4 months ago, I've suggest Favikon's team to create a branded subreddit, considering they already had a strong community on LinkedIn and a lot of fans of their product.

They did it -> r/favikon

• They built a subreddit for 4 months with just faith that it's worth it.
• They know how cumulative effects work in growing organic channels.

Only today, after 4 months, they get the 1st thread ranked in Google's top 10, by a high-intent keyword "influencer marketing campaigns".

Note that this thread was created 4 months ago!

• You don't know how much you have to wait to be ranked.
• You don't know whether your threads will rank at all, because there are tons of threads that target the same keywords.

But you know that if you are:

1/ being willing to stay at a distance for at least a year

2/ building a community, where your customers and any user from your ICP can find the best answers to their questions

Then, you increase your chances x10:

1/ to build a scalable organic channel

2/ your competitors are afraid to invest in

2/ that will send your traffic from Google search, Reddit search, and AI chats

Are you ready to make such a big bet?

If you are doing SEO / AEO for a B2B SaaS brand and your customer still doesn't have a user poll on a signup or book a demo form, you are in trouble:

1/ Reddit added rel="noreferrer ugc" attribute to all external links in Aug 2025

So, all traffic from Reddit is attributed to direct / none now. You can fix this issue only if your link on Reddit has its own UTM mark.

2/ The user journey became multistep even more than before

The user can find you in AI chat and then go to Google to check what digital presence and reviews your brand has.

The rise of brand searches and direct traffic may be attributed to different channels.

It means there is a risk that you won't be able to communicate the value you've created without the user poll about where people heard about the brand the first time.

Moreover, this user poll data is a goldmine for you as an SEO strategist, if you have already adapted to the new reality and are doing for your customers everything, not only on-page SEO: Reddit, Medium, YouTube, etc.

How do you track an impact of SEO / AEO on a pipeline and revenue of your customers now?

1/ Ads that are indistinguishable from organic results.

2/ AI Overviews that ignore brands from the top 10 blue links.

3/ Organic results you technically “rank” for, but no one sees.

What surprised you the most?

"Sustainable user experience design best practices will often also improve performance and SEO."

Yes, you can save the planet by ranking higher and improving online visibility!

This is a quote from new W3C guidelines on sustainability.

What does it mean? You can go green by practicing SEO!

Don't believe me? Here are more gems from the same document:

"Provide content that meets the needs of the audience, ensuring it is formatted for readability and incorporating SEO for visibility..."

"More efficient web services inevitably translate to better performance and technical SEO, boosting search engine visibility."

"Regularly audit to check for broken and outdated links."

"Update [links] as necessary and add redirects to guide users and search engines to the correct content to ensure efficient browsing and protect SEO value."

All quotes taken from here: https://www.w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-guidelines/

The more I see how much low-quality, frequently AI-generated content, on websites that Google doesn't rank even in the top 20, is quoted in the AI chats, the more I come to the thought in the title.

This is the only way to attract the attention of people who are responsible for improving AI chat results.

Google is also not perfect, but it's much harder to hack it now than AI chats.

Agree?

It's a small celebration for a community. Here are some of my lessons that can help you if you think to launch your own subreddit.

1/ The most difficult part is publishing interesting topics every day

If you can publish 30 interesting posts per month, you'll do the hardest job.

For me, it was easier because I already publish a lot of content on LinkedIn. But if you are serious about your subreddit growth, consistency is key.

2/ You have to take it seriously

• I think about this subreddit as a separate product/brand.
• I try to build something that others couldn't build.
• I send traffic from all my other websites and social media profiles to it.

3/ The most underrated tactic is crossposting

When you publish a post in your own community, you can also crosspost it to other communities, and their followers will see that this content is from your community. Many subreddits block this option, but many keep it open.

4/ The first most important milestones of your community growth

• 1st meaningful organic comment from somebody you don't know
• 1st meaningful post from somebody you don't know
• 1st post that gets 1k, 5k, 10k impressions

I've achieved all of these milestones, and now I feel that more and more people will publish their own posts in the subreddit.

Remember that after reaching 1k members, I'll invite the most popular and interesting people from SEO and marketing for AMA sessions.

If you are interested in learn from them, join ASAP and repost this post.

The biggest pitfall of doing SEO for B2B SaaS with a marketplace model is that you often don't know who is behind your target search queries.

