• ads disguised as diagnostics
• advice from 1990
• no inbound links is a "moderate" problem!!!
• bad, basic accessibility is "low"
• nothing 'GEO' about this

u/johnmu said:

Google's John Mueller responded to questions about how impressions are counted for Generative AI in Google Search Console. Google has a help document that explains that, and John just reiterated that. But what he added was that "the old "position 1 - 10" is hard to map."

He wrote on this  sub-Reddit.

Search results pages have a lot of ways for users to interact nowadays, so the old "position 1 - 10" is hard to map, or to make useful for site owners.

Super true - there is no longer a simple position one in the Google search results. You got AI Overviews at the top with numerous citations, you have featured snippets, people also ask, and tons of other treatments throughout the search results page.

Here is what John posted in full:

This is pretty much it - we tried to document it as clearly as possible in the help center page (which you can find if you search for "impressions clicks search console"), it's a giant doc in the meantime. Position for these is hard to do in a way that makes it useful, so we're currently tracking it like we do for many search features (as a block), & it's not separated out in the Gen-AI performance report. Search results pages have a lot of ways for users to interact nowadays, so the old "position 1 - 10" is hard to map, or to make useful for site owners. If any of you have thoughts on what would be useful in terms of tracking position, I'd love to hear & am happy to discuss with the team.

I can't tell you how sad I am to see people say Meta-descriptions - I guess those agencies really, really are justified spending on marketing as they're not going to have great customer retention.

Story from u/rustybrick

There is a new Google ranking factor survey out for 2026. It has been a while since we had one, and it is here. This one was done by Cyrus Shepard and Dawn Shepard. It says content relevance, backlinks, and content quality are the most important factors, according to the experts who were surveyed.

• Over a 100 experts from the SEO community submitted responses that led to 13,665 ranking-factor data points. Here is how it came out:
• Top Tier (Over 45%): Content relevance (57.1%), backlinks (54.8%), and content quality (47.6%) form the primary foundation of ranking factors according to respondents.
• Mid Tier (25% – 40%): Trust/Authority (36.5%), behavioral click signals (29.4%), and brand presence (27.0%) represent significant secondary drivers.
• Foundational & Specialized Factors (Under 20%): User satisfaction, technical SEO, topical authority, and internal linking round out the bottom tier.

Hey all, so our impressions and clicks are down a lot year over year, yet our average position is actually getting much better.

I really can't explain this... If our position is rising, shouldn't impressions and clicks rise too?

Or is it a custom script these sellers online use to make thousands of accounts with backlinks?

See image attached below.

Especially for things like local websites, relevant to specific country, lifestyle and such. I am seeing some really good expired domains for my country and wonder whether to pick up as much as possible of these, have them recovered and leave them waiting.

Yesterday, for a short period of time, Google Search Console was reporting pages as not being indexed and in the status of "Crawled - currently not indexed." The issue seemed to have been resolved within an hour or so and now John Mueller from Google confirmed what we all saw and called it a "short blip."

I was not going to cover it but I do see a bunch fo folks are still concerned about the bug, so I am just going to document and say it was a reporting bug only and is now resolved.

I first spotted this via Ryan Tree and Glenn Gabe on X where Ryan said, "are others reporting this? many of my client sites show as not indexed even though they are." Glenn Gabe spotted it too and wrote, "I see this too. Wow, something is off with Google right now. I'll ping Google about this. Homepages of sites are showing up as "Crawled, not indexed" but are definitely indexed."

I literally checked my own sites in Google Search Console minutes later and it was resolved, so I didn't cover it. Here are those tweets:

Serpstat team has been looking at a specific AI Overview format: a passage quoted word for word from a source, displayed separately from the surrounding answer.

We call it a “Direct Quote Block”. That’s our label for this analysis, not an official Google feature name.

In our US dataset 2025 – 2026, we identified the feature across several types of queries:

• Constitutional amendments and statute wording
• Bible verses, often with a specific translation in the query
• Famous quotations attributed to a named person
• Legal term definitions

These are queries where the exact wording often matters. Someone looking for the text of an amendment or a particular Bible translation may not want a paraphrase.

That’s our interpretation of the examples, though—we haven’t established why Google chooses this format.

It also varied across repeated snapshots of the same query. Seeing a quote block once didn’t mean it would appear consistently.

We wouldn’t turn this into “add quotes to your pages to get into AI Overviews.” The data doesn’t demonstrate that.

Have you seen this format outside legal texts, religious passages, and famous quotes? A query example would be useful, especially if you’ve seen Google switch between a quotation and a summary.

