I've been consistently getting 60% of my traffic from no source, every analytics dashboard says Direct. and I've tried them all. I simply can't imagine people typing in website URL directly since it's a two-month old SAAS.
So can anyone help me with this?
I've been testing the same type of query across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for a few different niches, swapping only the topic.
The same pattern shows up every time. Out of hundreds of pages that exist on a subject, the model pulls from the same three to five sources, over and over, even when newer or more thorough content exists elsewhere.
The pages that keep winning share one thing. They commit to specific numbers, specific dates, and specific named entities instead of paraphrasing a general idea.
A page that says "SEO consulting typically costs between R$2,500 and R$6,000 a month depending on scope" gets pulled into an answer.
A page that says "SEO consulting can vary a lot in price" does not, even if it covers the exact same topic in more words.
Volume of content doesn't seem to matter much once a site clears a basic threshold.
A blog with 40 posts that each commit to a real claim beats a blog with 400 posts that hedge everything, because the model is scoring how confidently it can restate your claim without getting it wrong.
Vague writing is safe for the writer and useless for a system trying to extract a fact.
Consistency across your own pages matters more than most people account for. If your about page says one thing, your service page says something slightly different, and a directory listing says a third thing, that inconsistency reads as noise to a model trying to build a stable picture of who you are.
Pick the facts that matter (years of experience, location, exact services, pricing range) and repeat them identically everywhere they appear.
The last piece is getting those same specific facts to show up on sites you don't control. A model trusts a claim more when it sees it independently confirmed somewhere else, not just repeated on your own domain.
This is the part most people skip, because it's slower than writing another blog post, and it's also the part that actually moves the needle.
Curious what others here are seeing. Is anyone tracking which specific pages get pulled into answers versus which ones get ignored, even within their own site?
Most SEO teams are already tracking referrals from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and other AI surfaces.
That part is not really the issue.
The harder question is what those visits are actually worth.
Across client projects, what we’re starting to look at more closely is not just AI referral volume, but the state of the user when they arrive.
If someone clicks after seeing a brand cited or recommended inside an AI answer, they are not arriving in the same mindset as a cold organic visitor.
They may already have context.
They may already understand the problem.
They may already trust the source a little more.
So measuring AI search only through sessions feels incomplete.
The more interesting questions are:
Do those visits convert better?
Do they ask more qualified questions?
Do they move faster through the funnel?
Does the AI citation create trust before the click?
That’s where I think the measurement challenge is heading.
Not “is AI sending traffic?”
But “how much demand or trust was created before the visit happened?”
Curious how others are handling this.
Are you treating AI referrals as another traffic source, or are you starting to measure them differently?
Google and ChatGPT don't read your article top to bottom before deciding whether to recommend you.
They break it into pieces, retrieve the pieces that answer a specific question, and often show or cite that piece without anyone ever visiting your page.
If a paragraph only makes sense next to the one before it, it gets skipped.
This is called query fan out.
Instead of matching your page to one search term, the system splits a single question into several related sub-questions, then searches for the best passage to answer each one.
Your article isn't competing as a whole. Each paragraph is competing on its own.
That's why a paragraph depending on context from three sentences earlier is a liability now, not just weak writing.
If a retrieval system pulls that block out and drops it into an answer, it has to make sense in isolation, with the subject, the claim, and the reasoning all inside the same block.
The practical version of this is simple.
Keep each paragraph between 40 and 80 words, and give it exactly one idea. Not one idea plus a supporting example plus a caveat.
One idea, stated clearly enough that someone reading only that block, with zero surrounding context, still understands what you meant.
This helps regular Google rankings too, not only AI answers.
Google has pulled isolated passages into featured snippets and "people also ask" boxes for years, using the exact same logic: find the smallest chunk of text that fully answers the question, and rank it independent of the rest of the page.
It also happens to be better UX. Readers scanning on a phone don't parse dense blocks of connected reasoning, they grab one idea, decide if it's useful, and move on.
Writing for extraction and writing for a tired person skimming on the bus turn out to be almost the same skill.
None of this means write worse or dumb things down. It means every block has to earn its place on its own, because increasingly nobody reads the whole page before deciding to trust it, they read whichever paragraph got pulled out and shown to them first.
Anyone else restructuring old posts around this instead of just adding more keywords?
Most guides on external linking say "link to authoritative sources" and stop there.
That advice is technically true and mostly useless, because it never tells you what to check before you hit publish.
Here is the checklist I actually run through at my SEO agency and for all our clients.
Pull real information from the source you cite, not just a link for the sake of having one.
If you write "studies show X" and link to a homepage instead of the specific study, that link does nothing for the reader and nothing for your credibility.
Cite the specific page, the specific number, the specific claim.
Prefer the primary source over a summary of it. If a blog post is paraphrasing a government report or an academic study, go find the report itself.
