Hey everyone, posted it in the r/localseo subreddit as well, but I wanted to get a different perspective from you guys as well. I’m working on local SEO for a client who’s a local bank. I won’t mention their name due to privacy concerns, but they’re located in a major city. Looking at GSC data over the past six months, I noticed that one of their location pages is showing up for a large volume of long-tail queries driven by AI Overviews and AI Mode. These queries are generating high impressions, but very few clicks.

I want to optimize the page to address the specific topics users are asking about, such as:

• "Can you tell me which checking account options in [city] have good flexibility?"
• "Can you tell me which checking account options in [city] offer good customer service?"
• "Find me business loan options in [city] with high flexibility in their terms and conditions."

These are just a few of the long-tail searches I uncovered. Looking at what's currently ranking on the SERPs, outside of third-party directory mentions, the individual pages that rank only briefly touch on these terms. None of them feature dedicated sections or cover these topics in crazy depth.

Do you have any suggestions on next steps? I created a rough draft of what I think would work well, but I’d appreciate any fresh perspectives or ideas on things I might have missed. Thanks!

Lately a big chunk of my week (4–7 hrs) goes into getting clients mentioned in ChatGPT / Perplexity / AI Overviews answers. Mostly it’s finding the pages the AI keeps citing and getting the brand added there.

The painful part is outreach. Half the time email gets ignored, so I end up hunting for the owner’s WhatsApp or calling them. Plenty want payment too. And honestly I rarely check whether the AI answer actually changed afterwards.

Curious how others do it:

Is there a smarter way I’m missing?

If you were starting from scratch and money was no object (let's DREAM here okay?), who would your lineup be? Let's say we want to avoid AI where we can, so a content writer/editor could be on that list. Sites being a more traditional CMS along the lines of Wordpress or Webflow. I've come from an agency background and have an idea of who I'd want on that team, but am curious what others here think.

What’s stopping you from building or vibecoding internal tools yourself, and from increasing output/revenue per employee by integrating more AI into your workflows?

Also, what internal tools have you built that actually serve their purpose?

I run a WooCommerce store (Canada/US audience) behind Cloudflare. Below are my custom security rules and robots.txt. Could anyone with technical SEO experience check whether any of these could hurt crawling, indexing, Google Shopping or link previews? I’ve skipped verified bots and Googlebot variants in a Skip rule.

Block:

(http.user_agent contains "python-requests") or (http.user_agent contains "Scrapy") or (http.user_agent contains "curl") or (http.user_agent contains "Go-http-client") or (http.user_agent contains "SemrushBot") or (http.user_agent contains "AhrefsBot") or (http.user_agent contains "GPTBot") or (http.user_agent contains "ClaudeBot") or (http.user_agent contains "meta-externalagent") or (http.user_agent contains "meta-webindexer") or (http.request.uri.path contains "/wp-json/oembed/") or (http.user_agent contains "Lightpanda") or (http.user_agent contains "secret-scanner") or (not ip.src.country in {"US" "CA"} and not cf.client.bot and not http.request.uri.path contains "/wc-api/" and not http.request.uri.query contains "wc-api=") or (http.request.method eq "GET" and http.request.uri.query contains "remove_item" and not http.cookie contains "woocommerce_items_in_cart") or (http.user_agent contains "facebookexternalhit") or (http.user_agent contains "facebookcatalog") or (ip.src.asnum eq 32934) or (ip.src.asnum in {27323 23033})

Skip:

(cf.client.bot) or (http.user_agent contains "Googlebot") or (http.user_agent contains "Google-InspectionTool") or (http.user_agent contains "AdsBot-Google") or (http.user_agent contains "Storebot-Google") or (http.user_agent contains "Google-Shopping") or (http.user_agent contains "FeedFetcher-Google")

Managed Challenge:

