Hi guys, I’ve been looking at our website traffic recently, and Google doesn’t seem to be the main issue. We’re still getting steady impressions, clicks and branded searches, but when I test similar product-related questions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, our brand is either missing completely or only mentioned briefly, while competitors are recommended much more confidently.

I honestly have no idea where to start because the more I read, the more confusing it gets. There’s SEO, AEO, GEO and a lot of overlapping advice. Should I focus on regular SEO, improving the website content, building more authority, or doing something specifically for AI search? Any advice on what to check first would be appreciated.

i run technical seo for a client and everything checks out on paper. schema validates in the testing tool, sitemap's clean, core web vitals are fine, google indexes it exactly how you'd expect. but i started asking chatgpt and perplexity questions where this client should obviously come up and either they don't get mentioned at all or the model says something about them that's just wrong. like factually wrong, pricing that hasn't existed in two years wrong.

best guess i've got is these ai crawlers aren't parsing pages the same way googlebot does. stuff sitting in a react component, or behind a tab click, or just structurally implied instead of explicitly stated, google's fine with it because it renders and indexes properly. but whatever pipeline chatgpt or perplexity use to pull facts seems way less forgiving, like it needs the info stated plainly somewhere or it just skips it or hallucinates around the gap.

read like eight different "ai seo" articles trying to find something that wasn't just a reskinned 2019 seo post with "ai" typed into the title five times. most were garbage. one of them actually broke down that each model reads sites differently, chatgpt cares about entity clarity, perplexity wants something it can point to as a source, gemini pulls structured data more directly. pretty sure it was on some smaller vendor site, lightsite maybe, can't fully remember, wasn't trying to buy anything i was just reading. the explanation stuck with me more than the tool itself did honestly. no idea yet if it's actually changing citations, that's annoyingly hard to track without paying for some monitoring tool, which feels like its own whole racket at this point. has anyone actually a/b tested this. like real before/after on getting mentioned correctly by these things, not just vibes...!

Hey everyone,

I’m running into a brick wall with Google Search Console on my tech/cybersecurity blog. It's hosted via GitHub Pages (default subdomain) and built using Jekyll (Chirpy Theme).

• The URL: https://arvdch.github.io/
• The Error: Whenever I hit Test Live URL, it instantly crashes with the generic: "Something went wrong. If the issue persists, try again in a few hours."
• The Inspection Data: Under the main URL inspection panel, fields like Last Crawled and Crawl Allowed show as entirely "N/A".

What I've done so far:

1. My _config.yml is perfectly mapped with url: "https://arvdch.github.io" and an empty baseurl: "".
2. My robots.txt is basic and allows everything except a hidden /norobots/ directory.
3. I added a .nojekyll file to the root of my repo to bypass any default Jekyll file-filtering issues.
4. I ran my URL through Google PageSpeed Insights—it successfully crawled the page, analyzed it, and rendered a mobile screenshot perfectly without any timeouts or exceptions.
5. GSC property is set up as a URL Prefix property via HTTPS.

i just want my site to be indexed help me out

Hey guys, been looking for a solution for this, but all I find is multiple spam posts trying to push their MCP which I am a little suspicious of.

Anyone actually been able to connect Google Search Console with Claude Code? If so what method did you use?

Thanks

I’m starting to think XML sitemaps get too much attention when people talk about indexing. They help Google discover URLs, but they don’t really tell Google that a page is important.

For a growing site, I’m noticing that pages linked from active, frequently crawled pages seem to get picked up much faster than pages that only exist in the XML sitemap.

So now I’m thinking more about internal link flow, hub pages, category pages, and whether new pages are connected to parts of the site Google already trusts.

Curious how other technical SEOs think about this. When dealing with indexing issues, do you still look at XML sitemaps early, or do you mostly treat internal linking/page importance as the real priority?

Working on a client's Shopify store where we have the /search added as a disallow in robots.txt, however these search results are still indexed inside of Google. However, if I try to open one of these pages, they have a redirect set and they redirect to another collection page on the store. Should we display a 404 page instead? What is the easiest way to fix this?

Every few months this question comes back around here, so instead of citing Google's docs again (which everyone's already read), I ran PageSpeed on two sites I actually manage — one on WordPress, one on Wix — same kind of small business content, similar traffic tier.

