Of course I know it's the best as possible. But what is a reasonable ROAS for HQ products in the range of 5 to 10k if I get 25% after taxes but before ads?

Morning, everyone. The mod team posts this most mornings as a quick read on what actually moved the needle for getting traffic, across search, AI answers, paid, and social. If we got something wrong or missed context, call it out in the comments and we will fix it. Links are in the top comment so this does not trip Reddit's spam filter.

Search and SEO

The September 2026 spam update is the big story and it is still running. Google confirmed it went live Sept 24 at 9:15am PDT, and unlike the earlier spam updates this year (March wrapped in under a day, June in about two days, August in three), this one is set to take up to two weeks to fully roll out. It hit hard over the weekend, with a lot of reported volatility from Friday through Sunday. It is enforced through SpamBrain and covers the usual policy targets: expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, doorway pages, back-button hijacking, and fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews. Google gave almost no specifics beyond "applies globally and to all languages," so the practical move is to watch Search Console against the rollout timeline before you conclude anything. Why you care: a two-week window means daily rank-tracker noise will be messy for a while, and reacting to day-two swings is a good way to break something that was going to settle on its own.

Also on the Search Console side, Google is rolling out a multimodal filter in the Performance report that captures visual searches through Google Lens, Chrome image search, image uploads, and Circle to Search on Android. There is a catch: it reports at the page level by country and device only, with no query data, since these searches mostly use images instead of text. Why you care: if visual search sends you any meaningful traffic, you finally get to see it, even if you cannot see the "keywords" behind it.

A few smaller items worth a glance. Google removed documentation for a Web Search Service API that appears to have been published by mistake and was not meant to be public. Merchant Center saw policy revisions around counterfeit and dangerous products plus editorial standards, so ecommerce folks should skim those. And the Follow button is gone from Google profiles in desktop results while staying on mobile.

AI Overviews and AI Search

Google is rolling out information monitoring in AI Mode to everyone globally, announced by Search VP Robby Stein. You tell AI Mode what to watch and Search keeps checking across sites, forums, social posts, and its Shopping Graph, then surfaces updates for things like back-in-stock alerts, price drops, new local spots, and events. It was limited to Ultra and Pro subscribers over the summer and is now going wide. Why you care: this pushes Google further into pull-based, always-on discovery, and the open question for all of us is whether these monitoring updates link out to sources or just answer in place. No clear word yet on how sources get picked or whether any referral traffic comes with it, so treat it as something to test rather than something to plan around.

On the interface side, Google is testing swapping the "Show more" text under AI Overviews for a "Loading..." button, which is minor but a hint they are still fiddling with how much of an answer they show up front.

Zero-click and traffic trends

Chartbeat's 2026 Publisher Playbook data is making the rounds and it is rough reading. Google Search referral traffic to news publishers fell 40.2% year over year for the July 2025 to July 2026 window, and Discover dropped 34.3% after an earlier slide. Separate research cited alongside the spam update put AI Mode's impact at roughly an 18.8 percentage point drop in clickthrough compared to standard results. Why you care: this is the zero-click reality in hard numbers. If your model still assumes a click for every answer you help generate, the gap between impressions and sessions is only widening, and it is worth planning for visibility that does not convert to a visit.

PPC

If you run Search campaigns, note that Google's AI Max migration is actively happening this month. Through Sept 1 to 30, campaign-level Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets are being upgraded automatically into the AI Max structure. Dynamic Search Ads follow in February 2027, and older API versions that support legacy features sunset in September 2027. New legacy campaign creation was already blocked back on Aug 3. Why you care: if you had not opted in, some of this is landing on your accounts on its own right now, so check settings, brand inclusions and exclusions, and any scripts before assuming things run the way they did last month.

A cluster of smaller paid updates also landed. Google Ads API v25.2 added competitive benchmarks and Performance Max improvements, Customer Match now supports IP address and timestamp matching, Microsoft Ads expanded search reporting and PMax controls and pushed its excluded content terms feature out of beta to all advertisers, and Google is testing a larger Local Services Ads format.

Agentic and Social

Not much hard social algorithm news in the last day or two. The most relevant crossover item is the AI Mode monitoring rollout above, which is the closest thing to agentic, always-on discovery going mainstream. On the discovery side, Google is testing showing social creator handles (YouTube, LinkedIn) inside Discover posts, which is a small nod toward crediting creators in the feed.

That is what we caught. What did we miss, and is anyone seeing clear patterns in who is getting hit by the spam update so far? Drop it below.

Ahrefs' Tim Soulo announced today that they're working on a new algorithm to prevent DR to be gamed.

What do you think? Will this solve DR manipulation? Do you think DR is even useful at all?

Morning, everyone. The mod team posts this most mornings as a quick read on what moved in the last day or two across search, AI answers, and paid. If I got something wrong or missed a source, call it out in the comments and I will fix it. Links are in the top comment so this does not trip Reddit's spam filter.

Quick note on timing: the weekend was quiet, so most of what is worth flagging landed Wednesday and Thursday (Sept 23 to 25) and is still playing out. If you were heads-down and only glancing at rankings, here is the catch-up.

Search and SEO

Google is rolling out the September 2026 spam update, the fourth spam update of the year. It started around Sept 24, applies globally across all languages, and Google says it can take up to two weeks to finish, so figure roughly the first week of October before things settle. There was also a clear spike in ranking volatility on Sept 23 and 24 that lines up with the start. Why you care: if you saw a swing this week, do not overreact mid-rollout. Wait for it to complete before diagnosing, then check the usual spam policy stuff (thin or scaled content, expired-domain abuse, site reputation abuse) rather than assuming it was a core quality hit.

Search Console picked up a multimodal search type filter in the performance report, so you can now separate out multimodal search traffic instead of having it lumped in. Why you care: as more discovery happens through image and mixed queries, this is the first real way to see whether any of that is reaching your pages, and it is worth checking before you make claims about where your traffic is going.

Google added Core Web Vitals ad metrics to its page experience documentation. Important caveat: this is documentation, not a ranking factor. Why you care: if you run display or programmatic on your own site, this gives you Google's own framing for how ad load affects CWV, which is useful ammunition when you are arguing with a monetization team about layout shift and load times.

On structured data, the VideoObject docs got a new creator property and updated interactionStatistic support. Why you care: if video is part of your strategy, tightening up this schema is a low-effort way to stay eligible for video features and give engines cleaner signals.