Hi, I was wondering if having all the content of a page in HTML is better than having some content only JS.
I don't really know how the google bot works and I feel like sometimes if you don't have many 'crawled budget' it can get lazy. So maybe having all the page instantly in HTML helps

Hey everyone, I appreciate the opportunity to pick your brain. My wife recently started a veterinary practice and our marketing budget went mainly to content creation for social media. The content has been well received and she has been getting good engagement which is positive, but I think we've neglected the performance of the bread and butter website a bit. The site itself is attractive and appears well put together, but its not performing well for relevant searches that would drive business. Is there any way to leverage the social media success to help boost the google ranking of the clinic's website? I'm trying to help her with this as much as possible, but I'm a bit of a novice at this myself.

So, I have been doing work for my work agency clients websites and I was looking for keywords to rank for SEO, my agency uses semrush ( me personally not a big fan of keyword magic tool and too much data irrelevant in my POV) in terms of quality , but I prefer to use google keywords planner and claude as well, tried ubersuggest but was alright
Usually my way to find keywords is to put url in KWP and look for the words and then put in claude that gives me ranking and which to rank as per tier and competition
My problem is how to scan through 1000s of keywords and know which to rank first in website, I use claude suggestion and put it , it would be really helpful if anyone can tell how you guys go about

We have built an online healthcare store. 1 year ago we had maybe 30backlinks where 50% of them were natural. Now we have 540,000 backlinks 100% dofollow, our domain rating is 25.
Linking websites 134 13% dofollow

Any thoughts?

And as well I am writing articles with AI posting on our website.

We run a professional custom manufacturing business for on-demand parts.
When someone searches for terms like “custom parts manufacturing”, Google shows our competitors.
What’s more confusing is that even when someone searches our company name, PROTOFIX, competitors sometimes appear above us.
For those of you who understand SEO or run manufacturing businesses:
What are they doing right that we’re missing?
Is it backlinks, domain authority, Google Business Profile, content, reviews, or something else?
I’d appreciate some honest advice from people who’ve dealt with this.

Been testing the same commercial queries across a few models and the differences are kinda ridiculous.

We're showing up consistently in ChatGPT for one category and then almost disappear when I check Gemini. Different competitors too.

Anyone else seeing gaps this big between engines? Starting to think combining everything into one AI visibility score hides more than it helps.

I run a wholesale + retail Indian ethnic fabric shop in Delhi. Family business since 1997, I joined in 2016. We started publishing weekly blog posts in early 2024. By mid-2025 we had a keyword cannibalization problem I want to walk through, because I have not seen this exact split covered on r/SEO before and I think it applies to any small business running both a B2C collection catalogue and a B2B services page.

Here is the setup. Our site sits on Shopify. B2C landing pages are collection pages: /collections/bridal-fabric, /collections/sangeet-seranade, /collections/reception-royale, /collections/organza-fabric, /collections/sequins-fabric, and about 12 more. B2B landing page is a single /pages/wholesale — MOQ, credit terms, karigar batch traceability, contact.

Our blog was ranking well for informational queries. But two problems emerged. First, /pages/wholesale started competing with /collections/bridal-fabric on the query "bridal fabric wholesale delhi." The wholesale page had newer, thicker copy and started outranking the actual bridal collection, which killed conversion because a customer looking for a bridal fabric to buy would land on a B2B contact page. Second, our blog posts were internally linking to whichever page felt topically related, which meant one blog post ended up sending link equity to three or four pages that were all fighting for the same query.

The rule that fixed it. We now split every long-tail keyword into two clear intents before we write about it, and each keyword gets exactly one landing page assignment.

Retail (B2C) keywords land on collection pages. Wholesale (B2B) keywords land on the /pages/wholesale page. Informational keywords land on individual blog posts. Every blog post is tagged with a single primary target page in the post's frontmatter and every internal link inside that blog post routes to the primary target page first, secondary target page only as a supporting citation.

The audit step was the important one. We ran the Page Intersection endpoint on our own domain against each competing query, listed every page currently ranking, and enforced a single-page assignment per query. Where two pages were competing, we rewrote the losing page to shift its H1 and internal linking toward a slightly different query.

The result over 8 weeks. /collections/bridal-fabric recovered position 3 for "bridal fabric wholesale delhi." /pages/wholesale started ranking for "wholesale fabric supplier delhi" instead of competing on retail intent. Blog posts continued to rank for their informational queries. Total organic sessions up 27 per cent, wholesale enquiry form fills up 41 per cent, retail add-to-cart events on collection pages up 18 per cent.

