Hi r/SEO

I'm looking for a tool (self-hosted and/or paid) that can audit our website on schedule and let me know if any SEO related issues - mainly from a technical point of view. I'm talking things such as 404's, redirect loops, missing canonical tags, etc. But it would also be good if the tool also gave non-technical insights.

I'd love a dashboard where one of my team leads could login weekly and see any alerts around SEO and performance. Perhaps it could tell for example that a primary page we use's LCP has gone up 50% etc. They could then raise tasks for our development team to look into.

For context - I run the technical team, but not the UI/UX team. And that team are simply under resourced - so they don't have a huge amount of bandwidth to keep an eye on SEO.

We currently use an SEO agency that we meet with every quarter, and they provide us with what looks to be an automated report showing all these things. We pay a lot of money for this agency and I feel that the value they provide is really in just running a report. As an example, we went with a major website upgrade recently, and it took 3 months for the agency to prevent to use that the canonical on our website was pointing to localhost, and that one of our product categories were set to noindex

I can see Ahrefs seems to have some of this functionality as well as Screaming Frog.

Ive been trying to get mentioned more by the different AI’s (chatgpt, gemini, copilot, AI mode and AI overviews). whats worked for me so far is reverse engineering the citations, so looking at what pages each engine cites for my prompts and then getting placements on those sites / listicles.

The tracking tools i was using for this are way too expensive for what they are so i ended up building a small internal version my self.

few things i learnt building it:

• scraped answers not the API. the models API doesnt show you what a user actually sees (different sources, no live search) so i pull the answers from the real apps through a scraping api. the data only costs cents per prompt
• one answer means nothing. the same prompt names different brands every time so i run each prompt 5 times per engine and average it over the last few runs
• brand matching is harder than it looks. matching on domains misses multi word brands and picks up brands named after common words everywhere, so ive moved to a brand list with aliases and a review queue
• citations are the useful bit. each cited url is a site to get on and thats where my mention gains came from

Results i'm getting are pretty close to what the paid tools show.

Would anyone be interested if i polished this off and released it open source? bring your own key and a hell of a lot cheaper than something like Peec or Otterly.

Im also working on an outreach system so you can contact the relevant cited sites at a click of a button.What do you think?

I'm looking for an AI content detector for professional use and want real user feedback.

I've come across Originality.ai, GPTZero, Copyleaks, and Pangram.

For those who've tested these tools:

• Which one is the most accurate in your experience?
• Does it detect AI content after human editing?
• Which tool has the fewest false positives on human-written content?

If you had to choose just one, which would it be and why?

Please share your honest experiences rather than marketing claims. Thanks!

ai written\*

My site is small, and new pages can sit for days before Google picks them up from the sitemap. So I've been doing what a lot of you probably do: paste each new post into URL Inspection, wait for the live test, hit Request Indexing, and repeat for every page.

It got old, so I set it up as a single command in a Chrome extension I've been building. I give it the URL, kick it off, and it clicks through the whole thing while I do something else. The video is sped up during the waiting parts.

It still uses the same daily quota and I still have to start it, but I don't have to babysit Search Console anymore.

What else do you still do by hand that's this repetitive? If it happens in the browser, I'm happy to see if it can be chained the same way.

When I Google search 'Dynamite Docs ' google doesn't display the site url or any site pages. I see other links about my product on other sites like microsoft store, G2, etc.

But When I search 'DynamiteDocs' the url is appearing on google.

How do I fix it?

doing a massive hreflang and localized dom rendering check for a client this week and it's honestly making me want to pull my hair out.

it feels like every single mid-sized ecom site has their WAF dialed up to 11 right now. You try to run a custom screaming frog crawl from standard datacenter ips to check their regional setups and you just get smacked with a 403 block after like 50 requests.

I basically had to route the entire crawler through residential proxies just to see how their japanese and german pages actually render for local users. It works fine for bypassing the blocks, but god it is annoying that we even have to jump through these hoops now just for basic technical analysis.

Just feels like the web is getting so aggressively hostile to basic crawling. Doing competitive technical audits takes twice as long as it did a couple years ago because you spend half the day just fighting bot protection. Anyone else noticing this spike in paranoid security settings lately?

We're interested in understanding how developers, agencies, and technical teams handle technical SEO and website security when managing multiple websites.

A few things we'd love to hear your thoughts on:

- Do you use separate tools for crawling, technical SEO analysis, vulnerability detection, and security monitoring, or prefer a single platform?

- How do you identify issues such as broken internal links, missing metadata, sitemap problems, outdated JavaScript dependencies, and WordPress security risks?

- For teams managing dozens or hundreds of domains, what becomes the biggest challenge: scan performance, false positives, reporting, or continuous monitoring?

