u/steve31266

I'm of the opinion that "free traffic" is shifting from Google referrals to "Direct" referrals, as it is defined in GA4. For most of my sites, which includes those that I own, and those that I've built for clients, I've lost a lot of traffic from Google over the past few years, but I am gaining most of it back, if not more, in the "Direct" category.

Historically, "Direct" was mostly people visiting you from bookmarks, typing in your URL, or browser autocomplete. But then it included mobile app referrals like Facebook, SMS apps, privacy-focused browsers. Now, it includes referrals from AI chat apps (as opposed to AI websites) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc, and people talking through a voice assistant.

My "Direct" traffic is now equal to, or double that, of Google, depending on which site's GA4 i am looking at.

I know "Direct" can also include bots. But overall, I think as our Internet usage is fanning out more heavily into apps, and voice assist, our referrals are increasingly getting lumped into "Direct".

In some of my sites, my traffic has recovered from Google's slow killing of SEO. "Direct" is the new SEO.

I have a client that wants all of their PDF documents searchable from their WordPress site. I'm considering Relevanssi and SearchWP. I've watched some videos and did some reading, but much of the material does not focus on PDF document indexing, and a lot of the material is from 10+ years ago. Does anyone have experience setting up either of these two plugins for PDF searching, and steer me towards the better solution?

I know that Grokipedia has been discussed here before. But here's what I'm seeing...

• Google Search Console is showing as finding backlinks from Grokipedia on several of my client sites, suggesting that Google can find and follow these.
• Grokipedia links are all "do follow", there is no "no-follow" to be found.
• I don't know yet what positive impact these have on rankings as of yet, probably still too early to measure.
• Grokipedia pages have far more outbound links than Wikipedia, thus PR value for each link is highly watered down.
• But, where Wikipedia links are incredibly hard to get and keep, Grokipedia links are easy.

Obviously you cannot submit links to Grokipedia. You can only publish lots of content (preferably content that is unique enough to cited as a source), and hope for the best.

But as a website developer, and one whose clients pay me for getting them more traffic, I'm incorporating a strategy to write more FAQ pages, more services pages, or whatever based on what the client is about, in order to take advantage of this.