LLM Search Undermining Existing SEO Efforts
Businesses are finding their established SEO strategies ineffective as customers increasingly rely on LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini for product discovery. Traditional ranking factors on Google are no longer sufficient, leading to decreased visibility and lost opportunities despite strong Google rankings. This shift necessitates a new approach to search optimization.
SOURCES (60)
“Content and SEO is almost always the wrong bet this early, especially for a chatbot in a niche as specific as SMB support automation. It takes months to compound and you have no data yet on who actually converts, so you are optimizing blind. For…”
“I run a business where finding local suppliers (food produce) is needed, and Google is getting a little unusable with ads, SEO spam, directories scraping each other. The gap is actually reliable suppliers don't have web presence, they would rather just keep working their set client list. So I needed a tool that goes to the primary source instead: government registries. State Secretary of State filings tell you a business legally exists; federal license registries (like USDA's PACA for pr”
“name doesnt matter really. just make sure that when someone types it google doesnt try to fix the typo and show other brands”
“I think the interesting part is that Google is no longer just correcting the spelling. It is recognising the intent behind the search. “ChatGBT,” “Chat GBT,” and similar misspellings still lead to ChatGPT because Google has enough behavioural data to know what people actually mean. The same thing happens with Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and other major AI tools. It also shows how strong the ChatGPT brand has become. At this point, Google seems to treat it less like a normal website and more like”
“After months of working on SEO, Cardlyx finally hit 5.2k Google Search clicks in the last 28 days. I'm building in a competitive space with products like HiHello, Blinq, and Popl, so getting organic traffic wasn't easy. One thing that seems to be working is our positioning. Instead of selling "just another digital business card," we're positioning Cardlyx as a lead capture tool . Every card should help generate leads, not just share contact details. So far, those SEO visito”
“Buyers are asking AI assistants to find and compare tools for them, and the AI is reading pricing pages. But most pricing pages are built for human eyes. Solution - Publish a plain markdown duplicate of your pricing page, plus a pricing plain text file copy with a simple table of your plans, prices, etc. some companies link to theirs right from their pricing pages. ("Are you an AI agent? See pricing."). Some agents just check for pricing markdown file by default. submitted by ”
“Curious how other SEO/content folks handle this. Before writing something that needs to rank, do you still plan it first? check what's ranking, people also ask type questions, headings? Or is it just "AI (gpt/claude/geminoi) give me an outline" now? Also curious if the paid tools (Surfer, Frase) are actually catching stuff the AI tools misses, or if people are just paying out of habit at this point. And with AI Overviews eating clicks even at #1, are you tweaking briefs to try and”
“I'm working with a personal injury law firm, and I'm seeing something I can't quite explain with confidence. For many of their highest-value queries, GSC reports average positions between 1–2, including terms like: personal injury lawyer personal injury attorney car accident lawyer car accident attorney injury lawyer However, CTR is essentially 0% across many of these queries. 😅 Some additional context: Their Google Business Profile is performing well (about 1.17 million impressions”
“Bootstrapped SaaS in the QR code space. I had been telling myself SEO was finally working because rankings kept climbing. Then I opened Search Console and did the math on clicks. Ouch. Here is what I pulled for the last 28 days: 44,749 impressions 229 clicks 0.51% CTR average position around 9.9 So the traffic is there in theory. Google shows my pages to people. They just do not click. Around half my clicks come from branded searches and the homepage, which sits near 13% CTR and is fine. Everyth”
“Hi, I run search ads (ppc) for a healthcare provider and noticed that we get conversions (defined as a form submit or calls via the call asset) from competitor search’s that come up in our search terms report. I’m using mostly phrase match for my keywords. Last night, I was listening to some of the calls from when people call in from ads via Google’s call asset and heard a few people thinking they were calling a competitor but ended up calling us. The lead was over 60 secs but ultimately it was”
“I wouldn't say I was actively avoiding data on GSC as I was looking at it almost daily. I think my headspace was more "the product isn't good enough, that's why Google isn't pushing it" and therefore spent most of the time optimising the actual UX & UI. I had virtually no experience with these types of websites that need organic traffic previously, and my thoughts didn't even go to the difference of CSR to SSR. Of course also it wasn't my only focus, just a”
“Whenever I read the wining of US big tech corpos, I always think of this story of the monk in charge of the books at a seclusive monastery who was interviewed after giving Google permission to scan their library, thinking it was to preserve their valuable books for the future. When the journalist tells him that they basically gave their knowledge away for free and that their books have no value anymore, the monk instantly started to short circuit. What people should understand is that all their”
“This is almost certainly a brand name entity disambiguation issue. When you changed the title tag repeatedly to lead with generic product keywords you likely weakened the signal Google uses to associate that page with your brand as a named entity and something else temporarily filled the slot. BIng is less sensitive to this kind of title-tag churning which explains why it still holds there. Revert to a stable title with your brand name prominent, stop touching it and give it about 2-3 weeks for”
“yeah, we’re seeing this with ecommerce clients too. By the time someone hits a PDP from “best X for Y” in ChatGPT, they’re treating your page like a confirmation step, not real discovery, so weak or missing mentions upstream tank conversion and nobody ties it back. I ended up adding GEO tracking to our audits so we can see where brands show (or don’t) in AI answers, using seoforgpt to pull the prompts/citations and then create pages that actually get into those shortlists.”