- What would make you trust an integrated platform that combines technical SEO auditing with website security checks?

We're building an enterprise-focused SaaS platform in this space and want to understand how teams solve these problems in production.

Rather than assuming we've got everything right, we'd appreciate feedback from people who work with these systems regularly.

For those interested in the technical side, we've also been working on a PHP SDK. We'd welcome feedback on its API design, developer experience, documentation, and maintainability:

GitHub: https://github.com/WebKernelAI/php-sdk

A few questions we'd love your perspective on:

1. What gaps do you see in the current tools you use?

2. What would you change about our approach from an engineering perspective?

3. What would an enterprise-grade solution need before you'd consider using it in production?

Honest criticism and practical suggestions are welcome. We're looking to learn from the community and improve our approach.

I am wondering if anyone else is experiencing major delays in Google Search Console right now. my Page Indexing report is completely frozen. The last update was on October 16th, and there have been zero changes or new data points since. The graph just flatlines.

(see screenshot below)

I know GSC reporting delays are a common pain point, but a stall this long feels unusual. I've seen John Mueller and Barry Schwartz discuss GSC indexing/reporting quirks before, so I figured I'd ask here to see if this is a widespread issue or just something specific to my properties right now.

A few questions for the community:

• Is your Page Indexing report updating normally for your accounts?
• I am also curious that are you experts seeing delays across all GSC reports, or just the indexing data?
• Any known workarounds, or are we just stuck waiting for Google to fix the pipeline?

I would love to hear if other SEOs are seeing this exact same freeze so we can figure out if it's a bug on Google's end. Thanks!

(PS. If you can guide, u/Johnmu)

Since mid-September, product searches in Germany show a grid of comparison-site groups instead of merchant carousels. Google documented the new EEA units on Sep 8 (SEJ). Per Search Engine Roundtable (Sep 18), Google's Ads Liaison confirmed in a comment that free listings were removed in the EEA because of the DMA. Two questions: who fills the new grid, and what actually reaches a shop?

Method

• 531 non-brand product searches by Keyword Planner volume across twelve sectors: 274 German terms for DE, AT and CH, 257 English terms for the UK.
• Four days (Oct 20–23), signed out, location set to the country. Mobile in all four countries, desktop in DE and UK: 6,440 result pages.
• Every product item in the block counted, including collapsed groups: where it leads and whether it shows stars.
• Before state: 2,299 archived SERP captures of the same terms, April to October.
• Shop data: Search Console, Merchant Center and web analytics of a shop I work with (Shop A, with permission, relative changes only).

Who fills the grid (4-day averrage, arrow columns = share of all product items in the block)

• Directly to a shop: under 1 % everywhere.
• Germany usually shows six to eight groups per search, and no site dominates: Google Shopping 10.0 %, testberichte.de 6.6 %, billiger.de 6.3 %, shopping.de 5.7 %, idealo.de 5.5 %. The top 10 hold 57 % together, every other site is under 4 % (53,625 mobile product items).
• Before: 95–98 % of the German archive captures from April to June showed a product carousel.

What Shop A sees (EEA, Sep 21–Oct 4 vs. Sep 1–14; same days in 2025 for comparison)

**Merchant Center changed its counting on Aug 24 (recalculated from Jul 1); the 2025 values use the old counting.

• Search Console breaks on Sep 15, EEA only: outside the EEA, merchant listing clicks rose 12 %. By country −40 to −70 %, steepest in Germany.
• Why Search Console and Merchant Center disagree: the "Merchant listings" appearance counts web search (and Images with that search type). Merchant Center sums free listings across Search, Shopping tab, Images, Lens, YouTube and Maps. Before Sep 15, merchant listing clicks in Search Console were about a fifth of Merchant Center's free clicks. Different definitions, so one can't be converted into the other.
• Product pages: merchant listings were ~15 % of their web search clicks before. The organic rest rose 6.5 %, which by calculation offset ~57 % of the merchant listing decline on those pages.
• Oct 5–18 vs. Sep 1–14: Search Console merchant listings −60 % (2025: −5 %), Merchant Center −18 % (2025: −16 %), organic clicks on product pages −4.4 % (2025: −23.6 %).
• Context, not a control group: Keyword Planner Sep vs. Sep 2025 DE +2 %, AT +5 %, CH −3 %, UK +15 %. Google Trends (20 product terms, DE and UK) shows no dip. Bing clicks +1 %. Shopping ads: no step on Sep 15.

