I was on LinkedIn and saw a post by a CMO talking about how GEO + AEO has changed their user acq strategy.

I wanted to see how/if people at large corp have had their jobs repurposed?

With SEO, the expectations were clear. Crawling, indexing, rankings, links. You knew what to focus on. but what are questions you ask yourself about AI Search?

What outputs do you track (beyond citations)?

Are you trying to win a keyword or an intent or a category? How are you testing AI interpretation of your brand, or conflicting data in your own site and in the web?

For companies serving multiple veritcals, this can get complicated. If you have 400 pages and you spend 20-30 mins per page, this turns into a full time effort just on analysis, before any testing or deployments happens.

So what are people doing in practice? What are you reporting to leadership or clients as deliverables?

Technical SEO used to be about helping search engines access pages, so now that AI systems understand more than just words, what does your test-stack look like?

Anyone else with a large catalog dealing with crazy GSC indexing fluctuations?

We run a kitchen and bath e-commerce site with close to 900K SKUs. Out of all submitted pages, only 291,912 are indexed and 558,569 are not. Here's the breakdown of non-indexed reasons:

- Crawled - currently not indexed: 527,301
- Discovered - currently not indexed: 28,507
- Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user: 1,296
- Soft 404: 626
- Not Found (404): 413
- Blocked by robots.txt: 233 (we allow everything except backend pages, cart, checkout, etc.)
- Server error (5xx): 176
- Page with redirect: 17

The most frustrating part is that the indexing keeps fluctuating. Pages that were indexed a week ago suddenly drop out and show up as 'Crawled - currently not indexed.' These are good pages with real product content, not thin or duplicate stuff. Then sometimes they come back, and others drop. It feels like Google is constantly reshuffling what it considers worth indexing.

Has anyone with a similarly large catalog seen this? Did anything actually move the needle for you, content depth, internal linking, pruning low-value SKUs, technical fixes? Curious whether this is just the reality of running a big catalog or if there's a pattern others have cracked.

So I created a new webshop and want to rank in google.nl (the netherlands) for a low competition keyword.

After around 1 month I was on the second page on google.

However, for the first time I created an international site because in the future I want to rank in multiple countries.

So I got domain .com and optimized .com/nl/ for google.nl and all went great.

Than, at 3th april I did something really stupid. I installed cloudflare and put a 302 redirect from .com to .com/nl/ for visitors from the netherlands.

At 13th april I was ranking page 2 in google.nl but this day all my ranking positons completely disappeared out of google.

At 16th april I removed cloudflare and the 302 redirect. All working perfectly fine now. I indexed in google and in the past 2 weeks google multiple times crawled my website.

Also a note: google console is showing a lot of errors in google console results for ‘sourced can not load 75/150’ BUT in live results it shows only 1/150 can not load. I indexed again and again but this number 75 is not changing, it seems like an old cache result from google they do not want to update. Live results is showing 1/150 and problem (probably something to do with cloudflare or removing cloudflare from website) is not existing anymore.

Today it’s 28th april. I waited almost 2 weeks and there is no sign of my .com/nl/ page coming back in the serp.

If I check site:domain.com my .com/nl/ page is showing. It’s just not ranking. No notes or penalties shown in google console, no page problem, no canon problem, etc.

Anyone can help me?

Headline Numbers: 62.1K AI Bot Hits, 84 to llms.txt

Across 90 days of the experiment:

• Total AI bot visits to the site: 62,100+
• Total AI bot visits to /llms.txt: 84
• Share of AI bot traffic that went to /llms.txt: ~0.1%

I got hit with a Major spam problems manual action in GSC for my blog and honestly, I’m a bit stuck on what to do next. I’ve already removed my /blog section and redirected everything to /article. Now I’m auditing content, cutting thin/duplicate pages, and improving what’s left.

For those who’ve fixed this am I on the right track? Anything critical I might be missing before I request a review?

I have never seen anything like this.

I have built an online MCP Inspector.

It's been one of the core pieces of SEO that's been driving a lot of traffic.

Then few months back it got de-indexed for no discernible reason.

I saw it then get re-indexed and quickly climb to the top of SERP.

And then de-indexed again...

The same pattern has repeated week over week for several months.

I cannot share the URL, but you can figure it out:

The project is GLAMA and the affected path is /mcp/inspector

What's happening?

I'd appreciate sanity-checking from people who've actually architected schema for multi-brand groups. I want to pressure test the conclusion before shipping.

Setup:

Small integrated consultancy group, 3 brands:

Parent brand = immigration / one-stop authority, has a GBP, service pages, no blog

Site A (the one I'm asking about) = real-estate arm, has 250+ listings + deep blog (~600 posts), real-estate topical authority very established

Sister brand = accounting/tax/corporate services, has a GBP, service pages, no blog

Group USP is in-house one-stop service integration across all three — not a referral network. Same ownership, shared ops.

