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!

Does anyone have good vendors for this?

Checking SEMrush and Botify, I have nearly all keyword rankings taking a massive drop. We've dropped from 30% visibility on average to 12% visibility.

Not sure if there's a confirmed algorithm update or not...

I keep seeing information gain / “non-commodity content” discussed as though we have fairly good evidence that Google rewards pages for saying something new.

I’m not convinced we can actually isolate that. I mean, Google’s own example makes me more skeptical.

They compare something generic like: “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers”, with something much more specific and experience-based like: “Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line.”

The second one is obviously more unique. But it is also a completely different search problem.

It is narrower, more specific, probably has fewer directly competing documents/pages, uses more specific vocabulary, and is much closer to a long-tail information need.

So when that kind of content performs better, how are we separating:

• information gain
• uniqueness
• better query relevance
• lower competition
• fewer competing documents

See, I totally get that info gain or diversity makes a lot of sense when choosing sources for AI answers. What I’m questioning is the jump from: “Google can measure this” to “Google rewards this as an independent organic ranking factor.”

I also see tools comparing your wording against the current SERP and measuring things like phrase overlap, unique n-grams and vocabulary diversity. These can tell you your page looks less like the other ranking pages. But does it tell us why one page ranks?

A mature, competitive SERP naturally seems likely to have lots of content convergence. Everyone has researched the same entities, copied similar outlines and covered the same obvious points.

A niche query naturally has fewer pages, more specific language and more unusual information.

That alone could create a relationship where: more competitive queries = more “commodity” content, and less competitive queries = more “unique” content, without Google needing an information-gain ranking factor at all.

I’m not even sure a clean SEO-side test is possible. Say you take the same page and add genuinely new information. You’ve now also added new words, entities, facts, and semantic relationships. That can cause the page to surface for additional queries, get more impressions and clicks, and potentially strengthen from there. If rankings improve, how do you know Google rewarded the information gain itself rather than the page simply becoming relevant to more searches?

The variable you're trying to test changes the retrieval characteristics of the document at the same time. That seems incredibly difficult to decouple without access to Google's own ranking experiments or internal logs.

I’m much more convinced by information gain as a source-selection concept for AI answers. Once three sources already say the same thing, a fourth source with a new fact clearly has more utility.

I’m less convinced we can currently show the same thing happening as an independent ranking factor in normal organic search.

I mean one could even rank a blank page or a page with just a video embed tbh. So, is info gain even a ranking signal/factor in search rankings? Doesn't seem plausible to me.

Curious to know what I’m missing here. Has anyone seen a test that genuinely separates uniqueness/information gain from query specificity and competition? What are your thoughts in general?

More and more of the results I check have Reddit threads and forum posts in the top spots. For a small site, those feel like the easiest keywords to win, because the competition isn't polished articles.

Right now I find them by hand: search a keyword, see what's ranking, note when forums dominate. It's slow.

Ideas I've had: checking the top results for a long list of keywords at once and flagging the ones led by forums, or starting from questions people ask on Reddit and checking whether a proper article ranks for them.

How do you find these at scale? And have you had luck ranking against Reddit threads?

Hey guys

I just launched a site on 5 Oct. It was a tool site and it has about 500+ pages on launch. Everything went smoothly till 21 Oct. Earlier we were getting about 5 to 10 clicks. And on 22 Oct I audited my site and changed a lot of things on the 21st. I changed the title and description of 300 pages on 21 Oct. So on 23 Oct I found something fishy my clicks and impression went to less than 20 which was around 1000. And what I see is that mostly all of my pages go to crawled currently not indexes. It comes suddenly I don't know what caused this.

Is there any way by which I can recover all of the pages ? This happens only in google my bing is working normally.

Curious what’s happening across agencies right now.

My clients have started asking whether their brand shows up when people search on ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview. Honestly didn’t have a great answer at first.

Few questions for those of you running agencies:

1. Are your clients asking about AI search visibility?
2. Are you reporting on it — and if yes, how? (manual checks, a tool, ignoring it?)
3. Is this becoming a real client expectation or still just occasional noise?