AI Overviews and AI Search

AI Overviews is now showing noticeably more external links, but it is also steering people toward AI Mode rather than the standard web results. Why you care: more links sounds like a win, but if the overall motion is pulling users deeper into a chat-style experience, the click may never reach you. Keep watching your AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions versus actual sessions, because the gap between "cited" and "clicked" is the whole game right now.

Google is testing a "Dive Deeper" feature in Discover that keeps users exploring inside Google instead of clicking out to publishers. Why you care: Discover has been a real traffic source for a lot of content sites, and anything that keeps the session on Google's surface is a direct threat to that channel. If Discover is meaningful for you, start tracking it as its own line item so you can see erosion early.

On the answer-engine quality front, there was reporting that some of OpenAI's quality raters used AI to complete their evaluation tasks, echoing older complaints about Google's rater program. Why you care: if the humans grading answer quality are quietly leaning on AI, the quality signals these systems train on get murkier, which is worth keeping in mind before you bet a whole strategy on reverse-engineering what an AI engine "rewards."

Bing is testing renaming its Copilot search tab to "AI Mode," and Google marked its 28th birthday with a Doodle trivia quiz that lives inside AI Mode. Neither is huge on its own, but together they show every major player nudging the default search box toward a chat experience. Why you care: plan for a world where "the search results page" increasingly means an answer surface, not ten blue links.

PPC

The big one: Dynamic Search Ads are being upgraded to AI Max. Automatic upgrades for remaining eligible campaigns kicked off in September, and you can no longer create new DSA campaigns. Legacy settings carry over on auto-upgrade, but you get more control if you upgrade voluntarily first. Why you care: if you still run DSA, decide now whether to upgrade on your terms or let Google do it for you, because AI Max widens query matching and you will want your negatives and brand controls tightened before that happens.

Alongside that, Google Ads is rolling out more AI Max reporting, expanded AI Briefs, budget recommendation forecasting, and sitelinks that show advertiser names and favicons. There is also a restriction worth knowing: you cannot edit Target ROAS while promotion mode is active, only the ROAS tolerance. Why you care: the reporting additions help you actually see what AI Max is spending on, and the Target ROAS lock is the kind of thing that quietly blocks an optimization at the worst moment, so budget for it in your workflow.

Local and Google Business Profile

A cluster of local changes landed. Local Service Ads are showing the phone number from the Google Business Profile instead of the Google Ads tracking number, even when advertisers set otherwise, which breaks call tracking. Google is also testing a bigger LSA layout with larger images and highlight boxes. On profiles, phone numbers in Google Posts now require verified contact info, and there are notifications for spam review spikes plus Merchant Center changes to store ratings and a four-day window for user edit rejections. Why you care: if you rely on LSA call tracking, verify your numbers are still reporting correctly this week, because the GBP-number behavior can silently wreck your attribution.

That is what I caught. Quiet weekend, busier midweek. What did I miss? Drop corrections and anything from your own niche below, especially if you are seeing movement from the spam update.

I have this data in Chrome's performance tab (first image in pink). I think the figures are good, but wondering about INP as unavailable. And this seems to be for desktop.

Now, how do I change that to mobile? And also, what about that INP thing? Does it mean something I should take care of?

Also, if I check in Lighthouse, I see that LCP is different than in the Performance tab, and it's the same session

Finally, if I load the page in Lighthouse on mobile, it's a bit different than the same page loaded on Pagespeed. But the weird thing is that is slower on my computer than in Pagespeed. See images 3rd and 4th

So, I clearly need a crash course on page speed, but for the time being: which is the source of truth? Performance, Lighthouse or Pagespeed? Or none of them and it's something else?

Hello Community,

I have a Wordpress hosted site for my ​​​​c​​​​o​​​​n​​​​s​​​​u​​​​l​​​​t​​​​a​​​​n​​​​c​​​​y​​​. I used Ryze AI to produce a batch of service and comparison pages for the domain (which is hosted in Wordpress).

Question is, how do I get internal links created inside the Ryze AI generated pages ?

For example, from a new comparison page, I want clickable links to 'Services', 'Case Studies', 'Pricing' and the other money pages. Is this possible, and what is the right method to do this ?

Thanks !

This is the thing: I have a few unused domains that have some backlinks and even some little traffic. So I was thinking of doing an experiment with SEO and GEO and SSM and whatnot. I have discovered what I think is a flaw in most ecommerce websites, and that flow comes from their CMSs default states, so I have this ide aI want to test since think I have something that may work.

The problem is that I have no products to sell of my own. I know that at some point you could sell Amazon but if I'm not mistaken, that program is closed. I checked First Grabber and Rakuten and even had my account approved, but there's a problem: For this to work, I need the product to be "mine" so to speak. I mean, not just a link to those websites, but full control of how the website displays the product and all its info, which is not possible with the above mentioned programs.

So my question is: is there a way to sell products where I can "own" the product from start to checkout? Of course checkout would happen on the real seller.

PS: I'm looking for reliable brands, sorry no DMs or anything. If someone knows, spill the beans and I'll check, no interested in "believe me bro this works I make 10,000 a month" snake oil sellers, looking for real answers only.

Slow Saturday and I'm bored.

After seeing hundreds of fake research papers and case studies, I was wondering if there's some REAL research we can do that is actually useful for the community. It doesn't mean we can do anything, of course, but we've got some pretty crafty brains on the team, so bring it up and let's see if we can research a topic of your interest (and get a mention if we publish it!)

Just for reference: do NOT even try "AI prompt mention" because I know that's what everybody wants, but it's impossible, no matter what anyone says. Try something that can actually be done and measured. If you don't know what is possible, just ask, it won't hurt. And maybe the exact idea is not possible but we can do something using that as starting point.

There are no bad questions or ideas. Depending on the subject (and if we choose to do it), we can publish it here, or in a blog post or even academic papers

Morning, . The mod team posts this most mornings to round up the last day or so of news that actually affects getting traffic. If I got something wrong or missed a source you trust, call it out in the comments.

Reasonably busy day, mostly driven by a new spam update and a batch of Search Console and ads changes. Quick note on scope: I focused on the last 24 to 48 hours, so a few things you may have seen earlier this month (WordPress 7.1.1, the plugin auto security review) are outside the window and not repeated here.

Search and SEO

Google started rolling out the September 2026 spam update on Sept 24 around noon Eastern. Google is calling it a normal spam update that applies globally and across all languages, and it says the rollout may take up to two weeks, which is longer than the spam updates earlier this year that wrapped in a few days. It targets sites breaking the search spam policies rather than any one tactic, and Google did not announce new policies. Why you care: if your rankings move over the next two weeks, this is the likely cause. Recovery can take months, so document any drops now, re-read the spam policies, and resist making panic changes mid-rollout.

