u/Worried-Avocado3568

Most of my clients are B2B and used to get a lot of their leads from informational articles and queries. Now I can see AI Overviews answering most of those queries directly, so people just don't click anymore.

The problem is that clients don't get it. They think SEO is broken, or that adding an FAQ section will fix everything.

How do you explain this so it actually lands? Do your clients understand the main point? And has anyone lost a client over it?

Been working with a B2B manufacturing company on their SEO and online presence for about 3 months now.

Most of the work so far was as usual what we do. Fixed the website experience, set up proper tracking, technical SEO, schema, and a lot of E-E-A-T stuff because it's a pretty technical industry and buyers are mostly engineers. Slowly seeing results, few enquiries have started coming from the site.

Now client wants me to focus on AEO/GEO/AIO as well.

To be honest I haven't done this specifically before. I always thought if the site is good, relevant and follows SEO best practices, it would show up in AI answers anyway. But lately I see so many people talking about it as a separate thing, so now I'm not sure if I'm missing something.

So for people who have actually done this and seen it work:

How do you check where a site stands right now in ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI overviews etc? And how do you measure if the work made any difference later?

Any tools you use for this that are actually useful?

What did you do that was different from normal SEO?

Any resources or people worth learning from?

I know I can google this but most of what I find is same generic stuff. Looking for practical advise.

Thanks

Solo founder, first time doing SEO properly. Domain went from 0 to 6 in about six weeks.

What I did: built 14 free tools that work without a signup, wrote comparison pages against competitors where I'm honest about where they're better, submitted to around 14 directories, and republished content on LinkedIn and Medium.

I also generated 40 programmatic pages targeting keywords I'd guessed at rather than researched. Google indexed them then dropped them as thin content and my whole index count was unstable for two weeks until I noindexed the lot.

What would you prioritise from here?

Had a meeting today with an SEO company. They offer 20 hrs / month of SEO work for $2600 / mo.

Their pitch deck included in-depth website audit, backlink building, content creation and publishing, and technical SEO.

I’m not technically illiterate. I built my site, and page speed insights grades the site SEO at 100. I don’t know that I have the time necessary to dedicate to implementing a proper SEO strategy for long term organic positioning.

So, before I sign on with these guys, I wanted to get a general idea of how this quote sounds to you guys. Thanks!

I've noticed a lot of people are focused on AI Overviews, but I'm curious what strategies are actually moving the needle right now.

If you had to pick just one tactic that's delivering better results than expected in 2026, what would it be?

It could be anything, such as:

Internal linking

Entity SEO

Topical authority

Digital PR

Programmatic SEO

User-generated content

Brand mentions

Technical SEO

AI-assisted content workflows

I'm looking for real-world experiences rather than theory.

What's working for you, and why do you think most SEOs are overlooking it?

Spent the last few months going deep on the whole "get cited by ChatGPT" thing because clients keep asking for it. Here's where I've landed, and it keeps getting me into arguments, so let's see how it does here.

A lot of what's being sold as GEO or AI visibility is the same move we ran a decade ago, just pointed at a different reader. Submit to 200 directories. Get your name on every listicle. Pump out comparison pages. Stuff your brand into as many third-party mentions as possible so the crawler sees it everywhere.

We already ran this exact play against Google. It worked for a while, then the whole thing got arbitraged to zero and the index filled with garbage nobody wanted to read. There's no reason to think the model-facing version ends differently. The moment a tactic becomes a checklist, it's already priced in.

What I actually see moving the needle:

Being genuinely the best answer to a specific question, so you get quoted because you're right, not because you're everywhere.

Real usage and real discussion. Models lean on places where actual humans argue about your category, and you can't fake a hundred people caring.

Owning a narrow niche completely instead of ranking thin across a wide one.

None of that is a "submit to 300 places" spreadsheet. It's the boring version of authority, which is exactly why nobody's selling a course on it.

Tell me where I'm wrong. Is anyone getting durable results from the directory-blast approach, or is it the same short half-life we saw with SEO?

pulled our ai overviews visibility report this morning and half the pages moved up. classic rankings for those same urls barely budged. clicks still flat.

i keep two tabs open now and they refuse to agree. tried blaming a title rewrite from last sprint then undid it and nothing changed either way

how are you separating ai overviews visibility from normal ranking movement when leadership wants one number by friday

I’ve been doing SEO for around 5 years, and honestly, I don’t really understand why AEO and GEO are being presented like they’re completely new things.

Most of the things people are calling “AEO” are literally things we were already doing in SEO.

Targeting queries?
We were already targeting search queries.

Answering the query directly?
We were already doing that to get featured in snippets.

FAQs?
FAQs have been a part of SEO for years.

And then there’s GEO.

People are talking about things like entity building, author details, structured data, experience, valuable content, topical authority, etc.

Again… weren’t we already doing all of this in SEO?

So what exactly is new here?

It feels like we’re taking different parts of SEO, giving them new names, and then selling them as a new service.

Now there are people selling “AEO/GEO services” to help businesses become visible in AI.