“Impressions at position 80 usually just means Google is testing your pages across a bunch of long tail variants, not that there's some unsolved intent gap. Worth checking which exact queries are triggering those impressions in GSC (not just the main keyword), a lot of the time it's stuff tangentially related that isn't actually a match for what you built. On the actual product gap - the manual work people usually still do after "automation" is line item matching against POs”
“It's an old as the Earth idea, but it do not work this way. However to proof it or decline we need enough data with a long timeframe. So mostly it is statistic error.”
“Am I crazy or has anyone else noticed this? Every time we run a Google Ads campaign, our organic rankings take a noticeable dip. Not a huge crash, but a steady 5-10 position drop across several keywords. stop the campaign? rankings bounce back within a week or two I know they say ads don't affect organic, but the timing is too consistent to be a coincidence. feels like Google penalizes you for not paying enough or tries to make you dependent on both. Probably just my paranoia, but checking m”
“Spent 1 month following Claude's 100% definitive answer and when I verified it now, it gave me the complete opposite answer. "Yes, absolutely" in June. "No, not possible" today. What applies? Can you use SEO signals to train the Google Ads algorithm? Hypothetical application: Track Purchase Events on GA4 (including SEO/organic purchases with no gclid) and upload those to Google Ads via GA4's conversion import. Google owns both platforms and can identify the same user”
“The weird thing about this year is I spend less time worrying about homepage traffic quality and more time wondering what happened before the visit even started. Someone now asks ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews for the best option in a category, gets a shortlist there, and by the time they land on your site half the decision is already made. That changes the whole job a bit. If your product is missing from that answer, or shows up with weak context, or the wrong item gets surfaced, you are basica”
“"De-googling" is a spectrum, and I was pretty proud of being farther and farther away (Android and Youtube being the main resistance). But recently, I find myself using Gemini more and more often... I hate that I am more relying on it, but Gemini seems significantly smarter than the other free alternatives for the stuff that I do :(. But Gemini has been extremely helpful for me.”
“First, try searching your brand with &udm=14 to view Google's classic web results only. If you're still indexed and rank for domain + keyword , it's probably a temporary relevance shift from the homepage title changes, not a deindexing issue. I'd move the brand name back to the beginning of the homepage title and give Google a few days to recrawl.”
“Most small businesses are still mostly getting found through SEO, not ChatGPT or Perplexity. If you want to check AI visibility, look for whether your brand gets named in answers for your exact service terms. What's your current site mainly ranking for?”
“My Shopify site used to rank #1 on Google for my brand name. Recently it just disappeared — can't find it at all, went through 7 pages. Still ranks fine on Bing though. What I've checked: - `site:mydomain.com` shows pages are indexed - GSC says everything is indexed - Searching "mydomain.com + main product keyword" — still ranks #1 - But just the brand name by itself — nowhere Only recent change: I tweaked the homepage title a few times between different product keywords. Curre”
“I pulled a chart below. I was looking at impressions for June 2025 vs June 2026. We had a good month but here is what I saw. New customer acquisition was down 30% Orders were down 28% Sessions were down 25% Sales only down 2% AOV was up 22% I've also noticed the first bullet, new customers, that 30% has gotten more drastic as each month passes meaning February and March were up from year prior. April had an outage that was similar to what we just experienced this week, where performance cras”
“I am facing some issues with my website, I emailed google through their contact for but guess what? Chatbot responded to my email. Previously too, has been hard to contact human support. So what’s going on? submitted by /u/Confusedmind75 [link] [comments]”
“As a graphic designer I agree, Gemini seems to have made the best page. It feels pretty much like an actual national brand product website. The ChatGPT ones aren't bad but they would benefit a great deal from some directed refinement, especially with regards to product design/branding.”
