u/Wongpen_012

I manage a site dedicated to products, and historically, my main pages were just clear, concise product parameters. But ever since the recent core update, my traffic has fallen off a cliff. Google clearly only wants huge blocks of descriptive text now, just to feed their AI Overviews. I'm now expected to write lengthy descriptions for every single item, and it all has to be 100% unique without any duplicate content. Doing this across a whole catalog of products is just borderline impossible.

We’ve been testing something interesting across a few US-focused sites recently.

Hot take: it feels like Google is rewarding real discussions more than polished SEO articles now.

A few things we noticed in the last 60–90 days:

• Reddit threads ranking above DR80 blogs
• AI Overviews reducing clicks on informational posts
• Smaller niche sites beating huge publishers with more “human” content
• Pages with actual opinions/case studies outperforming generic “ultimate guides”
• Brand mentions on Reddit/X/forums helping rankings more than some backlinks

What’s weird is… some of our “best optimized” pages are losing traffic, while messy pages with:

• screenshots
• founder opinions
• community comments
• comparison tables
• actual experiences

…are gaining visibility.

Feels like Google’s AI systems are trying to figure out:

“Would a real human trust this answer?”

instead of:

“Did this page follow classic SEO rules?”

Even Google is pushing more community/forum content into AI results now.

And multiple SEO discussions on Reddit are reporting the same shift:

• AI Overviews hurting informational clicks
• Reddit/forum discussions gaining visibility
• Brand/entity mentions becoming stronger signals

One thing we tested that surprisingly worked:

Instead of publishing another “SEO tips” article…

we created:

• mini industry studies
• controversial takes
• comparison posts
• opinion-based content
• community discussion bait

Those pages got:

• more branded searches
• more engagement
• more natural mentions
• better rankings over time

Curious what others in the US market are seeing right now.

What’s actually moving rankings for you in 2026?

• Topical authority?
• Brand searches?
• UX?
• Reddit mentions?
• Community engagement?
• AI citation optimization?
• Parasite SEO?
• Video content?

At this point, SEO feels half strategy, half survival mode 😅

Would love to hear what’s actually working for US SEO teams right now.

been digging into this all week and my head hurts.

we target a pretty specific set of keywords, maybe 40-50 priority ones. all b2b saas adjacent. typical long-tail commercial intent stuff.

started checking what queries actually trigger AI tools to mention us. most of them aren't in our target list. they're usually more conversational, way longer, and sometimes entirely unrelated angles.

like we target "best x tool for y", AI is citing us for "what should I look for when comparing x tools in a growing team". same topic, totally different phrasing.

the really confusing part. the page being cited isn't always the page I optimized for that keyword cluster. sometimes it's an old blog post that ranks lower but somehow answers the conversational version better.

makes me wonder if our whole keyword research process is built for the wrong search behavior at this point. not sure what to do with it yet. anyone else seeing this disconnect?