r/SEO

Been doing web and SEO since 2003 and as SEO has evolved, actually spent more time just focusing on web. Even at my age (58) I no longer use Google search for anything. But my radar really went up yesterday visiting my son (24) and a group of friend he had over. They were talking about what I do - mainly web, mentioned Google and their reaction was "Google! lol...ok boomer." None of them use Google search.

So, obviously Google has owned search for decades, but now Gemini has some powerful competition - OpenAI, Grok, etc...I just have to wonder where all of this is gonna end up. You cannot simply throw money at this. Ask Meta.

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.

My company's website has a DA of 81 on Moz and we used to get millions of traffic per month but then something happened and we have been struggling with the traffic since the past 1 year.

There is no manual flagging from Google but we have a hypothesis that we might be shadowbanned by Google

Trying to figure out how to get things back on track, any suggestions?

On all of my websites, the number of links says No Data. I have highly established websites, no penalties indicated, traffic is normal. Anyone experiencing the same?

I am still learning SEO so I had some questions:

I have a new SAAS site with only a few backlinks to my home page, gets 60 clicks in a mo and DR is like 7 (Ahrefs). The site currently only has the home page and 5 feature pages.

I am starting a new blog section. I have identified a few low KD keywords to go after that are relevant to my niche.

What should I do next after publishing pages targeting each of those keywords?

1. I have identified some other relevant sites and will be reaching out to get backlinks from them. Should I point these backlinks to the new pages I will be publishing? Like 1 backlink for each page?

2. Should I feature these pages on the home page so that they get authority from the home page through internal links?

3. Should I also be linking these blogs with each other? How do I do internal linking? When do I do internal linking?

4. Once all of this is done, assuming these are to be done, what should I keep an eye on in GSC? and how do I use that data?

Looking for advice from experienced SEOs. Appreciate your help!

Breaking News: Google just announced their official transition to AI-only search. They’re calling it the Intelligent Search Box, and it’s the biggest update to Search in 25 years.

Here’s what you need to know:

🆕 Search is becoming fully conversational. You can just ask long, detailed questions instead of typing keywords.

🆕 It has AI agents that can search the web 24/7 and notify you when they find what you need.

🆕 It will remember context, which means that you can just keep asking follow-up questions instead of starting over.

🆕 It predicts what you want to search for and auto-completes as you type.

🆕 It can understand text, images, videos, files, and even Chrome tabs.

🆕 Google can now call businesses, compare options, and help you book services directly (huge for local businesses).

This new form of search isn’t just a search box; it’s now your personal AI assistant that can research, compare, call, choose, and book services for you based on your history and personal preferences.

Hi

Im in the UK with a local service business and this month has gone really quiet, virtually no enquiries, somethingseems to have changed. I havent changed anything so I wondered if there's been some algo update that I haven't heard about

Thanks

managing a small network of niche affiliate blogs and our search traffic completely tanked after the last major core rollout. i hired a team of freelance writers last summer to help scale production, and while copyscape showed zero direct plagiarism, the structural flow of the articles feels completely robotic in hindsight. it is clear they were heavily relying on automated tools to hit their word count targets.

i am trying to systematically clean up the index without completely deleting valid pages, so i am using the semantic analyzer at Lynote AI to audit the library. it flags programmatic sentence structures and heavily spun paragraphs across thousands of words so i can identify exactly which sections are dragging down our domain authority. for those who successfully recovered from content penalties, did you find it better to entirely rewrite the flagged sections or just prune the low performing URLs completely?

Hello all!

Im a wedding photographer, my site is mostly based around wedding venues (it's what people search for).

Ive recently started to work up some venue hero pages - these have all the info about the venue, how I work, and lots of text and images. These are very seo focused.

in addition to this, I also have multiple secondary pages (wedding gallery pages) - these obviously mention the venue quite heavily, but are more focused on the photos, the couple and their wedding day. But other than looking through my site, the only real way people would find these pages is if they did a search for the venue's name on Google.

And that's where the issue lies - Ive recently connected Claude with GSC, and it made the observation that multiple pages are fighting against each other for the same keywords, specifically the venue name.

So, to summarise - I have one hero page, multiple secondary pages all fighting for Google's attention.

Claude's suggestion was to 301 redirect all the secondary pages to the hero page, but that's a terrible idea as it effectively deactivates the secondary pages in favour of the hero page. Its next suggestion was to noindex them and just focus on the hero page while linking all the secondary pages through the hero page. And that at least makes a lot of sense.

Does anyone have any advice or suggestions on how best to approach this?

Hey, I'm wondering if the number of links matters, or if it's better to focus solely on the number of domains. For example, one link from each domain instead of 10 domains with 3 links each.

What are your thoughts on this?

Example:

Is it better to buy 100 backlinks from 10 domains

or 10 backlinks from 10 domains?

SEO is officially dead in 2026.

Not “changing.”

Dead.

SEO is dead in 2026.

Not “evolving.”
Not “changing.”

Dead.

Google took your content, fed it into Gemini, answered the question itself, then put your website underneath 4 ads, a Reddit thread from 2019, and a YouTube Short made by a guy named CryptoDad420.

The last straw for me was when my aunt Tina googled for kitten trinkets for Mr. Wonkers (her cat) and couldn’t find my kitten trinkets website after 10 days, no sleep, posting four hundred and four (404) insightful content pieces. I’ve fully given up. Google AI took my responses, recommended the right trinkets, and even ordered and delivered it to my aunt Tina. And worst of all - not from my site. Idk where the fuck they got it. Anyway, just posting here to let everyone know. SEO is dead.

- Written by AI

View Poll

Curious what everyone’s thinking after some of the I/O 2026 announcements.

I'm wondering which link would be stronger.

a) A website with no backlinks but many topical articles, generally related to my service.

b) A website unrelated to my service, some general-topic portal but with a high DR.

Assume that in both cases Google indexes the page.

Ahrefs is no longer reliable in my opinion.

Just today alone: data unavailable, delayed data, incorrect data.

No solid foundation, and above all:

Way too expensive!!!

AI has come so far:
why spend money on expensive SEO tools anymore?

It's not only rank, but also rank on AI

BREAKING: Google announces it will now prioritize AI-generated answers in search results over human-written website articles.

A move that could make it significantly harder for independent websites to gain organic traffic starting next Tuesday.

EDIT: I couldn’t link source in the post without it being removed so it’s in one of the comments, or just google search the newest Google announcements