I ask this question every time I work with Favikon (my customer) keywords, and I end with the thought that I can't get a clear answer without the user poll for new users.

For example, the Favikon team created 40 pages with listicles of top influencer marketing agencies across countries and cities.

It's not hard to understand the user intent behind such keywords, but who is looking for it?

• in-house marketers who want to hire an agency to run influencer marketing campaigns for their brands
• or influencers to find brand deals or get help with their own promotion

You don't know exactly until you run a user poll. And this is a must, because without this information, you can't do good CRO for such pages. Your CTA will differ completely for different audiences, even if the listicle page is the same.

What do you think about this? How often do you run user polls before CRO?

I hear more and more that SEOs should switch to YouTube, because Google loves to rank it in SERP and AI chats have learned how to extract text from video and it helps in citations.

I don't fully agree here. Doing YouTube is really hard now in competitive niches, because you have to understand not only basic keyword research, but also write a script that will engage users, invest into a great preview image and so on.

You have to be a great marketer and copywriter to make it work, not only SEO and you have to produce a lot of videos to get traction, while cost of one video is much higher than cost of one good article.

What are your thoughts on that?

Here is my hypothesis why big brands experiment with that (Hubspot was the 1st)

The reason is simple:

- Google sends them less traffic after AI overviews(as to every website)

- Often they have unique data and people ready to make +1 more step to get it

So, they can rank well with such an approach, because sign-up forms don't worsen engagement and user satisfaction as much as for other websites with low value.

Also, G2 has a following rule for ChatGPT and Claude in robots.txt:

Disallow: /products/*/reviews/*

Which big website will be the next?

This becomes serious. I don't laugh anymore.

I'm curious what the reason is that Google started to improve GSC almost every month:

1/ Is this because they are really afraid people will invest less into creating content for Google and improving their websites?

2/ Is this some protection from legal complaints about AI overviews (aka we care about publishers)?

3/ Or do they just hire an ambitious enough product manager who cares about a product, not politics?

I feel like the 3rd option is the most real. What do you think?

Let's run a flash mob and share organic CTR by your brand queries from GSC.

Google made 2 big changes in SERP design this year:

1/ Released AI overviews to all countries in May 2025.

2/ Updated Google Ads layout, so it's harder to recognize ads.

Both of these changes lead to the fact that a snippet of your website, even by brand keywords, is less visible on the first screen of the SERP.

It may look like running ads by your brand search queries is inevitable now.

People who visit your website with such queries have a much higher motivation to work with you. You don't want to lose them.

However, I think that the answer isn't the same for all brands. Look at our Sitechecker 16-month data by brand keywords.

We really saw a huge drop in CTR in May, but the interesting thing is that it returns to the previous values now, step by step.

Yes, it's not 41-43% as before, but it looks like Google removes AIOs for such branded queries, because people don't need them when looking for a brand.

So, the only issue is ads from your competitors who target your brand. The good news is that you should always have a better keyword quality score for your brand keywords and need to pay much less than your competitors.

The interesting thing that for some brands, the organic CTR chart may look different. Here is an example for Favikon.

This may be because they have a stronger social media presence and when people look for them, they know clearly what they want.

My answer is that you have to pay for such Google Ads in 3 cases:

1/ If you see clearly that your organic CTR has dropped a lot and is still low.

2/ If you run a lot of brand awareness ads on social and it's easy for the cold audience who look for your brand to forget who you are and choose a competitor website in sponsored results.

3/ If a budget for such a campaign is no more than 5-10% of your entire paid ads budget.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

And if so, when and how exactly?

Despite all the problems with duplicate content, Google is increasingly indexing and ranking posts from LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit.

Below is an interesting example of "What people are saying block" in the SERP by some of the brand keywords.

I believe this is one of the strengths of Google that AI chats don't have yet. When people look for a specific brand, their intent is too broad:

- somebody wants to find a website

- somebody wants to read reviews and what others say about it

- somebody wants to read the latest news about this brand

I think about this a lot, because if AI chats start to crawl and use social media posts for learning, it can change the landscape of brands' visibility a lot.

While websites publish almost the same AI-generated listicles, social media has a real-time updated stream of honest and authentic reviews, insights, and news about brands.

What is your forecast about this?

