u/TechyTilak

I’ve been thinking about how much search behaviour has changed recently.

For years, the SEO goal was pretty straightforward, rank as high as possible, get the click, bring the visitor to your website.

Now someone can search something and get most of what they need from an AI overview without visiting a single result. Also, now more people are asking ChatGPT and other AI tools directly instead of searching Google.

It makes me wonder if we're measuring SEO the wrong way now.

A website could lose some organic clicks while its content is still being discovered, or referenced in answers elsewhere.

Curious what people working on websites are actually seeing. Has AI changed how you approach SEO yet, or is traditional SEO still doing most of the heavy lifting for you?

I’ve noticed something interesting. Some sites publishing only a few genuinely useful pages seem to be making more progress than sites constantly pushing out new articles.

It made me question the whole “publish consistently” approach.

Maybe the bigger SEO opportunity now isn’t creating more content, but improving, consolidating, or even removing what’s already there.

have you tested reducing content output and putting more effort into existing pages?

i’ve been thinking about with AI search.

A site can rank well on Google but barely appear in AI-generated answers and another site can get mentioned by AI even when it isn’t sitting in the top few organic results.

I’m paying more attention now to whether a page gives clear answers, has original information, strong entity signals and something worth citing rather than just whether the keyword appear in the right place.

do anyone actually found a consistent difference between pages that rank well and pages that get cited by AI search?

I did 15k+ cold reach and getting just 1% of revert only.

Is there somene else who face that, want to genuinly know the soluution

I’ve been thinking about how people actually find local business now. for a lot of searches, Google already shows almost everything that someone needs.

It makes me think how often people actually click through to the business website anymore.

Obviously, the website still matters for credibility, detailed service information, and organic search. But for businesses like restaurants, salons, dentists, gyms, or local contractors, Google Business Profile sometimes feels like the first real “homepage” customers see. For anyone managing local SEO or running a local business, what are you seeing?

do people still visit to the website, or are most conversions happening directly from Google?

I’ve been working on websites, and one thing I’ve noticed is that beginners often focus heavily on how a site looks.

But once you actually start building for real businesses, you realise there’s a lot more that matters: loading speed, mobile usability, plugin choices, hosting, SEO structure, maintenance, and making sure the client can actually manage the site after.

I am curious about other developers here.

What something you learned the hard way that you now considers before starting every website project?

Would be useful to hear lessons from people who have been doing this longer.

I’ve been working on websites, and one thing I’ve noticed is that beginners often focus heavily on how a site looks.

But once you actually start building for real businesses, you realise there’s a lot more that matters: loading speed, mobile usability, plugin choices, hosting, SEO structure, maintenance, and making sure the client can actually manage the site afterward.

I am curious about other developers here.

What’s something you learned the hard way that you now consider before starting every website project?

Would be useful to hear lessons from people who have been doing this longer.

I’ve been curious about the problem people run into while building or managing websites that seem small at first but end up taking hours to figure out.

Things like a layout that works perfectly on desktop but breaks on mobile, a plugin suddenly causing a conflict, a site becoming slow after a few updates, forms not sending properly, or something completely different.

For people who manage their own websites or build websites regularly, what’s one issue that gave you way more trouble than you expected?

And what eventually fixed it?

I'd be interesting to hear both the problem and the solution, especially the weird ones.