r/seogrowth

Hey everyone, how you’re approaching SEO/GEO these days, especially for AI search.

We’ve been working on SEO for a new product and tried to make the site much clearer for both Google and AI. We focused on a few main search intents, rewrote the homepage around a clearer H1/value proposition, added pages like How It Works, About, For Users, etc., expanded the FAQ, improved internal linking and structured data, and made the main answers more explicit in the actual HTML.

We’ve also started building the blog and have 7-8 articles up so far, plus some external mentions and content outside the main site. The idea is basically to make the product/entity easy to understand and build up mentions across different sources.

I'm looking more for an experts advice. What you guys are doing for GEO specifically. What has actually worked for getting a product picked up or mentioned by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, etc.? Thanks a lot.

I have launched an article and it’s been 10 days my article is not indexed. Although its indexed over bing

I have checked the canonical tag is present to the blog
I have checked the content as well but still facing the issue

Tell me what could i possibly check that helps me in indexing my page.

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.

We've been thinking about this a lot lately.

a saas website can rank for hundreds of keywords and still struggle to get real leads.

at the same time, a page with 500 visitors can sometimes bring in more customers than a page with 50,000 visitors.

so what should we actually care about?

is it still: rankings → traffic → customers

or : getting found → building trust → getting customers

here's what we're curious about:

would you rather have:

A) 100k organic visitors every month with a 0.5% conversion rate

or

B) 10k organic visitors every month with a 5% conversion rate?

for saas, what has actually brought you more customers?

• blog posts
• comparison pages
• free tools
• backlinks
• reddit and communities
• product pages
• branded searches
• referrals
• something else

we'd especially like to hear from people who have seen this firsthand.

what changed your revenue, not just your traffic?

because at the end of the day, more traffic doesn't always mean more business.

I've been thinking about how much the outreach message itself affects response rates.

A highly relevant prospect can still ignore an email if the message feels too generic or immediately looks like a mass outreach campaign.

In my own outreach, I’ve found that keeping the message focused and making it clear why I’m reaching out seems to matter more than making it overly detailed.

For those doing outreach regularly, what tends to make the biggest difference for you personalization, the offer itself, the subject line or the follow-up process?

I am probably being lazy, and with some Googling etc.. I can probably find these communities. But I am a consultant with multiple clients who require links every month as a part of our contract.

I do not enjoy paying for these services typically (Fatjoe etc..) and much rather natural link swaps with in niche companies.

Does anyone have anything like this, would it be worth standing one up?

 Ran into something on a recent project that's worth sharing because it's easy to miss.

Client was in business brokerage. Site looked completely normal. Pages loaded, Google was indexing content, HTTPS set up, firewall active. Standard checks came back fine.

But when I fetched the site the way an AI crawler would, I kept hitting:

"JavaScript is required."

The firewall was challenging non-browser requests. Which meant AI crawlers couldn't reach the actual page content at all. They were hitting security wall, and getting nothing.

The fix was straightforward once we found it: adjust the firewall rules to allow legitimate AI crawler user agents, clear the firewall cache, then test again without a browser.

That last part matters. Opening the site in Chrome and seeing it work proves nothing here. You have to test it the way a crawler sees it, not the way a human does.

This is one of those issues that hide perfectly because your browser tells you everything is fine while crawlers are getting blocked entirely.

It also point to something broader. We used to ask "can Google crawl this?" Now the question is "can the different AI system actually access and understand it?" Those are not the same audit.

Expecting to see a lot more of this as AI visibility become a standard part of technical SEO work.

Anyone else running into firewall and security layer issue specifically affecting AI crawler access?

Hello to all, I recenetly started learning SEO through a very cheap online course around March this year because I was somewhat interested in website ranking but mostly I wanted a career switch so I started learning through videos, and reels but this sub has been an amazing help overall, I landed a freelance client and was clueless how to navigate but trying my best, there are many challenges one of it was paid softwares, so my client was kind enough to get me ahrefs lite plan, I am learning it, but I want to grow further, I want to learn what should go into the CV if I am applying for jobs and what should my portfolio highlight and make people want to hire me.
Apart from jobs I want which area and skill I should focus more on and how do I increase my worth.

P.S.- Sorry about my borken english, it is not my native language.

I've built an app NextUp Alert that provides persistent calendar/meeting reminders for Google Calendar and Outlook.

The only things I see leading to my site is when users search exactly for the app itself, nothing else, ever gets to the site. I just recently moved away from google sites, over to gitlab hosting - I do see some improvements - but it has only been 1 week.