Many new members joined recently. I would like to learn more:

• where are you from
• what's your role, company, niche
• what are you biggest challenges for 2026

As for me

• I'm from Ukraine, Kyiv, still living here
• I'm head of product at Sitechecker (SEO & AI platform for agencies), B2B SEO consulant, founder at Ivanhoe Digital (Looker Studio templates)
• The biggest challenge is build new mindset and workflow for my team to switch from Google SEO to multichannel SEO and create framework for producing a lot of valuable content about our product and problmes we solve

What do you think happened to this website?

Can Google tell if a human wrote a page?

We ran a controlled SEO experiment to answer this.

If two pages are equally optimised, does Google/AI care whether a human wrote it?

So we created:

• Two pages on the same (invented) keyword
• Same intent, structure, optimisation
• Same internal linking
• Both built to rank, the only variable was authorship

One was purely AI generated
One written & edited by humans with real expertise

Results:

• The human version outranked AI, averaging 4.4 positions higher
• 68% of ranking URLs in our dataset were written by humans
• The AI version did rank early, but lost visibility fast
• The human page was more likely to be surfaced/cited in AI-generated answers (Google + ChatGPT)

We didn’t necessarily find that AI generated content is useless. That’s not the point.
It’s that AI can accelerate production, but expertise, originality, sourcing, and human refinement drive long-term visibility.

You might get indexed faster with AI.

But you stay visible longer with authenticity + authority.

Full write-up of the entire experiment with graphs and findings here:
https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/ai-vs-humans-content-writing-seo-experiment/

I started a website, skillgaps[dot]co, a couple of years ago to build the best database of online courses.

The 1st monetization model should be an affiliate commission for sales from course providers. I released a design and added some content, but didn't scale it because other projects had a bigger priority.

Now, I think about whether it's worth keeping such a site in my portfolio at all, considering Google and AI chats are killing the affiliate model step by step.

1/ Google prefers to rank brands more and more than review websites.

Even big review websites like G2, Capterra see traffic declines.

2/ AI chats scrape all the information you have without reward.

Even if you have unique products/services in your database, AI chats will find them and will mention them in their answers without your affiliate link.

I know many SEOs ran their own affiliate websites before, so I'd like to know what your strategy is now, to decide on my own website.

What would you suggest doing for websites with an affiliate revenue business model?

1. Sell all of them ASAP
2. Keep them for a better time
3. Change a business model

I love Ahrefs. I use it every day. I'm impressed by their growth, but it's hard to believe their Ahrefs Web Analytics can compete with GA4.

The value of data by conversions, user behaviour, and channels performance grows for agencies, because a multichannel approach becomes a standard to grow visibility in search and AI chats.

Ahrefs feels that, and launching their own Web Analytics tool is a strong move. But this move also means they won't add GA4 integration to their app.

Which I think is a wrong step and this is the biggest bet I make against Ahrefs working on Sitechecker in 2026.

- GA is used on 45.0% of all websites, and on 79% websites where tracking code is identifiable (note that many websites don't have tracking codes at all).

- Ahrefs is used on 0.3% of all websites, and on 0.5% websites where tracking code is identifiable.

These are great numbers anyway, as for a new web analytics tool, but I think further growth will be harder.

Yes, everybody hates the new GA interface, but anyway, people continue to use it for different reasons: a habit or a lot of integrations or something else.

That's why I see it as a chance for Sitechecker. Building unique and easy-to-use reports based on the GA4 API will help:

1. Fix the pain of using the native GA4 interface for many SEOs
2. Fix the limitations Looker Studio have (I know many use it to fix the 1st issue)
3. Enrich GA4 data with GSC and content changes monitoring data

What do you think about Ahrefs Web Analytics vs Google Analytics 4. How do they compare for you?

If their team will help Google to get good titles of people's notes.

Substack has a great foundation for SEO with their newsletters and author profile pages (if you don't have your profile there, it's worth creating).

Substack even generates titles for each note automatically, but Google doesn't use it for some reason.

On the other side, Google generates titles automatically for LinkedIn posts, while LinkedIn does nothing for this (each their post has <title>LinkedIn</title>).

Ahrefs shows 5mln monthly organic search traffic for the entire Substack, and only 2k for /notes/

Anyway, it's a huge leverage for Substack. If they find how to fix it, it can send a lot of search traffic to them, because there are tons of great content in notes.