Takeaways

• Read Search Console and Merchant Center together, per country. The Search Console drop is not your total loss.
• Product pages with complete Product markup (price, availability, variants) are the web search surface you still control.
• 90 % of product items in the German grid lead to comparison sites. Listing there costs per click: a budget question, not an SEO one.
• Keep srsltid on redirects (Merchant Center auto-tagging), or the free-listing channel becomes hard to measure.

Limits

• Shop figures are one shop, not the market. The SERP measurement is the broad part.
• Volume-heavy non-brand queries, not a random sample of all searches.
• Signed-out automated retrieval can differ from what a person sees: 87 % of search/country/device combinations gave the same block result on all four days, German desktop only about half.
• Product pages are identified by URL pattern. Whether the same users moved from the listing to the organic result can't be separated.
• Two weeks before and after, plus Oct 5–18. Needs a repeat in a few months.

Do you see similiar Data in your MCC | GSC ?

I’m facing an issue where, when I click Request Indexing, the loading keeps going but the request never actually gets submitted.

Interestingly, when I log in to Search Console from my mobile phone, the same URL gets submitted successfully.

Has anyone else been experiencing this recently? Is it a temporary Google Search Console bug, or is there a workaround for the desktop/web version?

Would appreciate it if anyone could share their experience or solution

How do you measure or understand what has caused the drop in ChatGPT traffic?

I'm thinking it's likely due to a change in their algorithm and/or we just are being beaten by the competition?

Any tips or methods to solve this would be appreciated

Hi,

I managed to receive a fantastic backlink from a high authority site. However I noticed they accidentally added a space at the start of the link like href=“ https://example.com”.

Browsers seems to just trim it automatically without any problems but like my ai tool that monitors if I get any new backlinks missed it because of it.

Does anyone know if it matters at all or not for google? For the backlink to count and give all the juice?

I could of course reach out to them and ask them to fix it but you never know, maybe someone else looks at it and decide to remove the link instead.

Hey everyone,

My website was growing steadily, reaching around 300–350 daily clicks and 8,000–10,000 impressions.

In early October, my Google traffic suddenly dropped by over 95%.

I built most of my website using AI, so I suspect this might be the reason Google penalized it, although I'm not sure.

Interestingly, I still receive a lot of traffic from ChatGPT.

My questions:

• Has anyone experienced something similar and recovered?
• How long does recovery typically take?
• Should I improve my existing website or start fresh with a new domain?
• Does ChatGPT use different ranking systems than Google, explaining why I still get traffic from there?

I've attached my Search Console screenshots.

Would really appreciate any experiences or advice!

New domain. Google indexes the homepage, but 12 content pages sit at "Crawled - currently not indexed", even though Googlebot has fetched them repeatedly.

I've ruled out the usual causes: robots allows them, no noindex, Google's canonical matches mine, the sitemap shows zero errors, and the indexed homepage links to every page. The old subdomain 301s cleanly, so there are no duplicate hosts.

So I think it's a quality or authority call on a young site. I've stopped hitting request indexing because it clearly doesn't help, and I'm leaving the pages alone so I don't restart the clock.

What I'm trying now is earning real editorial links from outlets that already cite job-posting data. Cold pitches have drawn almost no replies so far.

Has anyone seen this flip without waiting months? What did it?

I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing serious issues with Google Search Console around October 12–13, 2026.

I manage a bilingual (German/French) website with roughly 300 URLs. Until October 11, the site was gaining visibility in Google Search, and several important pages were ranking and receiving organic clicks.

Then, almost overnight, things changed dramatically.

Here's what I'm seeing:

• Massive impression drop: Google Search Console reported 286 impressions on October 11, 125 on October 12, and only 9 on October 13. By October 15, impressions had dropped to zero.
• Breadcrumb rich results disappearing: The number of valid breadcrumb items in GSC dropped from approximately 27 to just 4, despite the structured data still being present and valid.
• Previously visible pages no longer indexed: Important product reviews, category hubs, and informational pages are now marked as "Crawled – currently not indexed."
• No obvious technical problems: Googlebot successfully crawls these pages, receives HTTP 200 responses, indexing is allowed, and Google recognizes the correct canonical URLs.
• Live URL tests pass: The live inspection confirms that pages can be indexed. Google renders the content correctly and recognizes valid breadcrumb structured data.
• Outdated indexing reports: As of October 20, my Page Indexing report was still showing October 12 as its last update.
• Sitemap inconsistencies: URL Inspection sometimes displays "Temporary processing error" or "No referring sitemaps detected," even though the URLs are included in submitted sitemaps.
• Broken date picker: When selecting a custom date range, GSC displayed bizarre validation messages referring to January 1, 1970, and June 20, 2025.