Over the last 3 months, Search Console shows:

• 5.3K impressions
• 169 clicks

I'm pretty inexperienced with SEO. If you know SEO well, what is the biggest thing you'd change about the site right now?

Is the problem primarily:

• lack of content/pages targeting search intent?
• technical SEO?
• backlinks/domain authority?
• poor positioning/search demand?
• something else?

> Can someone please check ? site/app is: nextupalert dot com.

What is my most significant step I can take next?

Hi all,

So I have a site with a .com domain. The .co.uk version is currently owned by someone else but not being utilised and becomes available next year. I’ll use a drop service to purchase it when it comes due. Similar domain names are owned by small companies on website builders with inherently poor SEO so I’ll probably end up outranking them in 3 months with basic matching keywords, meta description, h1, title before I even start on the backlink campaign.

Part of my marketing strategy will have to contain local SEO and PPC. I’ve heard Google gives more weight to .co.uk domains in the UK. If a competitor beats me to the punch with the .co.uk domain will they have a leg up in outranking me or if I can get significant traffic before the website is renewed will they just be noise? I’m aware of brand leakage and this has been playing on my mind for a few days now…

TL:DR; do .co.uk domains have significant effect on local SEO in the uk, or is the difference between a .com and .co.uk domain negligible?

I have answered a version of this three or four times in comments here over the last couple of weeks, so I am putting it in one place.

Everyone wants to know whether they show up in AI answers. There are tools for this now and some of them are fine, but you do not need one to start, and doing the first pass by hand tells you something a tool will not.

Start with questions, not keywords. Write down the fifteen or so things a buyer in your category actually types before they decide. Full sentences. Is X worth it for a small business. Best supplier for Y in whatever city. How do I fix Z. Not "supplier Y" as a keyword. The assistants answer questions, so your list has to be made of questions.

Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and write down every domain that gets cited. Perplexity gives you sources without being asked. In ChatGPT you have to prompt for them, and it is worth explicitly telling it to search rather than answer from memory, because those produce different results and you want to know which one you are looking at.

Then the part almost everyone skips. Do it again. The cited sources move between runs, so a domain appearing once tells you nothing. Ask the same question a few times over a couple of weeks and only keep what keeps coming back. That is the step that turns a messy list into something you can actually act on.

What you end up with is shorter than expected. A handful of domains that keep reappearing for your category, and it is usually not the list you would have guessed. A decent chunk of them tend to be forum threads and small comparison pages rather than the big publications everyone assumes are driving the answer.

Two honest caveats.

It is slow and boring and there is no way around that. Budget an afternoon for the first pass and about an hour a month after.

And it only tells you where you are absent. It does not tell you how to fix it, which is a separate and harder problem. For the forum threads in particular there is nothing to buy. You either take part properly or you wait for the question to get asked again and be early that time.

Disclosure, I run an SEO agency and this is the work we do, so weigh that. None of the above needs us or a tool, which is why it seemed worth writing down.

Complete SEO beginner here, so go easy on me. I'm the solo founder of a small web design / custom software / automations studio. Fully remote, US-based, worldwide clients, so no Google Business Profile (I never meet clients in person, wouldn't qualify anyway).

Full honesty: I've been using AI (Claude, mostly) to guide my whole SEO approach. What to build, what to write, how to structure things. I have no formal SEO background. So I'm partly asking to sanity-check whether the direction I'm being pointed in actually holds up against real-world experience.

Timeline:

• Domain ~4 months old but basically empty until recently
• Set up GSC June 1
• First blog post July 7. So, the content engine is ~5 weeks old, not 4 months.

The numbers:

• 2.77K impressions, avg position 64.5, trending down (good) from ~73 a few weeks ago
• 13 clicks, but ~9 are brand searches from a cold email campaign I'm running (prospects get my email, google the company, click). Real organic content clicks: ~4.
• Bright spot: a post from ~1 week ago is pulling a 20% CTR on its exact-match keyword (2 clicks / 10 impressions), so it seems to already sit page 1–2 for that term.

What I've done in these 5 weeks:

• 9 long-form posts (1,800–2,300 words), in 3 topic clusters with internal linking
• Full technical setup: static site, fast load, schema on everything, sitemap, clean URLs (did a 301 migration mid-period)
• Backlinks: 3 dofollow from client site footers (brand-new domains, ~zero authority) + Clutch, Crunchbase, and a couple other directory profiles

Landing this week:

• 3 client testimonials going live on my site
• Asking those same 3 clients to leave reviews on my Clutch profile

Not done yet: design gallery submissions, any digital PR / editorial links.