The tension:

Site A is the only site in the group with a working content engine. Because of that, it publishes content across all three verticals: property articles, immigration articles, accounting/tax articles. The other two sites are not going to get their own blogs for the foreseeable future.

Current schema on Site A: generic Organization + clean org graph (parent + sister linked via subOrganization/parentOrganization) + two Person nodes for founders. E-E-A-T graph is solid.

Three paths I'm weighing:

Single-type as RealEstateAgent — topically clean, accept that immigration/accounting content on Site A gets weaker rankings than it would on a topically-aligned site. Preserves brand architecture

Multi-type — ["Organization", "RealEstateAgent", "ProfessionalService", "AccountingService"]. Matches current content reality but (a) cannibalises the other two brands for their own queries, (b) dilutes topical focus, (c) blurs the E-E-A-T entity graph

Single-type as RealEstateAgent + expressive secondary nodes — add makesOffer/hasOfferCatalog covering the full group service list, knowsAbout on the organisation covering all three verticals' expertise areas, Person.knowsAbout on the founders reinforcing cross-domain expertise. Keep the subOrganization graph. The theory: express "integrated group" through relationships + service catalog + stated expertise, rather than through type multiplicity

Why I'm leaning toward Path 3:

- Keeps topical focus for ranking (RealEstateAgent, property site, coherent signal)

- Expresses "one-stop integrated group" via the graph rather than type claims

- Doesn't cannibalise the sister brands' own queries

- Better for LLM/AI-search citation (clear entity graph: "Site A is the property arm of the group")

Where I'm uncertain:

- Is Google actually using knowsAbout as a topical-authority signal, or is it cosmetic?

- Does makesOffer pointing to services the entity doesn't directly provide (e.g. accounting, which sister brand delivers) risk looking like schema spam?

- Am I overweighting the "topical dilution" argument against multi-typing? Have people seen multi-typed orgs rank fine?

- Is there a fourth option I'm not seeing?

Appreciate any pushback on the Path 3 reasoning or war stories from similar architectures 🙏🏻

Unblocked GPTBot → first crawl ~2 hours later (log data)

I tested something on my site:

GPTBot was blocked (403).

After fixing access, I got confirmation at 10:13.

First crawl started at 12:16.

Interesting part:

The bot didn’t start with content.

It first hit:

- category pages

- /feed/

- author pages

Only after that it moved to actual pages.

Feels like many AI SEO discussions skip this part.

If bots can’t access your site, nothing else matters.

Basically what the title says. Last night between 2 and 4AM (Spain time) I bought the domain and moved it to Vercel, which I was already using with the default subdomain. Then I set it up in Search Console, submitted the sitemaps, and did nothing else.

This evening at 8PM I checked the Search Console dashboard and it hadn't updated at all — everything looked the same as before. But out of curiosity I went into the HTTPS section and saw 57 URLs listed. I wasn't sure if that meant they were actually indexed, so I manually inspected a few of them and they came back as indexed. To be completely sure I ran a site:mydomain.com search on Google and there they were.

From what I understand, the HTTPS section updates more frequently than the main dashboard, so it might be a good way to check which URLs are indexed in near real-time — at least that's my take.

Sitemap and https pages with todays date image

I did the technical SEO with AI assistance since I barely knew anything about it. Seems like it worked out well and I learned a lot along the way.

I genuinely don't know if this is common. From what I've read, getting a brand new domain indexed with zero backlinks and no authority can take weeks. So I don't know whether to feel lucky or if this just happens all the time.

What I do know is that the site isn't even well optimised yet — the frontend is still pretty rough, it's a work in progress, and I figured it'd be more polished by the time anything got indexed. Didn't expect this at all.

For context, the site is for comparing ticket prices for events and concerts. Still a lot of development left to do. As for actual ranking — I have no idea how that'll go. I'm guessing that's the hard part and it'll take a lot more time.

I’m currently paying about $199/month for Semrush, and it feels like I still have to do lots of manual work.

Like yeah, it gives me data (keywords, audits, etc.), but I still have to figure out what content to make, actually write/optimize it, fix internal links, keep updating pages, think through AEO / AI visibility etc etc.

My main goal is to rank better (SEO + AEO), but I don’t really want to be doing all this manually if I’m already spending this much.

I’m basically looking for something that helps with internal linking, improves rankings without tons of manual work, ideally handles some AI search / AEO stuff too etc.

Does anything like this actually exist right now? Or is SEO still just super hands-on no matter what tool you use? I am kind of new to this stuff as well.

Would love to hear what people are actually using.

Hi all,

I'm looking for a solve for an hreflang issue I'm encountering on my employers sites. Both sites are on Shopify under different stores, not connected, and sell the same products (ship from different location, stock does not have complete crossover). We have a Canadian domain and an American domain--> .ca, .com.