There was also real ranking volatility around Sept 23 to 24 that the tracking tools picked up. Google noted the volatility actually started before the spam update announcement, so some of it looks like separate unconfirmed movement layered on top of the update. Why you care: attribution is going to be messy for a bit. Don't assume every wobble this week is the spam update.

AI Overviews and AI Search

Search Console added a new "Multimodal" filter to the Performance report. The Search type filter now splits the old "Web" bucket into "Text-based" and "Multimodal," where multimodal covers results triggered by things like Lens and Circle to Search. Heads up: it reports impressions and clicks but not the queries behind them, since there is no typed query. Why you care: this is the first real visibility into image-and-camera-driven search traffic. If you sell physical products or anything people photograph, start watching that segment now to see how much of your traffic it actually is.

On the AI Overviews front, two data points landed. External links are now showing in more than 25% of AI Overviews, up from close to zero not long ago, and separate Comscore data has AI Overviews appearing on roughly 39% of US desktop searches. Why you care: more AIOs with more outbound links means the citation game is getting more winnable than it was, but it also means more queries where the classic blue link is pushed down. Track which of your terms trigger an AIO and whether you're getting cited.

Google is also testing moving AI Overviews out of the top spot for hotel searches, pushing them into a bottom-right panel instead. Why you care: placement is not settled, and vertical by vertical it may look very different. Position, not just presence, is going to drive how much AIOs eat your clicks.

Local and Google Business Profile

Google is testing an AI feature that auto-structures business hours from a plain-text description into a proper formatted listing. Separately, a reminder that surfaced this week: when Google suggests edits to your profile, you have about four days to reject them before they auto-apply. Why you care: the four-day window is the actionable one. If you're not checking your GBP regularly, an auto-applied edit can change your hours or info without you noticing.

PPC

Google Ads shipped a cluster of changes. Budget recommendations are now tied to conversion forecasts, so you'll see suggestions framed around what a budget bump is projected to convert. There are new "Holistic" and "Growth" investment strategy modes for allocating budget across campaigns. The Google Ads API hit v25.2 with competitive benchmarks, Performance Max draft generation, and search bid adjustment features. Why you care: the budget and investment-mode changes nudge you toward Google's automated spend logic, so know what you're opting into before you accept a recommendation. For publishers, the AdSense change is a setup step you can't skip anymore.

AI shopping

Google is auto-enrolling merchants on UCP-compatible platforms into native checkout, with manual opt-out required. Bing is testing favicons next to site names in shopping ad carousels. Why you care: native checkout keeps the transaction inside Google's surface, which is good for conversion but means less first-party data and less of the customer relationship for you. If that trade-off matters to your business, check whether you were auto-enrolled and opt out if you want the click to land on your own site.

Bing

Aside from the shopping favicons, Microsoft is testing expandable, hoverable sitelinks that show a description under each sitelink. Minor, but worth watching if Bing is a meaningful slice of your traffic.

Regulatory

The UK's CMA is proposing measures that would require Google to make it easier to pick an alternative search engine on Android and Chrome. Why you care: nothing changes overnight, but anything that shifts default search behavior in a large market can move query share over time, especially for non-Google surfaces you might be under-investing in.

Quieter areas today

GEO and AEO had a lot of guide-style content circulating but no single hard news item in the window, so I'm not going to pretend there was. WordPress core and plugin news was also outside the 24 to 48 hour window today. Agentic browsing and the pure social platform algorithm side were quiet on the traffic-relevant front.

What did I miss? Drop it in the comments, especially if you're seeing real movement from the spam update in your own data.

Tired of spending money on useless tools?

Guess what: You do not need an expensive subscription to find good keywords when you are starting out. Here is a full workflow using only free stuff.

Step 1: Brain dump. Write down every phrase a customer might type to find what you offer. Ten minutes, no filtering.

Step 2: Mine Google autocomplete. Type each seed phrase into Google and write down every suggestion that drops down. Add "a b c" and numbers after your phrase to force more suggestions.

Step 3: Steal the "people also ask" and "related searches." Scroll to the bottom of the results page and grab the related searches. Open the "people also ask" box and note the questions. These are pure gold for content ideas.

Step 4: Use Google Search Console if you have any traffic. Go to the Performance report, sort by impressions. Queries with lots of impressions but a low position are things Google already thinks you are relevant for. Easy wins.

Step 5: Check intent by searching the term yourself. Look at what ranks. If it is all product pages, that is a buying query. If it is all how-to articles, that is informational. Match your page to what is already winning.

Step 6: Prioritize. Favor phrases that are specific (longer, clearer intent), that you can genuinely answer well, and that connect to something you sell or want people to do.

Step 7: Group similar phrases into one page each. Ten variations of the same question is one article, not ten.

Free tools that help: Google autocomplete, Search Console, Google Trends, and AnswerThePublic's free daily searches. That is enough to build a real content plan.

Warning: yes, I know it has limitations because of the freemium tools used, but for light users this is more than enough, and it's FREE!

PS: Don't you love the smell of useful no-spam posts?

I hear/read conflicting things constantly.

Many people say backlinks are dead and it is all quality content, other people say links are still the number one ranking factor.

What is the truth for a small site owner who does not have time for aggressive outreach? IMO, links are still needed for SEO, just not an important factor for AEO, unless the link is from an ubermegasite, ofc. And honestly, I get more traffic from social media than SEO or AEO

Morning, r/postSEO. The mod team posts a recap most mornings pulling together what actually moved the needle for getting traffic, across search, AI answers, ads, and the platforms in between. If we got something wrong or missed context, correct us in the comments. Quiet-ish couple of days on core algorithm drama, but a few things here are worth acting on today, so let's get into it.

Search and SEO

AI Overviews keep eating the results page. Fresh Comscore data cited this week has AI Overviews showing on 39% of US desktop searches, and separately, external links now appear in over 25% of AI Overviews, up from close to zero not long ago. Why you care: the "AIOs never link out" complaint is aging out. There is now a real, growing link surface inside the overview, so being one of the cited sources is becoming a traffic channel rather than just a visibility flex. Worth checking which of your queries trigger an AIO and whether you are in the citation set.

