions on forums, review sites, and industry publications that AI training data pulls from.
• Answer-structured content — Writing content that directly answers the question rather than dancing around it with keyword density.
• Schema markup — More important than ever. AI parsers rely heavily on structured data.

What I'm struggling with is how to report GEO performance to clients. There's no "position 1 on ChatGPT" equivalent yet. Anyone found a clean way to track and present AI visibility metrics?

Also curious — are any of you including GEO as a separate line item in proposals, or bundling it into existing SEO retainers?