(http.request.uri.query contains "filter_cat=" and http.request.uri.query contains ",") or (http.request.uri.query contains "filter_cat=" and http.request.uri.query contains "%2C") or (http.request.uri.query contains "filter_cat=" and http.request.uri.query contains "%2c") or (http.request.uri.query contains "add-to-cart") or (http.request.uri.query contains "add-to-compare") or (not http.referer contains "example.com" and http.request.uri.path eq "/cart/" and http.request.uri.query contains "remove_item") or (not http.referer contains "example.com" and http.request.uri.path eq "/cart/" and not http.cookie contains "woocommerce_items_in_cart") or (http.request.uri.path contains "/page/" and http.request.uri.query contains "filter_cat=")

Skip:

(http.request.uri.path contains "/wp-json/")

Skip:

(http.request.method eq "GET" and http.request.uri.path contains "/wp-content/uploads/" and http.referer contains "example.com")

Don't know why I am facing sudden traffic drop in my website, an article got sudden Traffic rise of 2.3K single-handedly & gained total traffic of 4.2K, but within 3,4 days the article got out of rank, now the site has 1.9K traffic. Is there any specific reason that the sudden traffic gain, sudden traffic, is there anything we can do?

Quick question for agency owners and freelancers: how has your primary tool stack shifted over the last year?

Right now, our core stack looks like this:

Keyword & Competitor Research: Ahrefs / Semrush

AI & GEO Citation Tracking: Currently testing kwerve (mostly for its multi-engine reporting & white-label PDFs for client updates)

Is anyone relying on all-in-one platforms that handle both traditional SERPs and LLM search queries well, or are you all running separate tools for traditional SEO vs GEO monitoring?

I was looking around the Internet but couldnt find a number or anyone truly sharing it. I am curious how good or bad this works for us. I already see a bunch of levers, like better Headlines, better Images, better Hooks. The usual stuff, that I need to get into my writers brain - and sometimes into mine haha

Our CTR of the past 3 months sits at 7 % -- Past 28 Days 7,3 %

So what is it for you?

Quick context: I'm a small business owner, I sell furniture, been selling online for about 15 years. I've been through many SEO and PPC agencies and independent individuals, all of which have, for the most part, been a total waste of money (paid backlinks, low quality blog posts, etc on the SEO side).

Couple years ago I started learning the basics of SEO myself, following this sub, reading up on topics I didn't understand, things like that. I've been a little late the AI game, but I started messing around with Claude for some other projects I was working on. I used Claude Code, linked it to my WordPress site files through my site host via SSH, and had it almost completely rebuild my site.

To be clear, I did not do this in a one-step, simple command. It was in sections, I gave Claude specific instructions to use the /deep-research tool on a specific topic at a time, like product titles, meta titles, descriptions, verbiage, length, word choice, keywords, and to also research things to avoid, and I pointed it towards specific sources, like this sub, Google, etc and told it to put the results in a summary report and save it to it's memory, then using that report, come up with an action plan for my products. I reviewed every step, tweaked what I didn't like, then pushed it live and moved on to the next step.

I already have useful posts and instructions I've personally written on my site that I used to feed Claude the information about my writing style, and facts to use. I gave it a long history lesson on my company, projects we've done, how we operate, etc and told it to build content using actual facts about my company and history vs creating generic one-size-fits-all content.

Everything about AI I see on this sub is that using it will make my site like every other AI slop out there, which only helps at making me more "mediocre" which is what's worrying me a little. But with the changes I've made, my Google Search Console has already shown huge jumps in search ranking. Most of my pages were ranking ~#10 for my major keyword searches, they all jumped to #3-7 within a couple weeks. My Core Web Vitals and page speed scores also shot up, passing my CWV now and going from a score of ~50 to 90 for mobile.

I'm seeing improvements, but I know AI can be good at masking deeper problems that will hurt me in the long run. Am I killing my site by using AI this way?

Everyone is using AI agents and LLMs to automate most of their workflows in SEO, but I am interested to know what type of bottlenecks are you facing for example:

1- if you are doing content strategy are the results generic AI slop content suggestion that doesn't match the real context or objectives of your company? or If positioning changes how fast is LLM adapting to this?

2- for content maintenance and refresh, how efficient is it with the recommendations not just telling the drops form GSC but overall keeping sync with the company or brand objectives.

Are there any other bottlenecks that i might be missing like with overall strategy and planning?