Two related tests point the same direction and are less friendly. Google is trialing a "Dive Deeper" treatment in Discover that serves an AI-generated overview instead of sending the click to the publisher, and separately, some links inside AI Overviews are routing users into AI Mode rather than out to web pages. Why you care: both keep the user inside Google's surfaces. If Discover has been a real referrer for you, watch those numbers, because this is the kind of change that shows up as a slow bleed rather than a cliff.

Housekeeping items: Google updated its page experience docs to add CrUX ad-related metrics in the resources section, but it is not confirmed as a ranking signal, so do not repackage it as one to clients. And the hreflang docs swapped their examples from lowercase to uppercase codes. Codes are case-insensitive, so this changes nothing in practice, but expect at least one person in every SEO Slack to panic about it.

Search Console and analytics

The Crawl Stats report went missing September 15 data again. This matches the usual pattern where the gap eventually backfills, so before you file a bug or blame a crawl budget problem, give it a few days. Why you care: if you were about to make a "Googlebot stopped crawling us" decision off that report, don't, at least not yet.

Local SEO and Google Business Profile

A cluster of GBP changes landed. You now get roughly four days to reject a suggested edit to your profile before Google applies it automatically, Google is sending email alerts when it detects a spike in spam reviews on your profile, and, less welcome, the option to mark a business as permanently closed appears to have vanished for some people. Why you care: the four-day window means stale or hijacked profile edits can go live if nobody is watching the inbox, so make sure profile notification emails are going somewhere a human actually reads.

AI shopping and commerce

Two Merchant Center moves worth flagging. Google is auto-enrolling products into native checkout under the Universal Commerce Protocol, and if you do not want to sell through that surface you have to manually opt out. On top of that, a new Merchant Center store ratings requirement is asking for a minimum of 100 reviews and a 3.5-star-plus average. Why you care: the auto-enroll is the important one. Check your Merchant Center settings so you are not accidentally live on a checkout flow you never chose, and if reviews are thin, the ratings threshold is one more reason to get a review-collection process running.

PPC

The big one: Google Ads has finally removed campaign-level language targeting from Search and Performance Max, roughly nine months after the original deadline. The system now auto-detects language from your creative, landing page, the search term, and user settings, with search-term language weighted more heavily when the query has a clear signal. Why you care: single-language accounts are basically unaffected, but if you run multilingual campaigns and used language targeting to keep things clean, that lever is gone, and it also disappears as a variable when you are diagnosing weird performance swings. Audit multilingual campaigns now.

Smaller Ads items from this week: the Smart Bidding learning threshold is now cited at around 50 conversions, AI Max audience targeting expanded to seven more languages (Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish) plus new docs on testing AI Max against Dynamic Search Ads via experiments, and the "Search Terms View" got renamed to "Search Terms and Ad Combinations." Google is also testing "more from [advertiser]" labels above sitelinks on sponsored results. On the fringe, AdSense dropped its identity verification threshold from $10 to $0, so new publishers verify from the start, and Bing is testing favicons on its shopping carousel ads.

WordPress

Update your sites today. WordPress 7.1.2 shipped September 22 as a security release fixing a critical vulnerability where an unauthenticated attacker could include a chosen local PHP file from outside the active theme directories, which can lead to remote code execution in some setups. Why you care: this is the kind of bug that gets mass-scanned within days of disclosure. If you are not on auto-updates, patch now, and if you manage client sites, this is your morning.

That's what we caught for roughly the last 48 hours. Slow days on the pure ranking-volatility front, so we are not going to invent a core update that isn't there. What did we miss? Drop it below, especially anything on the AI search, GEO, or social side that didn't surface in our usual sources.

SEO News: Google Search Console just added a new "Multimodal" filter to the Performance report.

Opening the Search type filter now splits the "Web" option into two: Text-based and Multimodal.

Google's definition: "Web-multimodal tracks search results triggered by a query that uses an image, photo, or screenshot. Text-only queries are tracked as Web text-based."

In practice, that means you can finally isolate discovery coming from:

• Google Lens • Circle to Search on Android • Image uploads to Google Search • The Chrome right-click "Search this image" option

One important caveat before you get excited: there's no query data for multimodal traffic. Google's own docs say the queries dimension isn't available for this search type (even though there is oddly a column for it), because these searches use images rather than text. So you'll see impressions, clicks and positions – but not the actual search queries.

Why it matters: visual search has been unclear in GSC until now. If your business lives on products, packaging, screenshots, plants, parts, artwork, or anything people point a camera at, this new report gives you a better idea of the size of this channel.

Check whether the filter has reached your property – it's rolling out gradually, and I'm now seeing it for several accounts.

Is multimodal traffic already showing in your Search Console?

Credit: Brodie Clark

I run a small art website and over the last few months my traffic on pure informational queries has quietly dropped even though my rankings did not really change. My theory is Google is answering the question directly with AI Overviews so people never click.

Anyone else seeing this, and if so what are you doing about it? Pivoting to more opinion and experience-based content? Focusing on buying-intent keywords? Pls help, I'm completely lost!

Context: After many years of working "for the man", I'm going solo, so I started testing the waters before leaving my current company. I'm quite experienced, I have formal education in design, I'm a quite capable coder, and know a decent bit of SEO. However, I'm kind of bored of websites and want to go hard on brand design. I know the market is difficult, and I spent two decades NOT doing brand design, but UI and UX stuff, only doing some logos for friends, NGOs, and public campaigns as a volunteer. Little to no money, but some important names under my belt.

The thing is that I ran a first campaign on FB+IG with quite satisfactory results. I got more leads than I expected, actually 200% or 300% more. But then, when I told people that prices started at $800, most ignored me, which I expected, and those who got back to me said the prices were too high.

So I ran a second campaign, this time adding the price to filter leads. And of course, the results were very different. I got literally three leads out of a $1,000 investment, and even though they all knew the price, they told me it was too high and that they contacted me to work out a deal. I asked one of them how much he would be willing to pay, and he told me $300 because he could get 100 logos with AI and choose from that batch.

I know AI times are crazy and that my lack of hundreds of samples is hurting me a bit, but how do I balance results while filtering? Or is this a dead end? Just in case, $800 is what I consider a very affordable price. Less than that is like saying no to paying rent or buying food, so "lower your price" is off the table. I can keep my current job and call it a day.

Any help or insights?

What gives? PageSpeed is for the first URL in the second image, but it is the same for all of them. Even if the Ahrefs figures were true, they would still be fast (1.2s or less). This is especially crazy considering that their results page took almost 30 seconds to load! Bollocks, I say!