My questions for people who've actually done this from scratch:

1. In a saturated niche (web design/agency), what moved the needle first for you, more content, or grinding out links from real established domains? This is my main question.
2. At ~5 weeks of content with avg position ~65, is this a normal trajectory or is something structurally off?
3. Is there a point where more content has diminishing returns until domain authority catches up, and I should shift effort to links?
4. For a total beginner leaning on AI for direction, what's the thing AI tends to get wrong or under-emphasize that I should watch out for?

I hope this is enough information.

Small disclaimer: writing isn't my strong suit, so I had AI help me put this post together. The numbers and the situation are all real, just wanted it to read clearly and honestly Claude knows my situation better than me lol.

Why do the "AEOs/ GEOs" post about how good they are at getting LLMs to cite them, but then share a screen shot of GSC. Are these not different things? I get it if its AIOs in Google, but outside of that.

working on an e-commerce SEO project where we're looking at how bigger shopping sites structure their categories and keywords, then trying to apply the same thinking to a smaller brand.

instead of just collecting hundreds of keywords, we're grouping them by actual product categories and using search volume + KD to decide which ones are worth Targeting.

it makes sense on paper. but now i'm wondering if i'm overcomplicating something that experienced SEOs already have a simpler process for.

*has anyone done this before? what results did you get, and which tool did you rely on most — Semrush, Ahrefs, GSC, or something else?*

What are some GEO strategies that have worked for you?

This is a 2 part question: I've been working as a freelance SEO writer for a while now and the new fancy toy in town is GEO and AEO. So far, I've barely seen any results with most tools. Also, truth be told, most apps are vibe coded and barely have any logic reasoning behind them. Any recommendations or ideas you might have on how you get your articles pulled by AI and referenced? I'd love to hear from people who've actually done it for real. Not these new gurus (granted some of them do offer real gems) on social media.

Second part: Out of fear of being phased out of the market, I learned programming( MERN). Now 2 years later, blogging is still here, and I believe it's going nowhere (I might be biased though but who isn't). The only thing I've noticed is CTR is dropping and search is changing. I'd like to build something, during my spare time that's actually valuable to SEO experts and would help us get ahead in this market space. Anyway, I do have some ideas of my own, but I'd love to hear what you guys are facing, problems you think I could truly solve and yeah, any advice you got is 100% welcomed. Phew😅 that's long. But if you read it all, let's chat :)

I’m seeing a lot of advice around AI, content, backlinks, and topical authority. What has produced measurable results for you?

Running a tiny agency here. One of my clients is a scrappy startup with basically zero budget. Yet they keep asking whether they show up in Chatgpt… like it's a simple yes or no. I am trying to figure out whether they even show up in google AI overview for their main terms. Andhonestly, I've got no clean process for that either. Right now, it's literally just me typing prompts into Chatgpt and Google manually. Then I just show them of whatever shows up and hope I didn't miss something. Not scalable, not practical, and definitely not something I can bill hours for tbh. What are you guys using to track this stuff without paying enterprise prices? It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a tool that actually works I guess.

Recently made significant edits to an older blog post — updated stats, rewrote a few sections, and added new info. It's been live for a few days but Google still shows the old cached version in search results.

I've already resubmitted the URL via Search Console's "Request Indexing" feature, but no luck so far. Does resubmitting the sitemap actually help speed things up? Does adding a fresh internal link to the post make a difference? Or is this really just a "wait it out" situation?

Curious what's worked for you all — especially for sites without huge crawl budgets

I keep looking at AI-visibility dashboards and getting stuck on what the numbers actually represent.

They give you clean metrics: mention rate, share of voice, citations, sentiment, sometimes an estimated audience. It all looks reassuringly measurable.

But change the prompt set, competitor list, country, model, or how often the prompts are rerun, and you're no longer measuring quite the same thing.

That doesn't make the tools useless. A fixed set of buyer-style prompts, run the same way over time, can probably tell you whether a brand is showing up more often and which competitors or sources keep appearing. That's at least a directional signal.

What I can't get comfortable with is the jump from:

"Our brand appeared in 18% of this tool's sampled answers"

to:

"Buyers are seeing us more" — or worse, "AI now considers us authoritative."

The tracker sees a sample of generated outputs. It doesn't see every prompt real users type, and it definitely doesn't know what influenced an actual buying decision.

So for people using these tools in practice:

— Have you ever run the same brand through two trackers and received a materially different picture?

— Which metric has survived manual checking: raw mention rate, citations, share of voice, something else?

— Has movement in a tracker ever lined up with branded search, qualified traffic, or pipeline strongly enough that you'd defend it to a client?

I'm not looking for the dashboard with the nicest graphs. I'm trying to separate "a useful sample of AI answers" from "an impression of authority with a percentage sign attached."