r/Agent_SEO

One thing I’ve noticed with SaaS SEO lately:

Many companies are still building backlinks as if it were 2019.

Huge focus on DR, homepage links, and publishing endless top-of-funnel blogs - but very little attention on whether those links are actually influencing buying decisions.

Meanwhile, some smaller SaaS brands with fewer backlinks are quietly growing because they’re getting mentioned in the right places:

comparison posts, niche communities, product roundups, Reddit threads, newsletters, etc.

Feels like visibility across trusted sources matters more now than just raw link numbers.

Especially with AI search and answer engines pulling information from multiple platforms instead of only traditional rankings.

Curious if others here are seeing the same shift or if backlinks are still working the old way for you.

Agentic SEO might be the biggest opportunity for boring local businesses right now

Most plumbers
dentists
law firms
roofing companies
local agencies
still barely understand normal SEO…

Meanwhile people are building the 47th AI wrapper for founders 😭

Feels like there’s a massive opportunity in using AI agents to automate:

• local SEO pages
• review responses
• citation updates
• blog generation
• lead followups
• ranking monitoring
• competitor tracking
• internal linking
• location page optimization

especially for industries where owners hate tech but desperately need leads.

And the crazy part?

A lot of these businesses will happily pay monthly if it directly brings calls/customers.

Way less “AI fatigue” there compared to selling another productivity app to founders.

Feels like boring SMB workflows + AI agents might quietly become huge.

Anyone here actually building in this space already?

Reddit threads usually contain mixed opinions, arguments, pros/cons, unlike polished blog content.

Feels like some overly optimized pages are starting to lose trust with both users and AI systems.

How To Rank On ChatGPT in 2026

Feels weird saying this… but “ChatGPT SEO” is slowly becoming a real thing 😅

A lot of people still think:

• SEO = Google
• ranking = backlinks
• traffic = search engines

But now people are literally asking ChatGPT:

• “best project management tool”
• “best AI app for students”
• “best CRM for small business”
• “how to start a SaaS”
• “best thumbnail maker” …and buying based on the answers it gives.

Which means the real question is no longer:
“How do I rank on Google?”

It’s:
“How do I become the brand AI keeps mentioning?”

From what I’m seeing, a few things matter way more now:

• people talking about your product online
• Reddit discussions
• niche communities
• reviews/comparisons
• consistent brand mentions
• clear positioning
• strong topical authority
• being attached to a specific use case

Feels like AI models trust “internet consensus” more than polished marketing pages.

And lowkey…
Reddit might become more important for discovery than Twitter/X for a lot of SaaS products now 👀

Most founders are still optimizing for clicks.

But AI search changes the game because users might never even visit page 2 anymore.
They’ll just trust the answer.

Curious though…

Do you think “ranking on ChatGPT” becomes an actual industry like SEO did?

Feels like SEO metrics are getting weird now because of AI search + agents 😅

A few years ago everyone only cared about:

• clicks
• impressions
• backlinks
• rankings

But now with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI snippets etc...

people are searching differently and sometimes not even clicking websites anymore.

So I’m curious...

What metric actually matters most in Agentic SEO now?

• brand mentions?
• citations inside AI answers?
• topical authority?
• user retention?
• direct traffic?
• conversions?
• something else?

Feels like traditional SEO dashboards still measure “old internet behavior” while users are slowly shifting toward AI-assisted discovery.

Curious what signals people here are paying attention to now 👀

Everyone knows quality backlinks matter. So why are most founders still stuck paying agencies and getting nothing?

Just got back from Ahrefs Evolve in Singapore — and yes, Tim Soulo said it again. Backlinks and brand mentions are critical. Nothing new.

But here's what nobody's talking about: most founders and marketers *already know* this. They've heard it a hundred times. Yet they keep throwing budget at random agencies, watching their SEO content sit flat, and hoping something eventually clicks.

We've been running a SaaS backlink agency from 3+ years, and the pattern is pretty clear:

The ones who move the needle fastest are doing two specific things:

1. Building quality backlinks to their MoFu and BoFu pages — not just the homepage or blog

2. Getting brand mentions where their competitors are already mentioned — same publications, same communities, same roundups

This isn't just about Google anymore. It's search everywhere optimization — your brand showing up across forums, newsletters, AI overviews, and social platforms.

The gap isn't knowledge in 2026. Its execution.

Curious — what's the biggest blocker you've hit when trying to actually build backlinks consistently?

Lately I keep hearing people talk about “Agentic SEO” like it’s the next big thing 😅

AI agents doing:

• keyword research
• content planning
• internal linking
• content updates
• topical maps
• publishing workflows
• even optimization automatically

Sounds cool in theory...

But I’m curious what people are actually seeing in real life.

Is Agentic SEO genuinely helping rankings/traffic?

Or is it mostly:

• AI generated noise
• overproduced content
• zero real authority
• and temporary traffic spikes 😭

Feels like SEO is slowly shifting from “write blogs manually” to “manage systems + workflows”.

Would love hearing real experiences from people actually testing this stuff right now.

What’s been working for you... and what completely flopped?

Feels like informational content is becoming harder to monetize because users get the answer without clicking anymore

Feels like just yesterday everyone was scrambling for AI citations, and now we're already competing for real estate inside the OS itself. A lot to keep up with—our team's here to help you stay ahead of every shift:

• AI Content Strategies That Backfire

Lily Ray dropped the results of research, which backs up several of our findings while adding some fascinating nuances. Specifically, she looks at how different types of posts actually "perform" in search and what that means for AI-content enthusiasts.