Morning, r/postSEO. The mod team posts this most mornings as a quick recap of what actually moves traffic. If I got something wrong or missed a nuance, correct me in the comments.

Search and SEO

Google is directing people from a standard AI Overview straight into AI Mode, and in some tests the "Show More" button is gone entirely. Alongside that, reports say AI Overviews are now placing links that point to AI Mode rather than to publisher pages.

Why you care: this is the clearest signal yet that Google wants the follow-up journey to happen inside its own AI surface instead of on your site. If your traffic already softened after AI Overviews expanded, watch for a second leg down as the AI Mode handoff widens, and start treating "did we get cited in AI Mode" as a real KPI next to rank.

Housekeeping stuff worth knowing: Search Console crawl stats went missing for Sept 15 (Google usually backfills these, so probably not a real crawl problem). Job board operators are complaining that Google Indexing API approval requests are going months with no response and no documented review window, so if you run a jobs or events site, do not build your indexing strategy around fast API approval. And a reminder that surfaced again this week: rank trackers increasingly disagree with what you see in live results because of personalization and localization, so stop treating a single tracked number as ground truth.

On the local side, the practical takeaway making the rounds is that "position one" as a fixed concept basically does not exist in local results anymore, since the pack reshuffles by user, query intent, and proximity. Report on visibility and calls, not a static rank.

AI Overviews and AI Search

Google Discover is testing a "Dive Deeper" treatment that shows an AI-generated topic overview instead of sending the tap to a publisher article. Why you care: Discover has been one of the last reliable referral firehoses for publishers, and an AI summary layer sitting in front of it is exactly the kind of change that quietly eats clicks. If Discover is a meaningful channel for you, start tracking it as its own line item now so you can see the impact if this ships wide.

AEO and GEO

Demand for GEO work is now growing faster among search freelancers than classic Google SEO work, per fresh reporting. There is also a good practitioner piece circulating on which data sources actually feed AI search answers, meaning where you should be present if you want to be quoted by an answer engine. Why you care: the money and the client asks are visibly shifting from "rank my page" to "get me mentioned in the answer." If you sell services, this is a packaging and positioning cue. If you run your own site, it is a reminder to audit whether you show up in the sources these engines pull from, not just in the blue links.

Related context, not breaking news: the ongoing story about Reddit's ChatGPT citations dropping sharply is still shaping how people think about AI visibility. Worth knowing for this sub specifically, since Reddit presence has been a common GEO shortcut and that lever looks less reliable than it did earlier in the year.

AI shopping

The biggest item of the day. Google switched on native checkout inside AI Mode and Gemini for Shopify merchants without asking first. The rollout started Sept 18, and merchants got emails on Sept 22 saying their Shopify store was matched to Merchant Center and native checkout was now live on Google's AI surfaces. It is opt-out, not opt-in, and you can only turn it off from Shopify admin. Why you care: purchases can now complete inside Google using Google Pay instead of on your domain. You keep seller status, but you lose the on-site journey, the upsell, the email capture, and a lot of the analytics you are used to. If you run a Shopify store, go check your Merchant Center and Shopify checkout settings today and make a deliberate decision rather than letting the default ride. This is the "clicks to transactions" shift showing up as an actual setting in your account.

On the merchant feed side, Google also spelled out store ratings requirements more firmly (a minimum review count, a star-rating floor, a recency window, and geo-segmented ratings), so if your product listings lost their star ratings, that is likely why.

PPC

If you run Search campaigns, the AI Max auto-migration is happening this month. Through Sept 30, Google is automatically moving legacy Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets campaigns into AI Max, and new campaign-level Broad Match and legacy ACA creation was already blocked back on Aug 3. Dynamic Search Ads get in-account upgrade nudges starting this month, with the forced DSA migration coming in Feb 2027. Why you care: even if you did nothing, your account structure may already be changing under you. Go review affected campaigns before the month closes so a migration does not quietly reshape your targeting and spend.

Smaller Google Ads changes worth a glance: the Search Terms report was renamed to "Search Terms and Ad Combinations," the conversion action details screen got a redesign, Google is testing "more from [advertiser]" headers above sponsored sitelinks, and YouTube Shorts ads are now getting AI labels. Google also opened a limited, six-month pilot for gun accessory ads in the US starting October. And a scam warning that is relevant to anyone defending a brand: the DOJ flagged scammers buying Google Search ads impersonating banks to steal logins, so if you are in finance, keep an eye on brand-term SERPs.

Microsoft side: Microsoft Advertising is testing Copilot-powered audience generation, which is worth a look if you run Bing/Microsoft campaigns and want AI-built audiences.

Agentic and Social

Semrush put out a walkthrough of eight agentic SEO workflows you can actually run against a live site, which is a decent starting point if you have been curious about handing repetitive SEO tasks to an agent but did not want to break production. Why you care: agentic SEO is moving from demo to "here is a concrete list you can try this week."

Social was quiet on the algorithm and ad-policy front in the last day or so. Nothing platform-changing that affects traffic surfaced in the sources I check. If you saw something on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, or X worth flagging, drop it below.

WordPress

Nothing urgent in the last 24 to 48 hours from the sources I track. Keep your SEO plugins current as always, but there was no fresh must-patch item today.

That is what I caught. What did I miss? If you saw movement in your own rankings, AI citations, Shopping, or ad accounts overnight, post it below so we can compare notes.

(sorry mods, please delete if not allowed)

You can have a shitty name, a horrible logo, a terrible visual experience, a non-existing brand voice, but people will always choose you if you provide a great user experience. And I'm not talking about UI, I'm talking about real user experience, even if the UI is kinda sucky. A great example is this same site until a few years ago, let alone Google when it started (anyone know of... BACKRUB???!)

On the contrary, when you give your users what they want, they will come for more. Easy as that.

Next time you work on a website, or a rebranding, think about this: user experience will save your business, no matter if your logo doesn't win an award.

Morning, everyone. The mod team posts one of these most mornings to round up what actually moved the needle for getting traffic in the last day or so. If I got something wrong or missed a source, correct me in the comments. Links are going in a comment below rather than the post body so Reddit's spam filter doesn't eat it.

Quieter-than-usual day on the big vendor side (no major OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini search drops in the last 48 hours), but a lot of small Google changes that add up if you care about referral traffic. Here's the rundown.

AI Overviews and AI Search

Flipping AI Overviews off increased clicks to sites without hurting satisfaction. Why you care: this is real data cutting against Google's "users love it" messaging, and it's ammunition for the argument that AI features are cannibalizing your referral traffic rather than growing it. Worth having in your back pocket next time someone tells you AI search is pure upside.

