With AI making it easier than ever to publish content, it feels like everyone is saying the same thing in slightly different words.
Do you think original research, first-hand experience, and unique insights matter more than ever now, or is ai generated content good enough to compete?
Curious to hear what people are seeing in real projects.
One thing I like about SEO is that your opinions evolve as you get more experience.
Is there anything you were completely convinced about a few years ago that you've since changed your mind on?
Could be about:
Always interesting to see how experience changes the way people think?
I'll start.
I think way too many people blame "Google updates" when the real problem is that their content just isn't the best result anymore.
Curious what everyone else's unpopular SEO opinions are.
Could be about:
No wrong answers here. Just interested to see what opinions people have that usually get them into arguments.
Every few years the SEO community declares something "dead."
Yet I still see people getting great results from strategies that everyone says don't work anymore.
For me, internal linking continues to be one of the highest ROI activities. It's not flashy, but I've seen pages move significantly just by improving site structure and making sure important pages receive relevant internal links.
I'm curious what everyone else has experienced.
What's one SEO tactic that people dismiss, but you've personally seen work in the last year?
Please share real examples if you can.
Every few years the SEO community declares something "dead."
Yet I still see people getting great results from strategies that everyone says don't work anymore.
For me, internal linking continues to be one of the highest ROI activities. It's not flashy, but I've seen pages move significantly just by improving site structure and making sure important pages receive relevant internal links.
I'm curious what everyone else has experienced.
What's one SEO tactic that people dismiss, but you've personally seen work in the last year?
Please share real examples if you can.
I've started noticing that some informational keywords are becoming much less attractive to target because AI Overviews answer the query before users ever click through.
It's making me think more about search intent than search volume.
Are you changing your keyword strategy because of AI Overviews, or are you seeing little impact in your niche?
Lately I've noticed that many people equate topical authority with publishing hundreds of articles around a niche.
I'm not convinced that's how it works anymore.
To me, topical authority seems more about demonstrating that your website can answer a user's journey comprehensively rather than simply covering every keyword variation.
A site with 40 genuinely connected, well-structured pages can often feel more authoritative than one with 400 loosely related posts.
Internal linking, content hierarchy, entity relationships, and satisfying follow-up questions seem to matter far more than raw article count.
Curious how others approach this.
Do you think topical authority is primarily about coverage, quality, or site architecture?
The best engineer on my team uses AI the least. Not zero, but noticeably less than everyone else. I'm a senior on the same team and I use Claude Code and cursor, coderabbit all day. He opens them maybe once a week. His output is better than mine and I've been trying to figure out why
Part of it is that he's been doing this for 15 years and the patterns are just in him. He doesn't need an agent to scaffold a component because he's built 500 of them and his hands know where to go. The agent would slow him down for the 80% case and he only turns to it for the 20% that's genuinely tedious
But I think the bigger part is something I don't want to admit. He understands the code he writes at a depth I'm losing. When he writes a function, he's thought through the edge cases before he types. When I write a function with an agent, I'm reviewing the agent's thinking after the fact. He's building from understanding. I'm evaluating from inspection. Those are different skills and his produces better code
The part that's uncomfortable. I'm shipping more than him by volume. More PRs, more features, more lines. But his PRs have fewer bugs, his architecture is cleaner, and when something breaks in his code he knows exactly where to look. When something breaks in my agent-assisted code, I have to read the diff to figure out what the agent did
I'm not saying AI is bad. I'm saying I've noticed that the engineer I respect most on my team has a different relationship with it than I do, and it's making me wonder if my default-to-agent instinct is actually serving me. He uses it as a tool for specific jobs. I use it as a default for most jobs. His code is better
Anyone else noticed the strongest engineers on your team aren't the ones using AI the most.