In our digest, we’re only scratching the surface of this massive article. It’s packed with incredible insights, but there’s one specific section you can’t afford to miss. It serves as a major red flag for content creators, highlighting exactly where you need to watch your step:

“Eight Recurring Content Patterns that Are Risky for SEO and AI Search

1. Comparison pages at scale.
2. The “What is X” glossary.
3. The “Best [X] for [Y]” listicle.
4. The self-promotional listicle.
5. The competitor-vs-alternatives page.
6. Programmatic location and language scaling.
7. The FAQ farm.
8. Off-topic content published at scale.”

Source:

Lily Ray | Substack

_____________________

• Adding Schema Did Not Improve AI Citations

Barry Schwartz recently highlighted a fresh study from Ahrefs that effectively shuts down the theory that structured data is a "cheat code" for AI citations. Despite the SEO chatter, the data shows that adding schema (specifically JSON-LD) doesn't actually help you land more spots in AI-generated answers.

Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that implemented the schema between August 2025 and March 2026, comparing them against 4,000 control pages. The results? "No major uplift in citations on any platform," according to the report. Whether it was ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, or AI Overviews, schema didn't move the needle in a meaningful way.

Google AI Overviews: Actually saw a 4.6% decline in citations for pages with schema—a small but statistically significant drop.

ChatGPT & AI Mode: While treated pages technically performed slightly better, Ahrefs dismissed the gain as "random noise" rather than a result of the schema itself.

So, if you’re adding schema solely to "rank" in AI results, you might be wasting your time.

Sources:

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

Louise Linehan, Xibeijia Guan | Ahrefs Blog

_____________________

• Googlebook: The Evolution from Search to "OS as AI Agent"

If you thought adapting to AI Overviews was the final boss, think again. Google just unveiled Googlebook—a new category of laptops where Gemini isn't just integrated into the browser, but baked directly into the "DNA" of the device.

For SEOs and content creators, this is a clear signal that the playground is expanding once again.

We’re used to optimizing for search engines. Recently, we started learning how to land AI citations in chatbots. Now, a new challenge is on the horizon: Device Ecosystem Optimization.

Magic Pointer & Contextual Awareness: The new Magic Pointer feature allows Gemini to "see" whatever the user points to on their screen and suggest immediate actions. If a user hovers over your product review, the AI could instantly pull specs or pricing without the user ever clicking through to your full article.

Prompt-to-Widget: Users can now generate custom widgets via prompts. This means your content (whether it’s event schedules, pricing guides, or "top 10" lists) needs to be structured so perfectly that the AI can "snatch" it from your site and pin it to a user’s desktop as a dynamic widget.

The New Challenge: Optimizing "For the Cursor"

We are entering an era where AI acts as the ultimate intermediary between content and the user at the operating system level.

Probably soon we won’t just be debating how to "rank #1." We’ll be strategizing on how to make sure Gemini picks your content to build a personalized AI widget on a customer’s laptop.

So, focus on entities… AI devices work with objects (dates, locations, prices, brands). The more clearly you define these entities in your content, the easier it is for the Magic Pointer to identify and surface them.

Source:

Alexander Kuscher | Google Blog

Hello everyone, I wanted to ask?

Do you put an introduction as the first paragraph of your blog post or just go straight to answering the question?

Freshness feels way more important lately. Some pages barely changed rankings for months before, now even small updates seem to affect visibility.

Spent the last few months deep in the GEO tool space and kept running into the same wall. Most tools track mentions across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, dump them on a dashboard, and call it a day. That's useful for about two weeks until you realize:

1. **Mention counts don't tell you what to fix.** Knowing you're cited 80 times means nothing without knowing which page or third-party source caused it.

2. **Sentiment matters more than volume.** Showing up as "the affordable option" when you sell enterprise is worse than not showing up at all.

3. **Tracking without action is a vanity loop.** You see the gap, the tool doesn't help you close it, you go back to manual work.

The tools we tried (Otterly, Peec, Profound, AthenaHQ, a few others) are solid at the tracking layer but stop there. The marketing team ends up exporting CSVs and figuring out the action plan manually — which is exactly where time gets lost.

The one that actually moved the needle for us was Yozigo. It's the only platform we've found that audits visibility, finds the opportunities, AND acts on them. The audit-plus-act loop is the part that turns this into pipeline work instead of dashboard work.

For marketing teams it's been a real shift:

- Less time spent compiling reports nobody acts on

- Direct line from "we're invisible on Perplexity for X query" to "here's the source content driving it and the fix"

- Stops sentiment drift before it gets baked into how LLMs describe you

Curious how others are solving this:

- Are you stitching together tracking tools + manual action plans?

- Has anyone found a clean way to close the loop between citation data and content fixes?

- For agencies — how are you reporting this to clients without it becoming a vanity metric?

We looked at 10.4M clicks and 54M impressions across 419 Quebec-based SME websites over 16 months, then compared the current post-AI Overviews click distribution with pre-AIO CTR benchmarks.

The pattern was pretty blunt:

- The Top 3 captured 89.2% of page-one organic clicks
- Position #1 alone captured 63.6%
- Positions 4-10 captured 10.8%
- Position #7 averaged a 2.6% CTR

Before AI Overviews, positions 4-10 usually captured around 30-45% of page-one clicks.

Now, in this dataset, they captured 10.8%.

Barely 1 out of 10 clicks.

So no, SEO isn’t dead.

But weak page-one rankings are getting weaker (nothing new, but like… by a lot).

That changes how I’d think about keyword prioritization. If a keyword is realistically capped around positions 4-8, it may not be enough to say “we’re on page one” anymore.

Curious how other SEOs are handling this.

When do you keep pushing for Top 3, and when do you move effort toward long-tail keywords, AI citations or brand demand instead?

What signals tell you a ranking is still worth chasing?