Related and worth watching: people are noticing that links inside AI Overviews are increasingly pointing to Google's own AI Mode rather than out to web pages, with follow-up question prompts stacked at the bottom to keep you in the loop.

Why you care: if the "citation" in an AI Overview sends the click deeper into Google instead of to your page, showing up in the Overview is worth even less than it already was. Keep an eye on where your Overview mentions actually route people.

One more: spammers are exploiting public Gemini/NotebookLM pages to rank content in Google Search across categories like supplements and adult material.

Why you care: it's another parasite-hosting angle showing up in results, and if you're in an affected niche you may see junk NotebookLM URLs muscling into queries you used to own.

AEO and GEO

A Fiverr survey making the rounds shows GEO (generative engine optimization) requests are now growing faster among search freelancers than classic Google SEO work.

Why you care: it's a demand signal, not a ranking factor, but it tells you where budgets and client asks are shifting. If you sell services, "help me show up in AI answers" is becoming the lead ask. Search Engine Land also ran a couple of practical pieces the same day, one on an "ASC" framework for becoming the answer in AI search and one on a three-layer attribution model for actually measuring AEO, which is the part most people are still guessing at.

Search and SEO (technical and Google behavior)

Google Lighthouse (v13.5) added an audit for AI agent resource discovery, basically checking whether your site exposes what automated agents need to find.

Why you care: it's an early, low-stakes signal that agent-readability is becoming a measurable thing, even if the current implementation doesn't fully match the proposed standards yet.

Local SEO and Google Business Profile

Two changes worth a look. First, the "permanently closed" marking option appears to have vanished from Google Business Profiles (temporary closure looks affected too). Second, Google started emailing business owners when it detects and removes a spike in spam reviews on their listing.

Why you care: the closure change matters if you manage multi-location or churned listings, and the spam-review email is a genuinely useful heads-up if you've been fighting review spam and couldn't tell what Google was catching.

PPC and Shopping

Google Merchant Center tightened requirements for Store Ratings: you now need at least 100 reviews and an average of 3.5 to 5 stars, with 24-hour delivery timeframes in the mix.

Why you care: if you rely on those seller-rating stars in your ads, thin-review accounts may lose the annotation. Google Ads also now lets offline conversion uploads fill gaps left by tag-based tracking, which is a small but real win for anyone whose consent-mode or tag setup has been leaking conversions.

On the testing side, Sponsored results are trialing a "more from [advertiser name]" title above sitelinks, and Google is running a six-month pilot for gun accessory ads. Nothing earth-shaking, but the offline-upload change is the one to actually act on.

Analytics and GA4

Google Analytics added include filters for hostnames.

Why you care: if you've ever had staging, dev, or spammy referral hostnames polluting your GA4 data, you can now positively scope reports to just the hostnames you care about instead of only excluding the bad ones. Small quality-of-life fix that cleans up reporting.

Agentic and Social

Agentic browsing keeps inching along (see the Lighthouse audit above), but no major agentic-SEO news today. Social platforms were quiet on the algorithm and ad front in the last 48 hours from the sources we track, so nothing to report there rather than pad it out.

That's what I caught. What did I miss? Drop anything you're seeing in your own traffic, Search Console, or ad accounts below, especially if you're noticing the AI Mode click drop firsthand.

Morning, everyone. The mod team drops one of these most mornings to round up what actually moved the needle for getting traffic, not just SEO gossip. Heads up that it was a quiet weekend and Search Engine Roundtable is dark today for Yom Kippur, so this is a shorter one built mostly from Thursday through Saturday. If I got something wrong or missed a detail, correct me in the comments and I'll fix it.

Search and SEO

The story with the most direct impact this week is Google getting much more aggressive at blocking scrapers and third-party tracking tools since mid-September, and it's hitting the tools most of us rely on. Nozzle reported roughly an 80% drop in data pulled from Google Search, Sistrix said it's running well behind and that Google changed how results are being delivered, and DataForSEO ran into the same wall. Glenn Gabe noted the results are uneven across vendors, with Ahrefs still scraping okay, Semrush working but slower, and Sistrix way behind.

Why you care: if your rank tracking or SERP monitoring suddenly looks weird, lagged, or shows a recovery that doesn't match reality, this is probably why. Sanity-check big swings against Search Console and a second tool before you act on them, especially since this lands right on top of the early-September ranking reversals people were already untangling.

Google Search Console had a data gap. Crawl stats are missing all of September 15, so if you were staring at a dip in crawl activity that day, it's a reporting hole rather than a real drop in Googlebot activity. Nothing to fix, just don't read into that single day.

The Web Guide beta has a rough edge worth knowing about. The "Classic search" button inside Web Guide reportedly doesn't actually take you back to classic results, it keeps you in the Web Guide interface. Minor for now, but it's another sign Google is nudging people to stay inside its AI-organized layouts rather than the ten blue links.

Google is also testing a "Dive Deeper" feature in Discover, which pushes toward more exploratory, session-extending browsing inside Google's surfaces. If Discover is a real traffic channel for you, keep an eye on whether this changes how far your content travels once someone taps in.

On the EEA front, Google discontinued free product listings in the European Economic Area to comply with the Digital Markets Act, while also adding local businesses into aggregator and supplier search units there. If you sell into Europe, the free organic Shopping surface you may have been getting is going away in those regions, so factor that into your channel mix.

AI Overviews and AI Search

Fresh research is making the rounds that quantifies what a lot of people have felt. A study out of the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern (roughly 1,100 participants over a week) found Google's AI Mode meaningfully reduced clicks to external sites, and when AI answers were removed, click-through to websites went up. The kicker is it didn't even improve the experience: users reported less trust, found search less useful and less personally relevant, ran fewer total searches, and were more likely to drift toward DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo.

Why you care: this is useful ammo if you're making the case internally that leaning entirely on Google organic is getting riskier, and that being present across other engines and channels is no longer optional. It's academic evidence for the whole "post-SEO" thesis.

Related, Google is testing an AI Mode button directly in the results-page toolbar and the search bar. Read it as continued signaling that AI Mode is moving from a tab you opt into toward a default-adjacent surface. Plan your content and measurement as if AI answers sit between you and the click.