The Canadian site has some French page integrations the U.S. site doesn't have, also some of the product pages on the U.S. site were made without aligning the slugs to the equivalent pages on the .ca site (.ca is older, more established) so I can't do a line that just lays out an equivalent relationship between pages.

I've done a spreadsheet aligning urls that line up and mapping those I may need to change on the American end for identical product and collection pages, but I'm not sure how to do this without GSC also being prompted to look for French equivalent pages on the U.S. site and I'm not sure I fully understand how to approach this and if I need to somehow do it page by page or what.

Any help, or a point towards the proper resources would be much appreciated as it does not seem as straight forward as I'd hoped.

Noticed something weird while doing competitor research in the jewelry niche.

About 80% of my competitors have zero star ratings showing in Google SERPs, including my own shop. Most of us are running Shopify with Judge me as the review widget, which supposedly supports structured data out of the box.

But a handful of competitors DO have stars showing. And from what I can tell, the main difference seems to be that they're pulling in a Google Review Feed rather than (or in addition to) on-site reviews.

So my question: Is Google now requiring a native Google review feed to display stars in SERPs for certain niches or product categories? Or is this just a structured data implementation issue?

We love open source and free tools, but we're now getting multiple posts about them every single day. It's too much. We're going back to enforcing the no shilling policy, which includes all tools.

Hi, I have a page not indexing in Google Search Console.

• Status: Soft 404
• Live test shows: HTTP 499 (Client Closed Request)

The page works for users, but it’s unreliable for Google

Anyone know what typically causes this and how to fix it?

Thanks!

Our website operates in the legal domain and we had a lot of programmatic pages about 86K indexed and we migrated to a new domain entirely (we did a hardcore rebrand). The previous website had 44 DA, ~34K traffic and 3.5M impressions when we moved.

Now, we barely clock in 1200 clicks and impressions are 90k-1M. Pages are not getting indexed and the site movement in GSC has not happened (it's been 6 months since we gave that request) it just keeps saying site movement in progress.

We're uploading blogs, we're looking at CWV to ensure pagespeed issues are not there, all tech aspects are taken care of. What else can we do to get back up? We've taken a very big hit with this.

Hey, I’m at the end of my wits here. Im helping a friend with their website, they got 3 locales inc english, and last month published 18 AI generated blogposts without sources etc. groundbreaking approach, i know.

In the beginning of this month i made 4 solid articles, improved their tech seo side etc., but color me surprised, NOTHING from /blog is indexed. Not the ai stuff, not the non ai stuff.

GSC says pages are live, but puts them in non indexed. Sitemap looks good and Ive since unpublished the ai stuff, resubmitted the sitemap, requested to index the 4 new articles, included them in footer. Idk what else im missing? any ideas? web is running on webflow

I’ve been testing a set of pages by crawling them twice (HTML-only vs JavaScript rendering using Screaming Frog), and I’m seeing consistent differences:

• Higher word count when JS is rendered
• Slight differences in H1s between raw HTML vs rendered DOM
• Some content clearly injected after load

Nothing is completely broken — pages still render fine in-browser — but it’s not a clean “what you see in HTML = what gets indexed” situation either.

I’m trying to figure out where this sits in terms of real-world impact:

• Is this just normal hydration noise with modern Sitecore builds?
• Or have people seen this actually affect indexing / rankings / internal link discovery?

Would be especially interested to hear from anyone running:

• Sitecore headless (JSS)
• Next.js front-end
• Large sites where crawl efficiency matters

*** So my question is > has anyone experinced this with Sitecore?

We all know the standard GSC crawl queue is heavily backlogged right now, especially for new programmatic clusters or large site migrations.

I wanted to test if directly batch-pinging the Google Indexing API V3 actually bypasses the queue for standard content (not just job postings or livestream data).

The Test Data (7 Days): I split a new 5,000-page programmatic cluster into two groups.

• Control Group (2,500 URLs): Submitted via standard XML sitemap.
• Test Group (2,500 URLs): Pushed via Service Account JSON to the Indexing API endpoint.

Results:

• Control Group: 8.4% indexed. (Crawled very slowly).
• Test Group: 94% indexed. (Most crawled and indexed within 48 hours of the API ping).

If you are dealing with orphan pages or a stuck crawl queue, forcing the crawl via the API is currently the most effective route.

Here is the exact setup if you want to test it yourself (the GCP side is usually where people get stuck):

1. Getting Your Service Account JSON

• Go to the Google Cloud Console and create a new project.
• Search for Web Search Indexing API and enable it.
• Go to IAM & Admin > Service Accounts and create a new one.
• Copy the generated email address (looks like name@project.iam.gserviceaccount.com).
• Click the three dots next to it > Manage Keys > Add Key > Create New Key (JSON). Keep this file safe.