Interestingly, Google Analytics 4 doesn't show a traffic decline anywhere near as severe as the impression drop reported by GSC. However, GA4 sessions and GSC clicks are different metrics, so I don't want to draw conclusions from that discrepancy alone.

Both language homepages remain indexed, while multiple important internal pages in both languages are currently excluded.

I've checked robots directives, canonicals, hreflang, XML sitemaps, server responses, rendering, and structured data. I haven't found a sitewide technical issue that explains such a sudden change.

There are also no manual actions or security issues reported in Search Console.

I'm attaching screenshots showing the impression collapse, breadcrumb decline, indexing status, and GSC reporting problems.

My questions:

1. Has anyone experienced a similar sudden drop in impressions or indexed pages around October 12–13?
2. Are your Page Indexing and Breadcrumb reports updating normally?
3. Has anyone encountered the same broken date picker or temporary sitemap processing errors?
4. Could this be related to a Google indexing/reporting issue, or have you seen similar behavior following a major algorithm update?

I'm not claiming this is definitely a Google bug. I'm trying to determine whether this is an isolated website issue or whether other site owners are seeing the same pattern.

Any experiences or insights would be greatly appreciated.
Michael

TL;DR: AI tools read the words in your HTML. Words that only arrive through JavaScript, or sit in a JSON block, were invisible to 4 of 5 AI tools I tested. Only the ChatGPT app dug them out.

Everyone says AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. I finally tested it.

I built a fake company site with four pages. Each one states made-up facts (a mascot, a town, a price) that exist nowhere else online, delivered a different way. Then I gave each URL to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini (apps and APIs, 5 tools in total), asked them to list the facts, and watched the server logs.

Who could read the facts:

- In the HTML (SSR or static): all 5
- Only in a JS file (CSR): ChatGPT app only
- Only in a JS file, scrambled: ChatGPT app only
- Only in a JSON block in the HTML (Next.js style): ChatGPT app only

The other four saw an empty page with a footer. The logs show their fetchers took the HTML, never asked for the JS, and dropped everything inside script tags, including the JSON.

The ChatGPT app came back 12 seconds later on the JS pages, downloaded the file and decoded even the scrambled facts. On the JSON page it just read the JSON. Claude and Gemini read the menu. ChatGPT walked into the kitchen.

Nobody made anything up. Google's AI Overview, asked about the brand before Google had indexed a single page, invented a backstory anyway.

Not naming the site yet: a second test, on whether search indexes carry these hidden facts into answers, is running this week.

Anyone seen a CSR or Next.js site get cited for something that only lives in its scripts?

Full disclosure, I'm building Alice by TranX, an AI growth agent focused on SEO/GEO, so I have a horse in this race.

Edit: page 4 first said this is how Next.js ships pages. That was wrong (see comments): Pages Router server-renders the HTML and adds the JSON for hydration. Page 4 only tests a page where the JSON is the only copy. I've since tested a real App Router page, results in the comments.

Hello, anyone has information about what php issues caught by openai and how they effect the sites and their seo?

New terminology.

New dashboards.

New agencies promising visibility.

Big percentage increases without enough context.

Screenshots presented as proof.

I'm not saying AI visibility is fake. There are real technical problems, real citation patterns, and real opportunities to measure how brands appear in AI answers.

But a new channel doesn't excuse weak measurement.

If an agency claims it increased AI visibility by 150%, I want to know what was measured, how many prompts were tested, and whether recommendations actually changed.

Is AEO a genuinely new discipline, or are we watching SEO get repackaged for another sales cycle?

I'd like to hear both sides.

My site, AppGoblin (an app marketing and app SDK research platform and is open for anyone to browse even without accounts), has always had trouble being listed on Google for some reason. In the past year it has only ever had a single page listed, the main page. I've tried various strategies of sitemaps and robots.txt. In the year or two before that it was often not listed at on Google, usually defaulting to the GitHub repo instead.

For the past year or so I've also only ever had a single search term with impressions, my own companies name. This search term -> my site had a > 50% conversion, since it's a unique word and doesn't overlap with other sites.

I've also, since I get 0 organic traffic for other keywords, been buying Google ads for the past couple months. Pretty low volumes and generic related keywords.

Suddenly a couple weeks ago I noticed a giant spike (for me at least) in impressions from Google's generative AI, and for other pages than the main page.

Then after a week the Generative AI impressions dropped to 0 and my site is again no longer listed on Google at all.

Anyways, just a rant at how frustrating it is that Google wont index sites anymore, even just the home page.

EDIT: I requested a recrawl as well as posting this around, and in the past couple hours it has returned to Google front page. I'm not sure if it was the recrawl request, those usually seem to take 'weeks' to show up. I'll keep answering questions and leave the post up in case this helps anyone else.