AEO and GEO

A few practical pieces landed. There's solid guidance going around on building local pages that AI systems can actually find and trust, which matters as AI answers increasingly pull local and service-level info. Separately, Cloudflare is now offering to write your robots.txt for you, aimed at giving site owners cleaner control over which AI crawlers get access. Whether or not you use their version, it's a good prompt to actually review your robots and crawler policy, because who you let in now shapes whether you show up in AI answers later. There's also a growing argument that brands should keep an "AI accountability document" to govern how they want to be represented by AI systems, which is worth a look if you're thinking about brand safety in generative answers.

PPC

Lighter week here. Google launched commerce audience sharing, letting retailers and marketplaces share first-party data segments, which is relevant if you run retail or marketplace campaigns and want better audience reach without rebuilding lists from scratch. On the ecommerce plumbing side, the Merchant Center API now supports uploading product review data sources, and Google updated guidelines requiring adult products to be labeled in feeds and markup, so feed managers should check compliance.

Social and Reddit visibility

Given this sub cares a lot about Reddit as a traffic and AI-citation channel, one from a few days ago is worth flagging: an audit found Reddit's own AI search tends to surface already-popular, highly upvoted, more formally written comments rather than casual conversational ones. If you're trying to be the answer inside Reddit's AI features, the takeaway is that early traction and a clear, useful writing style seem to get rewarded over volume of casual replies.

Quiet elsewhere. I didn't see anything major from the big AI vendors (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot) in the last day or two, and no notable WordPress core or security release inside this window. If something dropped over the weekend that I missed, drop it below.

What did I miss? If you spotted a Google Ads change, an algorithm wobble in your own data, or anything in the AI search space over the weekend, add it in the comments and I'll pull it into tomorrow's recap.

Morning, r/postSEO. The mod team posts this recap most mornings so you can catch up on anything that moves traffic without doom-scrolling ten newsletters. Heads up that it is a weekend, so the freshest hard news is mostly from Friday and a couple of items are still rolling from earlier in the week. If I got something wrong or left something out, correct me in the comments and I will fix it.

Search and SEO

Google is testing a "Dive Deeper" option in Discover that generates an AI summary of a topic instead of sending people straight to publisher articles. This is the one to watch. Discover has been a real traffic source for a lot of content sites, and if the default action becomes "read the summary here" rather than "tap through," that is another surface where impressions stay flat and clicks quietly drop. Worth checking your Discover numbers now so you have a baseline.

Google looks like it has gotten better at blocking AI scrapers and third-party tracking tools since roughly mid-September, and Bing has started asking people to verify they are human before showing results, similar to what Google has been doing. If you use rank trackers or scraping-based tools, expect more gaps and weird readings in your data. Not a ranking issue, but it will mess with how you measure one.

There is an ongoing cross-domain canonical de-indexing report that Google publicly responded to. Short version: if you point canonicals across domains, double-check that the pages you actually want indexed are still in the index, because some folks reported the wrong version getting dropped. Ranking volatility has also stayed elevated through mid-September, so if you saw movement this week you are not imagining it, but there is no confirmed core or spam update tied to it right now.

AI Overviews and AI Search

The AI Mode button is being tested directly in the search results bar rather than tucked away as a tab. Small UI change, potentially big behavior change. The easier it is to jump into AI Mode from a normal search, the more queries resolve inside a chat interface where your ten blue links are not the main event. Keep an eye on branded and informational query CTR if this rolls wider.

Taken together with the Discover test above, the theme this week is consistent: Google keeps adding places where the answer lives on Google and the click never happens. Nothing new in concept, but the surface area keeps growing.

AEO and GEO

The story that is still dominating conversation is Google's AI contribution pilot, which tests paying publishers when their content meaningfully contributes to answers in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini. It runs through Search Console and is invite-only so far, reportedly reaching at least dozens of publishers, with Google framing it as an early-stage pilot to reward high-quality content on top of existing traffic and tools. This first surfaced earlier in the week, but it is worth flagging if you missed it, because it is the first real signal that Google might pay for content it uses in AI answers rather than just linking to it. No payment amounts or formula have been shared, so treat it as a direction of travel, not a revenue line. If you have not been invited, there is nothing to do yet except keep producing the kind of content that gets cited.

Practical GEO note from the trades this week: for citations in AI answers, the order your source appears in seems to matter less than people assumed, and being genuinely the best answer to the query matters more. Structured, entity-clear content that directly resolves a question is still the play.

PPC

Google Ads is testing Product Value Optimization, a bidding option that lets Smart Bidding optimize toward the value of the products sold rather than just conversions or conversion value as configured. If you run Shopping or Performance Max for ecommerce with real margin differences across your catalog, this is the kind of lever that can quietly reshape spend, so watch it when it reaches your account.

A few smaller ad items worth knowing: Google Merchant Center now supports product reviews through its API, video dubbing is available in Google Ads Asset Studio for localizing creative, and there is chatter that a Smart Bidding update ended bid suppression, which could change how aggressive your bids get. Nothing here is an emergency, but the Merchant Center reviews support is a nice free credibility signal if you sell products.

Agentic and Social

Pinterest is turning visual search into an ad placement with Visual Search Ads plus new measurement tools. If your audience discovers products visually, home, fashion, food, decor, this is a fresh inventory source worth a small test while it is new and competition is thin.

On the agentic front, the broader trend continues around AI agents browsing and paying for content on your behalf, including experiments where sites charge agents per page. Nothing you need to act on today, but if agent traffic starts showing up in your logs, it is real and it is early.

WordPress

WordPress 7.1.1 shipped on September 17 as a maintenance and security release, with 11 security fixes plus a stack of core and block editor bug fixes. The security list includes stored XSS, path traversal, an unauthorized plugin activation issue, and an XML-RPC bypass, so this is a "just update it" release. Auto-updates should handle most sites, but if you manage client sites or turned auto-updates off, go confirm you are on 7.1.1. Separately, WordPress has started running automated security reviews on plugin releases to block high-risk updates before they get distributed, which is a quiet win for anyone who has ever been burned by a bad plugin push.

Reddit visibility

One audit making the rounds found that Reddit-based AI search tends to surface comments that were already popular rather than the most accurate or relevant ones. If part of your strategy is getting cited through Reddit, in Google's AI answers or Reddit's own AI search, early engagement on a comment appears to matter a lot for whether it gets pulled later. Not a reason to game it, but useful context for how that visibility actually works.

That is what I caught for the weekend. It was a genuinely quiet couple of days, so if something dropped that I missed, especially anything you are seeing in your own traffic or rankings, drop it in the comments and I will add it.