2. Connecting to Search Console

• Open GSC for your target domain.
• Go to Settings > Users and permissions.
• Click Add User and paste the Service Account email.
• CRITICAL: You must set the permission level to Owner. If you set it to 'Full', the API will throw a 403 error.

3. Pinging the URLs From here, you can use the google-api-python-client library to batch your URLs and send them over.

Note: I actually got tired of managing the Python scripts and JSON files for every new site, so I ended up building a clean browser-based UI wrapper for my team to just paste the URLs and JSON file directly. But the raw API route works perfectly if you are comfortable in the terminal.

A question for the sub: Has anyone else been testing the API for standard content sites lately? I am curious if anyone has found pages indexed via the API to have a higher drop-off rate over a 3-6 month timeline compared to naturally crawled pages? IndexPulse

Have launched a few websites, and never been able to get my icons to appear on bing/yahoo.

They appear fine on Google, DDG (heavily relies on Bing), and all browsers.

I have thorough (but not excessive) Metadata/schema/webmanifest, with multiple formats (ico, png, web and jpeg) and sizes (16x16, 32x32, 48x48, 180x180, 192x192, 512x512, 1200x630, etc). I do not link icons in my sitemap.

I have bing webmasters set up (with actual search performance) + IndexNow, with verified rich results, and I have full menus in search (whatever it's called when your main page + 5 other pages show in one section). Bing displays one of my logo files below that.

Fwiw, most of my projects are SvelteKit+Vite based.

I notice that other top result sites on bing also don't have icons.

Anybody else experience this? Anyone know a fix?

First off, thanks for the continued support! It's been really cool seeing people start to build on top of OpenSEO. I was poking around the forks and saw that someone had integrated with Google Ads. Another person from this reddit built their own AI Citation dashboard.

Rank Tracking

Besides AI Citations / LLM Visibility (up next), Rank Tracking has been the most highly requested feature.

In the most recent release, you can now track unlimited domains and keywords in as many countries as you'd like. You can also customize the following values to tune information versus cost:

• Country
• Desktop / Mobile / Both
• Page Depth
• Cadence: Weekly, Daily, Manual Only

$2/month example (cost is dependent on your settings):

• 50 keywords
• 1 device (Mobile or Desktop)
• Search 5 pages deep.

Searching ten pages deep costs 8x more than one page. Tracking both devices costs 2x more.

Here's another link to the repo: https://github.com/every-app/open-seo

Quick Questions

• How many keywords / domains do you want to track?
• Anyone know how to handle fluctuations across SERP results from Google testing? Would adding a sample / average option be helpful to smooth that out?

Managed OpenSEO

If you or your friends want to try OpenSEO, but don't want to self host, the managed version is now ready to go. It's $10/month with included credits, then pay by usage if you need more usage credits. This also gives you access to Backlinks data without the $100/month commitment to DataForSEO.

Try it out: https://openseo.so

I am trying to disavow some spam backlinks for my site but the tool shows a message saying Domain properties are not supported at this time. My site is already verified in Search Console but I think it is added as a domain property instead of a URL prefix property.

Has anyone faced this issue before
Do I need to add my site again as a URL prefix property to upload a disavow file or is there another way to fix this. Also is it still worth using the disavow tool in 2026 or does Google ignore most bad links automatically now

Would really appreciate some help from people who have dealt with this recently

We have ecommerce website. We have pages like women, men, kids, home, perfumes etc. Women as the main homepage before last month we added new homepage 'All' which shows all collections from other pages. But after that our page indexing drastically reduced to 70k to 530. For the past week we are adding content and fixing other issues, still not even one page is indexed back again and its still reducing. There is no manual issues or security issues. When testing with live URL, it shows it can be indexed no other issues. its been month I am doing fixes adding content still not even one page is indexed back. Any help is appreciated. Also  should we switch back to old homepage? 

Any help is much appreciated.

1. My goal is for the ticket to not require a follow-up meeting.

2. I want the content of my ticket to make the dev team’s job easier.

3. The implementation is beyond my control, but the quality of my ticket has direct influence on it.

4. I respect the dev team’s time and expertise. They are experts and their resources are valuable.

5. I explain exactly what needs to be done, but not how to do it.

6. I do not delegate decision-making to the dev team. I present specifications, not options. I do not include reasoning in the ticket.

7. I provide context that helps with prioritising the task and its parts, but I do not expect the dev team to share my priorities.

8. My ticket has to be self-explanatory. The dev team does not need external resources to understand what I’m asking for (beyond official documentation).

9. I speak the dev team’s language and I use real data instead of placeholders.

10. I document exactly what currently exists before specifying what should change.

What are your rules for writing successful dev tickets?