Linking to the original protects you when the secondary source gets something wrong, and it reads as more trustworthy to both readers and crawlers.
Write anchor text that describes what's on the other end. "According to the 2026 IBGE services survey" tells the reader something.
"Click here" or "source" tells them nothing. NOTHING!
Audit your outbound links every few months. Sites get redesigned, reports get taken down, pages 404. A page full of dead links reads as neglected, and neglected pages tend to lose rankings slowly without anyone noticing why.
Don't pad a page with links to look thorough. Three links that support specific claims beat ten links added because a checklist said so. Readers notice the difference, and so do the AI systems summarizing your page for someone else's answer.
If a competitor's post genuinely has the best explanation of something, link to it anyway. Hoarding all authority inside your own site is a worse strategy than most people think, because it makes your content read like it exists in a vacuum.
What's the worst external linking mistake you've seen on a client site?
How you guys are you actually acquiring clients today?
Only respond if you’ve personally closed SEO clients in the last 12 months without an agency brand.
I’m trying to map real acquisition loops used by solo operators.
I care less about “channels you use” and more about:
- exact first message / offer framing
- why it worked instead of getting ignored
- the smallest repeatable action that reliably produces a lead
- the moment trust is actually created (not assumed)
If you had to rebuild your client acquisition system from scratch in 2026,
what would you keep exactly and what would you delete?
the fact that the head of an seo agency has never heard of screaming frog, makes me super suspicious of them. But maybe screaming frog isn't as popular as i thought? i thought it was the gold standard for technical seo.
even if you use other tools for technical seo, it was surprising that he showed ignorance in even knowing what it was.
had the same interaction with a sales person for SEMrush - they said she had never heard of screaming frog.
is this not as crazy as it seems to me? do i just exist in a bubble of screaming frog die hards?
Is SEO still worth investing in for a local service business in a country with a population of around 2 million?
I've often read that the top 3 Google search results receive around 70% of all clicks. But if the first 5 positions are already occupied by competitors' Google Ads, the first organic result ends up much lower on the page.
In this situation, does SEO still provide a good return, or has Google Ads become the only realistic way to attract high-intent traffic from Google Search?
Same.
I have been writing a lot of articles, and now I am actually prompting a lot of good pieces, like legitimate pieces that are informative, relevant, answer the user's query, and are well optimized. I also take care of internal linking and ensure the content satisfies EEAT as clearly as possible. In short, I am doing almost everything a writer would do, just that I am producing the bulk of my content using AI. Now, I am at a crossroads here. What criteria do I need to follow in order to ensure my content starts getting picked up by Google? I have managed to write around 10 articles so far on a product website, but I am not sure if it's enough! It's a fairly new domain, and how long do I need to consistently keep posting for Google to pick up my content and start indexing it? My service pages are indexed, and one of my articles has successfully been indexed, but that's just one. What am I missing out on? I am not into link-building activities much. I make a couple of links every now and then, but I do have a plan, and I am publishing topical, authoritative, and semantically satisfying articles every week. It's just that I can get them indexed manually, but that's not what I want... I want the Google bot to pick them up. Any suggestions?
So, I have a situation. I have a website that's around 10+ years old, and recently I had its complete SEO audit done. The website has been active for many years now, and we are seeing significant traffic and business coming through it.
After the audit, we found that there were around 3,000+ non-indexed pages present on the website. They are old blog posts and dormant service pages. Some are just dead pages that we can repurpose or remove, while others are simply dead weight... pages that aren't going to be of any relevance.
The blogs are around 1,500+, and my SEO expert suggested that we should currently put them on a noindex tag, repurpose the content, optimize them with fresh keywords, and submit them manually on GSC.
My suggestion was to remove them completely since they will be taking up significant crawl budget if they somehow get indexed or something. Also, the blogs are from 2018, 2019, and earlier, but he said it wouldn't be a good idea.
I don't know what to do here, so I genuinely need advice on what I should do. Should I remove these old dead blogs, repurpose them and relaunch them, or just leave them the way they are?
SEO changes so fast and there are so many "hot" tactics out there that it's hard to see what is actually worth the effort these days (at least from my experience)
What's something that used to work well for you but just isn't worth the effort anymore? I'm trying to refine my SEO tactics - random youtube videos and/or blogs are more clickbaity than useful
Hi all- I checked out Semrush and other tools and most of these tools look like its for agencies and creating reports. But are there any tools that help me automate SEO for my business? Thanks in advance!
My website reached 5k monthly visitors in the first 4 months, and after a mistake from one of my developer and prioritization of another project, the website slowly reached 200 monthly visitors. During the low times I started relying on Bing only.
I started working on it again 2 months ago.. or close to 2 years after the incident and now reached 700, and Google started driving 2-4 clicks a day but I struggle increasing my impressions on Google.
Any advice?
I'm planning an SEO audit and action plan for a Ecom website.