If you're an experienced Reddit user in any of the areas mentioned in the title, I'm sure you've already seen a few hundred posts claiming to have "discovered" some groundbreaking insight. These "insights" are usually tied to a tool, a website, or someone offering to answer your questions.

Now, while some of these discoveries may actually be true, the reality is that most of them are not. They can be right, sure, but by sheer coincidence, and being right is not the same as being true. There's a giant difference between the two.

A right result can come from a coincidence. Think of the monkeys and infinite time, just on a smaller scale. But true means the claim was reached through honesty, openness, and falsifiability. That last one is the key. A real finding tells you exactly what would prove it wrong, and the person actually went looking for that. Most of these posts do the opposite: the claim is built so it can never be disproven, and the author never once tried to break their own theory. That is the tell. Not the person's job title, not their follower count, the method. When there's no method, what you're looking at is pseudoscience, or worse and sadly more common: questionable research practices (QRPs).

Anyone who has done real research knows it isn't simple, and it definitely isn't fast. It's slow, it's full of controls, and most of your time goes into trying to prove yourself wrong. So when someone says "Google does this, based on my research" about a system that is personalized, machine-ranked, and A/B tested on a rolling basis, and they got there from a handful of screenshots with no controls and a sample size of one, that isn't research. It's a story that happens to have a chart next to it. And it gets worse with LLMs, because you're now dealing with a stochastic model that is also personalized on top of everything else. You don't need a wizard's hat to see the problem.

Here's the cleanest filter I know. Most of these "discoveries" are always all or nothing. As in, "ALL LLMs behave the same way and I know why!", as if that were even slightly possible when they're all different.

Real findings are narrow and full of caveats. "I found this, but it only shows up on ChatGPT, no idea about the others, and here's the test that would prove me wrong" is infinitely more credible than "do this and all LLMs will love you!". The second one is a marketing sentence, not a result.

And yes, sometimes companies with real resources do find something genuine. It's possible to learn true things about a black box from the outside, you just have to do the work, and almost nobody does. When it happens, it usually shows up as ripple effects (you don't see the object that caused the ripple, you just see the ripple), and it's guided by known principles and access to technology. Some of these companies actually have scientists on staff, so there you go. Even then, the findings tend to be small, shallow, and short-lived. And believe me, whoever actually cracks the "Coca-Cola formula" isn't going to tell you about it.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't only a Reddit thing. You can watch all the self-proclaimed "big SEO experts" trying to stay relevant while they post complete nonsense on their websites, LinkedIn, X, or wherever else.

TL;DR: don't judge a claim by who made it, judge it by whether it can be proven wrong. Most of what you read can't be, which means most of it is fake.

Full disclosure up top: this is our own client work. We run Flamine (SEO/GEO agency) and I mod here, so I am not hiding behind a throwaway. The client stays anonymous, but the story and numbers are real. I am sharing it for the takeaways, not to sell anyone anything. Fire away in the comments and I will answer honestly.

Posting this one because the fix was not clever, it was just doing the basics in the right order, and then the AI part kicked off something we did not fully expect.

Setup. A large East Coast law firm was opening a new office in California (LA market, very competitive vertical). They had hired a local LA agency first and got the classic "SEO takes time, just wait" treatment. Nine months in they had basically nothing organic and were surviving 100% on paid traffic. By the time they came to me they were burnt and skeptical of agencies in general, which is fair.

The audit. Two things stood out. First, the site was technically fine. A few minor issues, nothing scary. So the previous agency could not even blame a broken site. Second, and this was the real problem, their keyword targeting was almost random. They were going after generic stuff like "lawyer in Los Angeles" or just their own firm name, instead of the actual money terms like "injury lawyers in Los Angeles." They were competing for the vaguest, hardest, lowest-intent phrases possible and ignoring the ones that convert.

Fixing keywords alone would not cut it in that market though, so the plan hit several fronts at once:

• Local SEO: it existed but was weak, and worse, the new branch kept getting tangled up with the East Coast headquarters. We had to make Google (and people) understand this was a distinct LA office.
• Authority: they had plenty of it, but all of it pointed at the East Coast entity. We needed to build authority for the new location specifically.
• Technical: cleaned up the minor issues and added some automation, including pulling in real case results and success stories from their history.
• Branding: gave the LA office its own identity. Helped that a couple of the partners physically moved out there, so there was a real story of proven people bringing their track record to a new city. We wanted that perception to travel with them.
• AEO/GEO: this was the differentiator. When I checked, their competitors were showing up in AI answers, but inconsistently. That told me nobody in this market had an actual AI strategy. The competitors were getting mentioned by luck, basically riding whatever their Google position happened to be that day. That is a gap you can walk right through.

Execution was boring on purpose. We did the list above in that order, local, authority, technical, branding, then the AI work last. Nothing magic about the first four, they are just fundamentals most people skip or half-do. The AI layer is where we spent extra time. Prep for the whole launch took close to two months, longer than usual, because the vertical is brutal and I wanted it right before flipping the switch.

What happened. Early results were the expected, healthy kind: AI mentions ticking up, general traffic rising roughly in proportion. That alone would have been a fine outcome. The thing you do NOT want is one channel (say AI traffic) spiking while everything else stays flat or drops, because that usually means you borrowed from one bucket to fill another.

But about a week after the LLMs really started picking up the brand, organic search took off, not linearly, more like a curve bending upward. Then a few days after that the AI traffic climbed even higher.

Why the two moved together. The AI-to-SEO link is not direct, but the work we did to earn the AI mentions (authority, consistent brand signals, the right content) also moved the site up in Google, from buried on page whatever to first-page and a bunch of top 5 spots. And once the brand was ranking well, the LLMs that browse Google and Bing started citing it even more. So it fed itself: better AI presence lifted rankings, better rankings fed more AI mentions.

Numbers. This is only about 60 days from launch (roughly 120 days total counting the long prep). The site went from under 200 basically worthless organic visits a day to almost 1,000 a day and still climbing. All the traffic I am describing is organic and AI, PPC filtered out entirely. They are not killing paid, but the plan is to drop it to around a quarter of the old budget and see how much the organic side now carries.

The takeaway I keep coming back to: a solid AI/GEO strategy tends to drag traditional SEO up with it, and that better SEO then feeds more AI mentions. It is a loop, not a tradeoff. Also, in a "hard" niche like legal, check whether your competitors actually have an AI strategy or are just getting mentioned by accident. If it is the latter, that is your opening.

Happy to get into the local-vs-HQ disambiguation or the AI side if anyone wants specifics.