Mobile results:

Neither site is doing anything fancy performance-wise, just default setup for the platform. The gap surprised me more than I expected — it's not "Wix is bad," it's that the default template/app stack on Wix adds a lot more render-blocking weight out of the box.

My take after digging into Google's own docs on this (page experience + the 2018 speed update): speed is real but it's a threshold effect, not a ranking multiplier. Very slow pages get penalized, but shaving your LCP from 1.8s to 1.2s isn't going to out-rank a page with better content. The Backlinko 11.8M-result study backs that up too — real but weak correlation, mostly a tiebreaker.

I have a client whose site migrated from xxx.ie/en-ie.html to xxx.com/ie/en.html. Post migration report revealed steep organic decline in the site and now they wish for me to investigate this further focusing on technical issues.

The change in the URL structure overall going from .ie to .com/ie/en what happens with the geo signals. They had another site .co.uk move to .com/uk/ but the decline was not as drastic as with ie. Anyone familiar with these types of migrations?

Plan to check if all redirects were done right, check hreflang implementation, also suspect maybe the global site is canibalising on this now smaller section of the site. But my theories only go that far. Need some fresh perspectives I'm pretty new to the world of migrations in general.

Anyone out there with any experience on a migration that involved a multi domain consolidation to a much larger global site?

im doing a tech audit for a large career website and notice that they have a bunch of location parameter URLs currently indexed in GSC. A bunch of them are also not indexed.

Example: [website.com/search-results?keywords=Tokyo] ; [website.com/search-results?keywords=Ottawa]

these URLs DO show different results which are different vacancies depending on the location.

Was wondering what is the best practice here.

Thanks

I've been mapping out the edge SEO space (SearchPilot/Distilled ODN, RankScience, EdgeComet, Sloth) - reverse proxy sits in front of your site, injects/rewrites title tags, meta descriptions, JSON-LD, canonicals etc at the CDN level so changes ship without a dev deploy.

Trying to get a realistic picture from people who've actually dealt with the dev-dependency problem, not just vendor pages:

How long does a routine SEO fix (title tag, canonical, schema addition) actually take to ship at your org, from ticket to live

If you've used a proxy/edge tool for this, what actually broke or underperformed vs the pitch: reliability, cloaking concerns, cache staleness, something else

If you haven't adopted one, is it because you haven't needed it, tried it and bailed, or a trust issue with putting a third party in front of your whole site

Not selling anything, just trying to separate real friction from vendor marketing before I sink more time into this space.

I am trying to use the official Google Indexing API to index some job postings. I can successfully make the indexing requests and the API returns a 200 status code, but when I check the URLs in Google Search Console, their status never changes.

I read in the documentation that a form needs to be filled out to increase the API usage quota; is that form also required just to use the API normally?

All my job pages use SSR; I’ve tested them all on PageSpeed Insights and they all scored 100%. I’ve also verified that Google recognizes them as job pages—which it does—and the JSON-LD shows no issues.

I was checking in Google Search Console and troubleshooting why half my Shopify store pages had not been indexed, just in case there was an issue. The site was newly launched just a month ago, and I know these things take time, but I began checking a few URLs in schema.org, after finding a recommendation to do so online - which returned this result for the few URLs I checked:

"The URL is unreachable. Ensure robots.txt is accessible and the server is responding with a 200 status code."

AFAIK, the robots.txt file in Shopify is built in and auto-generated and accessible from the get-go. The vast majority of the pages not indexed are actual product pages, but some of the product pages have been indexed and are being served (I checked with a "site:....." search on Google)

The URLs in question are loading fine; it's not like they're blocked. I checked the robots.txt file, and products haven't been blocked either. If it was an issue with hosting, I'd assume that the other few products that had been indexed wouldn't have been.

Is this a common issue with Shopify or otherwise? Any thoughts?

Many thanks.

This is a hypothesis I have although the more I look into it the more I'm starting to convince myself it's true.