If you were auditing a site today to improve SEO and measure results on monthly basis, what step-by-step, priority‑based actions would you take?
Specifically:
How would you structure the audit (tools, checks, and key metrics)?
Which issues would you fix first?
Which KPIs would you track throughout the month to measure progress?
Any example checklist or tools you recommend would be appreciated.
I think that the useful "hygiene" tasks of a good SEO are also the ones people never commit to, because they're boring/time-consuming.
So I went on a journey to automate them using an SEO agent (mostly, packaged them into one), but here are the main capabilities that could be useful to you too:
1. Keyword-opportunity agent
Every week, the agent pulls your target keywords, your striking-distance queries in Search Console, and the gaps your competitors aren't targeting. Then it hands you 3 article ideas, each with a scored rationale and an H2 outline.
2. Article-drafting agent
(this one is pretty basic but it has a forcing function)
You give the agent a topic of your choice and then it writes a full article with your rules. For me the rules for instance are: brand-first positioning, internal links to the right pages, FAQ schema, a closing CTA.
Usually the ideas come a bit naturally based on my readings and competitive intelligence.
3. The page-2-to-page-1 agent
Once a month it finds the pages ranking 11 to 20 and tells you what to fix to push them to rank 1-10. These are usually the cheapest wins in SEO, because the content already ranks and just needs a nudge. They are also the ones I forget to go back to. I think it's the one that really moved the needle.
4. Content refresh agent
Freshness is a ranking signal, and stale stats / links are taking the piece of content's position. This agent is watching the best posts for decay, flags when there are outdated numbers / aging sections / broken links. The agent can correct this by itself ideally.
5. Competitor-watch agent
The agent monitors your named competitors (I suggest you find 3-4 who are the most "dangerous" and not more). Then it scores anything they published in the last seven days against your keywords, and flags the threats with a suggested response. This is the work a human means to do every week and never does.
6. GEO "basics" agent
I know GEO is way more than that but I think it's a good first step to have well-structured data and kill two birds with one stone. This agent is structruging content the way AI engines extract it: definitional sentences they can quote cleanly, FAQ schema they parse, original data they can attribute. The same article that ranks on Google also starts to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.
Any other ideas I didn't mention? I think you don't need a separate agent for all those use cases but...you could as well. I chose to have only one that manages everything.
I feel in the UAE, people are more into social media and I wonder if it makes sense for a company to invest in SEO when audience is limited
The SEO world is always full of surprises, so let's stay on top of the latest events with our news digests:
Updates
The June 2026 spam update began on June 24 and completed June 26. Global, all languages, no new spam policies attached—Google framed it as enforcement of existing rules rather than a policy shift. SpamBrain remains the underlying detection system.
According to Barry Schwartz, the update does not target link spam or Site Reputation Abuse—pointing the center of gravity at content-level violations: scaled content abuse, cloaking, sneaky redirects, scraped content, hidden text, and doorway pages.
Source:
Google Search Status Dashboard
Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable
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SERP features / Interface
Google is testing autocomplete suggestions inside the "Ask Anything" follow-up box within AI Mode—so when users start typing a follow-up question, Google now suggests completions just like the classic Search autocomplete does.
Source:
SERP Alert | X
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AI
Three weeks after the initial UK-only test, Google is gradually rolling out the Search Generative AI performance reports to more regions, with SEOs in the US, India, Switzerland, and others now seeing the report in their accounts.
Source:
Vijay Chauhan | X
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Documentation
Google published a new policy document in the Publisher Center covering Subscription Linking—the Reader Revenue Manager feature that lets paying readers link their publisher subscriptions to their Google Accounts so subscribed content gets highlighted across Google products.
Source:
Google Developers
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Local SEO
Nearly two years after Google killed messaging and chat history in Business Profile, the messages button is showing up again in the GBP dashboard inside Google Search—this time with an AI conversational agent integrated into the conversation flow.
Source:
Muhammad Hussain | LinkedIn
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Tidbits
Microsoft's free analytics platform Clarity now surfaces which bots are accessing disallowed URLs on your site—violations of your robots.txt directives are now detected and reported inside the Bot Analytics dashboard.
The new view includes a violations percentage card, a trendline so you can spot persistent offenders, filters by operator/bot/activity type, and content-level breakdowns showing which paths are attracting non-compliant crawler traffic.
Setup requires connecting a supported CDN (Fastly, Amazon CloudFront, or Cloudflare); WordPress sites running the latest Clarity plugin get it automatically.
Source:
Ihab Rizk | Microsoft Clarity Blog
Not well-versed in SEO or Google Analytics, so this might be a rudimentary question ... but my website traffic (which is almost non-existent) is mostly coming from countries across the world from my place of business - Singapore, Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to focus on more nearby audiences? Or how can I attract visitors who can speak/write in my language, since I'm a writer and editor? Thank you in advance.
There are hundreds of metrics available today. Which five actually help you make better decisions and ignore the noise?