I want to change my site's domain because I feel the current name no longer fits what the site has become. Almost none of my traffic comes from people searching for the brand name; it's almost entirely organic search traffic for the topic itself.

If I 301-redirect every URL on the old domain to its exact equivalent on the new one, will my rankings take a significant hit? Or, if I use the Change of Address tool in GSC and handle the migration cleanly, should the impact be minimal?

What is your experience on domain change for a website that depends on search traffic?

Hey everyone, 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!

Has anyone had luck moving the needle on reviews for their clients? I've been an SEO for over 10 years and I've never seen any effort make a difference. I've helped clients set up review systems like GatherUp or others, encouraged them to request reviews, and even manually started sending requests for one client with follow-ups when I spent some time in-office with them. Nothing made and difference at all. It seems like the only way is to get salespeople to badger the people when they're in-person or on the phone.

I have a client whose competitors all have a huge number of reviews and it just doesn't add up. Nobody in the industry has that many clients, and it's a really sensitive industry, so people are more reluctant to leave a review anyway. How are competitors getting these reviews?

I’m exploring an idea for a tool built for freelance web designers and agencies, and I’d love to get your honest opinion.
The idea is to enter a website URL and automatically get a report identifying issues with SEO, performance, mobile experience, and other technical aspects.
It would be useful in two situations:
Checking your own projects before delivering them to a client.
Analyzing potential clients’ websites to identify problems and prepare a professional report with service recommendations.
Would either of these use cases be genuinely useful to you? Or do your current tools already cover everything you need?
I’d love to hear how you handle this today.

I saw that u/thetafferboy posted this on LinkedIn - showing that Google do watch SEOs and used this to show that LLMs.txt is bunk!

Lets keep fighting those SEO Myths

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?

Hey guys,

I have a quick question for SEOs and agency owners who work with expired domains.

How are you using them most often in your projects right now?

1. Setting up 301 redirects to pass authority directly to your main/client site?

2. Building PBNs (Private Blog Networks) to link out contextually?

3. Or rebuilding the domain into a fresh, standalone niche site?

With all the recent Google core updates, which method has given you the best, safest results, and what would you avoid doing right now?

Would love to hear your honest thoughts and real-world experiences!

For a while now my site has been picking up new spammy backlinks pretty much daily. Random scraper domains, weird TLDs, auto-generated pages, the usual junk.

Semrush picks up all of them. Google Search Console shows none of them, and the links report there looks normal.

A few questions for people who've dealt with this:
Is this targeted negative SEO, or just the background noise every site gets?
If GSC doesn't list them, is it safe to assume Google is ignoring them anyway?
Disavow or leave it alone? I know Google says it handles this automatically, but what do you actually do in practice?
Has anyone seen this kind of spam actually hurt rankings? Its mostly spam, casino links, wtf? Do u think these are coming from an competitor?
Mostly just annoying to watch it happen every day. Curious how others handle it.

hey everyone, looking for some practical advice from the SEO and ORM community here.

i run an online business and recently discovered a top ranking reddit thread that is completely dragging down our branded search results. the post claims to be a review from a former customer, but after checking our records, the user was never in our system. it seems like a fake review or a deliberate hit piece from a competitor.

the real issue is that whenever someone searches our brand name, this specific reddit thread shows up right at the top of page one. our conversion rates dropped almost immediately because prospective clients read it right before making a decision.

we tried reporting it directly through standard channels, but automated reporting rarely moves the needle on reddit. standard SEO suppression also feels like a huge money pit because reddit domain authority is way too high to easily push down with new links.

has anyone here successfully dealt with direct source removal or google search de-indexing for fake defamatory threads like this? is legal compliance or policy removal the only real path, or are there agencies that actually get links cleared

would appreciate any insights or strategies that have worked for you.

Is there away to access GBP data thru an api or mcp? I did some searching but so far no luck. If anyone is getting data downloads like this please let me know how.