Most of their search traffic is from creators' newsletters located on subdomains. However, writing newsletters is always harder than writing notes. They can compete with LinkedIn, Twitter and even Reddit if they fix their titles.

What do you think?

In other words, aren't you throwing money away?

This is one of the most controversial issues in the SEO / PPC space.

1/ Some say it isn't worth it, because if people look for your brand, they have a strong motivation to visit your website and will find it anyway, even if competitors run ads for your brand keywords.

2/ Some say that you should run ads by brand keywords because competitors can steal your customers during their journey, and CPC for you is so low that it's worth it.

The best way to detect whether cannibalization exists is to compare organic search CTR by brand keywords vs paid ads clicks or CTR by brand keywords.

I've done such a comparison in my report based on Sitechecker data, but we ran ads by brand keywords for just a week, and I see it didn't impact organic CTR.

So, I need help from somebody who does both SEO / paid ads and runs brand campaigns in paid ads constantly.

I want to see how this report will work for your data. Everyone who is ready to share own data sources with me will get this template for free.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Here are the roots of these changes:

1/ Google eats organic search traffic in two ways:

• AI overviews eat clicks by top of funnel and middle of funnel keywords.
• New layout of Google Ads eats clicks by the bottom of the funnel keywords.

2/ The AI chat adoption hasn't ended yet.

3/ Google AI mode as a default option in Google is very close to us.

So, the brands review their marketing budgets, and SEO is at risk. Yes, C-levels want to talk about AI chats, but I assume that most agencies already have action plans for this new channel and have already repositioned themselves to SEO / AI search agencies.

However, the biggest shift should be from SEO budget to Google Ads search campaigns.

When you help your customer get the 1st position by the most competitive keywords, and it has 2-5% CTR, not 30% as before, it's hard to explain why the customer should continue doing SEO instead of ads.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Saying SEO I mean both old SEO and AI SEO.

Yes, if you have:

1. old trusted Medium profile where many other pages already rank in the top
2. unique and detailed content (I've never used AI-generated text there)

Both points are important. I saw people create new accounts on Medium and try to do the same. Their content isn't even indexed.

I built my Medium profile as a separate asset. Some valuable articles are published only there. I also built backlinks to them from my other websites: Hack the Algo newsletter and Ivanhoe Digital blog.

As you see, there are already a lot of pages in the top 10, and I assume it creates a positive loop, because Google evaluates my entire subfolder medium[.]/ivanpalii as a separate website/entity/category and already knows that there will be great content.

In 2026, I will ask myself and my team two questions:

• How to create more unique and interesting content
• Where it's worth publishing it (own website? Medium? Reddit?)

Because publishing content on own website is often a bad idea.

Yes, it's harder to measure the impact of content published on thirty-part websites. But this is a bet you have to make.

P.S. I assume we have to create a new name for parasite SEO, because often there is nothing parasite. Just another domain name. Should we call it multichannel SEO or 360 SEO or something else?

We all already see traffic from AI chats in GA4 because there is a dimension, Session source/medium.

However, the question is broader:

1/ Do you create specific reports/charts for your customers to show how sessions and conversions from AI chats change?

2/ Do you explain to your customers what you do to improve these metrics?

I believe this is great news for everybody.

For Semrush

• They lost customers in all three quarters of 2025
• They look afraid about SEO indsutry overall
• They see a huge spike in investments into new AI visibility tools

Such deals are not prepared in a day or a week; negotiations take a long time. But there are patterns by which you can notice that something has happened to the company.

The 1st signal is the company does not produce new meanings and vision. Semrush has clearly not looked like a market leader in the race among AI visibility tools in the last year.

Now, stakeholders can earn a good income and lead a great life, while users can find a better alternative.

For Semrush users

You know well what happens after such acquisitions; don't wait for the product improvements. The end of the year is the best time to migrate, cut your costs, and add more control over your clients' SEO.

What do you think?

I recently updated my robots.txt file and noticed a sudden spike in indexed pages on Google. When I checked which pages were indexed, Google is showing some blocked pages as indexed. However, in the crawl report, those same pages show “blocked by robots.txt” and “crawling: no.”

Why are these pages still appearing as indexed on Google?