But I have a simple question:

Are you even visible in traditional search yet? 😂

Because if your SEO fundamentals aren’t working, why would changing the label to AEO or GEO suddenly make you visible in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or whatever comes next?

Maybe I’m missing something.

So genuinely curious: What do you think AEO/GEO actually adds that wasn’t already part of good SEO?

I completed a digital marketing course a few months ago and have done 2 internships through my institute. I mainly worked on on-page SEO and have some basic exposure to technical SEO.

Now I want to seriously improve my skills in Technical SEO, AEO, and GEO, but I’m not sure where to start. My knowledge is still mostly surface level, and I want to learn through actual practice rather than just theory.

For those experienced in SEO:

- Where should I start?

- What YouTube channels/courses/resources helped you?

- How can I practice Technical SEO hands-on?

- What tools should I learn?

- Any good resources for understanding AEO/GEO?

I’m genuinely hungry to learn, so please share anything you think is worth learning like videos, courses, blogs, case studies, tools, etc.

Thank you!

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 ?

I wanna take GEO more seriously because I just realized I have no idea how visible our brand is inside LLMs.

How are you guys tracking stuff like mentions, citations, share of voice, etc. on chatgpt / perplexity / claude / gemini?? What tools are you using?

Someone posted a link to this, and I don’t see it anymore (removed?). I found the article on Apple News and opened it in a browser and it’s not paywalled for me.

The article goes into detail about how AI doesn’t scale, including quotes from folks working at the hyperscalers.

I’ll post a paragraph or two, then the final one.

As they scramble to keep their systems online, AI companies are making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude are so resource-hungry that tech companies may be purchasing 70 percent of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage. As a result, the prices of computer memory and storage are skyrocketing: Hard drives that I bought for my reporting two years ago for $350 each were $800 when I checked two weeks ago, and are now out of stock. The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years.

…

The problem is not simply that AI is being deployed so widely or quickly. Other computer technologies have seen similarly massive growth without triggering such a large spike in electricity or a shortage of computer components: Video and music are now streamed around the globe, accounting for many terabytes of internet traffic daily; the smartphone boom required the manufacturing of billions of devices that are now transferring huge amounts of data; billions of household devices are also now part of the Internet of Things; and whole industries have moved their operations to cloud software, which is hosted not in the sky but in, yes, data centers.

The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. This is achieved partly through the careful engineering of computer systems that can efficiently handle more users who want to post photos, hail Ubers, or stream music.

…

I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even outside the world of software, it’s hard to find a comparable example, given that economy of scale is the principle that has made light bulbs, cars, and clothing so affordable. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.

I've been getting more interested in SEO lately, and i thought the game has changed quite a bit 🤔

Between AI overviews, Reddit or forums showing up moree than Google. Increasingly competitive search engine result page. And Google seemingly reward different types of content that it used to.

Im thinking, is traditional SEO become less active or are we just adapting to a new version of it?

for people who have been doing SEO, what worked really well for you from 3 to 5 years ago that doesn't work anymore? And also Are backlinks is still important as they used to be? Curious to hear what everyone seeing in 2026 🤔

I have been analizing my clients GSC data recently and I noticed a weird thing which is impressions and entity base questions are way up but sit here is down by almost 25% on information keywords even though we are sighted directly in Ai summaries.

as an SEO, it feels like the definition of success is shifting from driving clicks to brand insertion inside LLM answers. how are you guys shifting your reporting kpies for clients who only care about website traffic when zero click searches taking over?

I’ve been reading/learning about seo as of lately, to try and grow my business. I think I’m past the point where it’s just, target keywords, h1, content value, back links, etc. where do I go from here, feeling lost.

Do I really care for all or just simple SEO with fundamental is OK?

This question is for experiences SEOs; I know I can do ChatGPT or Google but I’m asking here because I want answer from real people who have real experience.

Hello everyone,

i have managed multiple websites in different niche over the last 4-5 years and i would say over 60-70% websites got good results by the work i have done, but then sometimes my mind get stuck with rhose 30-40% website where i have done everything from building good contextual backlinks to building proper content cluster like everything and every test and error yet it failed to go up, i understand niche wise strategy may change but then foundational and basic things stays almost same

i want to ask SEO community what you typically do in this situation where you have done everything (content cluster, targeting low kd keywords, filling competitor gap, analysing past results and fixing issues if any, doing CRO and making website lead friendly basically everything a SEO mind suggest after deep analysis) but yet failed to achieve desired results, what's after that? what typical workflow you guys follow to figure out SEO (how to reach potential leads) for websites where Nothing much seems to work.

ok so i've done SEO for like 6 years. keywords, links, getting to the top of google. that was the whole job.

but now clients keep asking why they're not showing up in that AI summary thing at the top of the page. and i'm like... i don't fully get how that even works?? sometimes a page that's not even #1 shows up in the AI answer and the actual #1 page doesn't. makes no sense to me.

feels like i used to know how to make google happy and now i don't even know what i'm trying to make happy. an AI? how do you make an AI trust you lol

anyone else just feeling kinda lost trying to explain this stuff to clients without sounding like you don't know what you're doing anymore