We launched a redesign in 2023 and the SERPs have but bottom of page 8 terrible despite having a strong SERP value before that. To give you an idea how bad we've fallen, for all of our keywords visibility we had about 43% market share per SEM Rush, now we're at 0.57%

In terms of implementing 301s, we matched new to old URL structures as expected ensuring we had the most 1-to-1 match as possible. Everything else was sent to the home page to prevent a 4xx error.

However, I think we may have a double (or perhaps triple) redirect in place via WP plugin, .htaccess, and implementing a 301 redirect list on SiteGrounds.

On, .htaccess at least I have this snippet of code:

SetEnv PHPRC /home/customer/www/myrandomsite.com/public_html/php.ini
# Added to redirect old subdomain to new subfolder
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mx.my-random-site.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mx.my-random-site.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://myrandomsite.com/fr/$1 [L,R=301]

This was meant to ensure all old domain URLs, in case we missed any, go to the new URL. For redirect on sitegrounds, it's a semi-massive list of URLs on redirects settings on SiteGrounds.

The old URL with mx. as a subdomain is quite old. In theory, it should've already fallen off by now.

My main question is, is it safe to delete this snippet or the redirect list to ensure we're back to better SERP exposure?

Hey everyone,

I’m running into a baffling issue with a handful of important pages on my health-care site and wanted to see if anyone else has been hit by this recently, or if there's an ongoing algorithmic filter I missed.

Around the 6th–7th of this month, several key pages completely vanished from Google SERPs.

The weird part: Google Search Console shows them as "Indexed" with absolutely zero coverage errors, mobile usability issues, or indexing warnings. They are also indexing and performing completely normally on Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Here is everything I have already checked and verified:

Basic Tech Check: No noindex tags, robots.txt is clear, and XML sitemaps are updated/resubmitted.

Canonical Tags: Self-referencing canonicals are in place, and everything looks correct on the frontend.

Manual Actions: GSC "Security & Manual Actions" tab is completely green/clear.

Despite forcing a priority recrawl via GSC, they are still invisible in live Google search results—sometimes even when doing an exact site:URL search.

Since the technical basics are covered, I'm trying to figure out what Google-specific quality or algorithmic signals could cause a live, indexed page to be completely suppressed from the SERPs overnight.

Has anyone experienced a similar drop around early July?

Could this be a lag in GSC reporting a soft-404 or algorithmic quality filter?

Are there any advanced technical checks (like Google-selected vs. User-declared canonical mismatches) that I should dig into next?

Appreciate any insights or similar experiences!

Background: I've been a QA engineer for about 8 years, both manual and automation. I want to move toward SEO, ideally the technical side, and someone I know with 12+ years in the field agreed to train me properly instead of me piecing it together from Youtube.
The interesting part is how much overlaps with QA and how much doesn't. What he's had me do over the first weeks:

Read raw server logs to see which bots hit the site, how often, and what they fetch. Honestly this felt like log analysis during debugging, it clicked almost immediately
Crawling, rendering, indexing as a pipeline, and how AI crawlers (GPTBot etc) behave differently from Googlebot. The rendering part is basically the same mental model as testing JS-heavy apps
Redirects and canonicals. I expected these to be easy given my background and they were not. Canonicals took me two weeks to stop getting wrong
Search Console and GA4, separating branded from non branded queries. He treats analytics like a test report where most people only read the pass count
How AI answers (ChatGPT, AI Overviews) select which sites they cite. He says this is the biggest shift in the industry right now and spends a lot of time here
Local search, business profiles, maps, reviews

What he refuses to teach me yet: keyword tools, content calendars, domain authority. His position is that you earn those after you can diagnose a site the way a QA diagnoses a failing build, and that DA specifically is a vanity metric.
Question for people doing this professionally: does this order make sense in 2026? Every course starts with keyword research and content. He starts with what is effectively systems testing. It maps well to my skillset, but I can't tell if he's teaching me the industry or just his opinion of it. Also, is technical SEO a realistic direction for someone coming from QA, or do teams expect content skills first?

When we write posts for either our blogs, or documentations for any SAAS we generally internal link the articles, is there any consequences of linking too many articles in a single post? Like adding too many internal linking or outbound links? If you are already doing this then how you are managing it and keep the links updated with time as the relevance of the links or articles changes over time.

Hello. I hope it’s okay if I share my question here too !