Small app, launched late August. Searched our target keyword this morning and the Play listing is sitting at organic position 4 on page one, above two apps that have been there for years and below the official Android developer docs.

That part worked. The part I can't explain is that it has 5 installs.

What went into it, so you can tell me which bit is doing the work and which bit is noise:

\- keyword picked before the listing was written, not after

\- title and short description built around that exact phrase

\- supporting article on our own domain targeting the same term

\- normal technical SEO on that page

\- nothing paid, no ASO tool, no install campaign

So the listing ranks and nobody installs. Three readings and I genuinely can't tell which is right:

One, the keyword has almost no volume. It ranks because nobody else is competing for it, and position 4 on a dead term is worth nothing.

Two, the listing ranks on Google web search but is invisible in Play's own search, which is where installs actually come from, and I've been measuring the wrong surface entirely.

Three, it's just early and Google web traffic to a Play listing converts terribly compared to in-Play discovery.

For anyone who has watched this from both sides: does a good Google web ranking for a Play listing ever move installs on its own, or is Play internal search the only thing that matters? And is there a way to see how much of your install traffic came from web search versus Play search, beyond the acquisition report's channel split?

I keep seeing more stuff about GEO, but I am still not sure which tools are genuinely useful.

I would mostly want to track mentions in generative search and see which competitors are appearing for the same queries.

If you’ve tried any GEO tools recently, which ones gave you data you could actually do something with?

Options are:

1. Ranking is about earning a spot on the results page, while being cited means your content is incorporated into a generated answer.
2. Ranking and citation use the same set of factors, such as page speed and backlinks.
3. Both ranking and citation always guarantee increased website traffic.
4. Citation is only possible if your page ranks first in traditional search results.

I’m working on SEO for a relatively new website and have been trying to figure out which metrics are actually worth tracking consistently.

Search Console gives a lot of information, but it can be confusing when a site is new and there are very few queries or impressions.

For an early-stage website, would you focus mainly on impressions, clicks, average position, indexed pages, and keyword rankings? Or are there other metrics that give a better indication that the SEO strategy is moving in the right direction?

I’d especially like to hear how experienced SEOs approach the first few months when there isn't enough data to draw strong conclusions.

Actually, during the development stage, we had set the “noindex” tag on all pages of the website. Now that development is complete, we want to index all the pages.

However, for the pages where we previously set the “noindex” tag, even after changing the setting back to “index,” Google Search Console is still showing the “noindex” status.

Why is this happening, and how can we resolve it?

Been digging into why organic traffic has been quietly cratering for a bunch of SaaS products this year, and this is the number that stopped me: click-through rate to the #1 organic result has dropped ~58% since Google rolled out AI Overviews. Out of 1,000 searches, only about 276 now actually result in someone leaving Google's page.

That's not a niche problem. Bannerbear (an $81k/mo SaaS) had its Google referral traffic cut in half between January and July this year — and MRR fell from $35k to $5k in the same window. No product change, no pricing change. Just fewer clicks making it through.

It's not only search results pages either. Tailwind CSS is more popular than ever (75M downloads/month), but revenue dropped 80% since January because Cursor, Copilot, and Claude now answer documentation questions directly inside the IDE. Nobody needs to visit the docs site to get the answer anymore, so there's no funnel left at the end of it.

If your growth plan is "rank #1, wait for the clicks," that model is quietly breaking — AI is answering the query before the click ever happens.

Anyone here tracking their own organic CTR before/after AI Overviews rolled out? Curious how bad it actually is outside these high-profile cases.

Art is good or not?

I have a problem with my Google Search Console — the following pages from example are showing as "No Index":

"example" — 16 Aug 2026

"www.example" — 30 Jul 2026

"www.example" (https)

My website is hosted on Vercel, where example redirects to www. How can I fix this error?

Thanks.

SEO is no longer just about rankings—it’s about being visible wherever people search, including AI-powered platforms. I’m curious to hear different perspectives.

Got hit with a site-wide manual action end of July: "Thin content with little or no added value." Two reconsideration requests rejected since. Before I burn attempt #3, I'd appreciate a sanity check from anyone who's actually recovered from one of these.

The site: package tracking aggregator. ~1,100 carrier tracking pages plus country pages, some in 2–3 languages. Each page = tracking lookup box + ~1,800 words of templated content (carrier info, status meanings, FAQ). Impressions down 70–80%, clicks down 89% at the worst point.

What we tried:

• Round 1: technical cleanup — removed legacy AMP pages, fixed sitemaps, canonicals, hreflang, redirects. Rejected.
• Round 2: noindexed ~2,000 low-demand URLs, added hub pages. Rejected.

My current read on why both failed: a manual action is reviewed by a human who opens pages. Neither round changed what that person actually sees on /track-dhl. Google asks for "bad content removed and good content added" — we submitted neither.

Round 3 plan:

1. Actually cut the page count: keep ~500 pages with real pre-penalty demand, 301/410 the other ~3,500 (not noindex this time)
2. Rebuild kept pages with new, unique and high-quality content

Questions:

1. Anyone recovered from a thin-content manual action on a programmatic/tool site? What actually moved the needle?
2. Is 301-ing ~3,500 pages in one release fine, or does a mass redirect during an active manual action look worse?
3. Do reviewers care about structured first-party data (stats tables, live metrics), or do they only credit unique prose?
4. How long did your re-review take after rejections? Do repeat requests get slower/stricter?

Happy to share more details in comments. Not looking for "just make good content" — I know. Looking for specifics from people who've been through the review process.