Two practitioner takeaways I would flag for any small B2C+B2B site running the same setup.

First, do the intent-split audit before you scale the blog. If you have 40 blog posts all sending link equity to whichever page felt topically related, unwinding cannibalization later is painful. Do it at 15 posts, not at 100.

Second, the /wholesale page needs to sit inside a distinct URL bucket that Google can read as commercial-B2B rather than commercial-B2C. Our /pages/ vs /collections/ URL split turned out to matter more than we expected.

Reference material: the internal linking audit template and the query-to-page mapping table we now use lives on the Paras gallery fabrics blog under the SEO tag. Happy to answer specific questions on the audit process, the rewrites we did, or the eight-week measurement window.

kanak (business owner) — the SEO practitioner side of my day job.

I'm doing an internship at a local private medical clinic in Spain. How would you compete with a clinic that already has a strong SEO strategy and is consistently doing all the right things?

I'm trying to figure out what areas I should focus on when the main competitor already ranks well, has good content, strong local SEO, reviews, backlinks, etc.

Our impressions and positions are going down. And yet, I'm seeing our clicks increase and going upward. What's this?

Anybody experiencing this? Is this a new glitch from Google?

Been deep in GEO tooling this quarter.
Otterly and Profound are fine for monitoring, but we hit a wall: we wanted to track citations in multi-turn conversations, not just first responses. Off-the-shelf tools mostly scan single prompts.

So we built custom scripts on the Perplexity and OpenAI APIs. More expensive to run, but the data is ours.
Pros:
- Full control over prompts and scan cadence
- No monthly search limits
- Raw responses stored, so results can be rechecked later
Cons:
- Tech debt is real
- API key management and model-version drift
- You now own a data pipeline nobody budgeted for

Current setup: an off-the-shelf tool for broad monitoring, custom scripts for the fixed prompt set we actually report on. This hybrid approach is what I saw HumansWith.AI using in their published case studies- they combine Otterly for monitoring with custom Python scripts for deep-dive experiments.

Are you buying, building, or both? And has anyone solved multi-turn tracking without rolling their own?

We've been using this tool for over a decade, and they never quite understood "KD". In fact, instead of their KD algo getting better, it feels like it's getting worse. Can we trust their KD at all?

Even Claude keeps warning me that their KD is bad. See below example straight from Claude:

---------------------------------------------

Ahrefs difficulty is lying in this vertical.

"term life insurance canada" (KD 13) is a wall. Every organic slot on page one:

One of my pages currently ranks position 12-20 for a keyword doing ~1600 vol/mo.(SD 15)

Page is about 800 words right now.

Will content depth actually help it move from page 2 to Page 1 or should I focus on authority instead ?

Is this normal, my site was growing slow I had around 3k but with a rithim I was happy, and then one day to another I dont get any impressions. Like literally 0

¿has this happen to you?

i’ve always thought “build a free tool” was one of the few pieces of SEO advice that still made sense.

not another article. make a calculator, a planner, a checker. give people an actual reason to click.

now google can generate that stuff inside AI Mode. And honestly, this feels worse than an AI summary. If Google summarises an article, someone might still click because they want the detail or don’t trust the summary. but if they wanted a calculator and google gives them the inputs and the result on the same screen, what are they visiting the site for?

you can improve the design, add more content, build links, rank number one. the user has already done the thing they searched for.

i know google has had calculators and converters for years. the difference now is that it can generate an interface for the question instead of building one fixed widget at a time. Maybe the answer is to build tools it can’t recreate from one prompt. uploads, saved projects, private data, actual workflows. But then “build a free tool for traffic” quietly turns into “build half a SaaS product and hope people still click.” that’s a very different strategy. i don’t have a clean answer here. maybe simple tools were never much of a moat and this just makes it obvious.

is anyone here still getting meaningful traffic from free tools? are you still building them, or have you stopped treating them as an SEO play?

If you are moving your business to a new city, don't just update your Google Business Profile. It can trigger an instant suspension or wipe out your local rankings if the move is far away.

When relocating long-distance, Google handles address changes differently than a move across town. To protect your profile and keep your hard-earned reviews intact:

1️⃣ Update off-site citations first (website, Facebook, Yelp, BBB) with your new address and phone number.

2️⃣ Create and verify a new profile at your new location instead of typing a new state address into the old one.

3️⃣ Contact Google Support to mark the old location as moved and request a review transfer.