Thanks to the best roving SEO story supremo - u/rustybrick

Google also added a new section for "Only index content meant for Search."

It says:

If your service lets users create shareable pages, generated outputs, or interactive tools, consider whether that content is meant to be found through search engines or only accessed directly by people with a link.

When pages are created for direct sharing, collaboration, or utility rather than public search discovery, apply the noindex rule (using a robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP response header) or block crawling in robots.txt by default.

Google also added:

Verify your site or subdomain in Search Console so you receive email alerts if Google issues a manual action against your site or detects security issues. Also check the Page Indexing report and Search performance report regularly for unexpected spikes in indexed pages, impressions, or queries that don't match your platform's purpose.

Track platform-level creation and indexing metrics, and set up alerts for anomalies such as spikes in newly published public pages or a small number of users generating a large share of indexable URLs.

Hey all,

We have a lot of local foundation repair clients, and their primary GBP categories vary wildly when we’ve onboarded.

There is no “foundation repair” category on Google Business Profiles, and I have clients with “concrete contractor”, “waterproofing service” , and even just “foundation” as their primaries.

I flagged one the other day because their primary category is “foundation”. I’m under the impression that category is for like an actual non-profit foundation, not foundation repair. There is one other popular company in their area using “foundation” as a primary, the rest are the other two.

Am I right in thinking this is not a valid category for them? I feel like people are just seeing the word foundation and clicking. Idk if I’m going crazy or not lol. Would love to hear from anyone else doing local for contractors. Thanks!

Small retail site, brand name is two common words also used by a large national company in a different industry. Google mostly shows the bigger company when people search our exact name. Done so far: Organization schema with legalName, logo, sameAs to our social profiles; consistent name and contact info across profiles; a clear about page; a verified Business Profile (local pickup, service area). What else actually helps Google treat us as a separate entity: adding a descriptor to the site name, earning local press mentions, or something else? Or is time the main factor?

Hey guys!

I’m currently doing SEO on growing a restaurant marketing agency that specializes in the restaurant and food & beverage industry. We offer services like local SEO, website optimization, social media marketing, influencer marketing and promote their restaurant on food delivery platforms to help restaurants get more visibility and customers.

Our target audience includes restaurants, cafes, cloud kitchens, and other food businesses, primarily in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, in India.

SEO in the AI era

1.With Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI search tools changing how people discover businesses, what SEO strategies are actually working for you?

1. Are local SEO and Google Business Profile optimization still producing meaningful leads for restaurants?

2. Are you seeing results from creating helpful, location-specific content.

3. How are you measuring whether AI search visibility is generating actual traffic and leads rather than just impressions?

4. How are you finding the right keywords for such audience.

I’m especially interested in practical strategies that are working right now in SEO for u guys

Thanks in advance!

Relatively new to SEO here, so be kind...

I'm a senior software engineer with a ton of practical web experience (having built sites with search engine friendly / accessible HTML) and what I believe is a good understanding of what "bad" scaled/templated content is and what "good" programmatic content is. Yet, GoogleBot has completely shunned my site.

I'm not here to plug my site - I'm here to understand what it is causing this shape in my Google Search Console (6 mo. ago to now):
______,,/\,,_______

I've seen a bunch of terrible directory sites that are getting organic traffic. There's obviously something they're doing that convinces Google they're legit that I'm not doing. I've been waiting for a few months after making a bunch of changes to get Google to like me again...

• ~17k rotating pages (events drop off) - the old pages have `noindex`.
• I'm offering unique insights that aren't available anywhere else on the web.
• Navigation, design, content quality and depth is all there.
• I am rendering affiliate links as the main CTA for most pages.

The funny thing is my site was never intended to be just a directory; it's actually a compliment to my mobile app and it has a directory component.

Anyway I look forward to yalls suggestions thanks for reading.

Haven't seen one like this in a while. I think it might be some good old referral spam like what Vitaly would do back in the day. Curious who else is seeing it.