“It’s clear that Google has discovered that by optimising to a target ROAS to t CPA they’re missing out on inventory. Everything that Google does is to increase Sales to their mass inventory and make more money What’s everyone’s thoughts on changing tactics on bidding strategy? ROAS and CPA are becoming irrelevant It seems. I was thinking just testing maximise conversions. Everyone else planning to do about it. (Running $1m+ per month) submitted by /u/keep-the-momentum [link] [c”
“Hello I have heard countless times that quality score is not an important metric anymore. But if it is not as important as it was. Why is my campaign's Search lost top impression share (rank) = >90% Search lost absolute top impression share (Budget) = 0% I am not receiving any high-quality clicks. submitted by /u/MarzipanHot6468 [link] [comments]”
“Following on from poking at how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini recommend software, I wanted to answer something simpler: in a given category, can a challenger actually get named, or does AI just list the same couple of incumbents every single time? So I took three categories, asked one plain buyer question in each, ran it 5 times on each of the four models, so 20 answers per category, and counted who got named. Product analytics was basically locked at the top. Mixpanel and Amplitude got”
“We cover: Why Gary Vaynerchuk believes AI search is a real marketing change, not a passing trend How VaynerMedia is thinking about AEO, GEO, and AI search for clients Why SEO people need to understand how AI search changes discovery Why social content, video descriptions, Substack, Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube may matter more inside AI answers Why Gary thinks Gemini has a major advantage over other AI tools How YouTube transcripts could become a huge advantage for Google Why Gmail and Calendar”
“I can't get a Gemini flash response as fast as the Google results load. I half think they pre-cache common searches, no way a model has an answer in 0.2s flat like that. On more obscure and less asked questions I notice the AI overview talking longer to load than the search results, on a second search using the same terms on a different device I get instant answers again. Considering that this model is also doing some RAG by the looks of it, I'll go with pre-cached answers for common que”
“I’m trying to understand what people actually want from SEO and GEO tools right now. There are already so many dashboards, keyword tools, audits, trackers, AI visibility tools, etc. A lot of them feel either too generic, too expensive, or like they show data without telling you what to do next. For people here who work on SEO, content, SaaS growth, agencies, or AI search visibility: What features would a tool need to have for you to even consider trying it? For example: Google Search Console ins”
“Almost everyone is investing in SEO but a very few are investing in AI discoverability . Example: Company ranks #1 for a commercial keyword on Google. Then I ask ChatGPT or Gemini: “What’s the best software if I want to reduce customs compliance work?” The company doesn’t appear. I try another question. Still doesn’t appear. Another. Nothing. Technically they’re winning search. Commercially they’re invisible during buying decisions. That’s because AI doesn’t rank pages. It recommends businesses”
“Interesting. What changed after you started using it? Was the traffic boost mainly from fixing product data / PDP content, adding content around buyer questions, improving reviews/schema, or just discovering which prompts you were missing from? Also curious how you measured the lift - Shopify Agentic channel, GA4/referrers, server logs, or something else?”
“(these are not my stats, just an example im using) I see so many people in this subreddit posting Google Search Console analytics with huge spikes in impressions and clicks. Sometimes they explain what increased their traffic, but it never feels like it was just one thing. For those of you who've had one of those graphs where impressions suddenly took off, what actually happened? Was there a single change that made the biggest difference (technical SEO, content, backlinks, internal linking,”
“The real shift for me: AI answers lean on third-party stuff way more than your own site. ChatGPT will recommend you off a Reddit thread or a roundup post, not your homepage copy. So the funnel work moved to getting mentioned in the sources it already trusts, not polishing my own pages. Curious if you're seeing the same?”
“It's not just tricking an algorithm. It's deceiving people searching for targeted keywords. It may not be illegal, but it absolutely is unethical. And blacklisting when caught is entirely called for. Yes, there are some SEO companies that won't stoop to that level, but trying to claim there's no such thing as unethical SEO...well, you do you, I suppose.”
“Seeing the way people are bringing rushing content scaling scripts to market - I think this is going to get all of Google's attention. Historically - Google has either been ignore or come down like a god with vengeance (Penguin, Panda, HCU)..... And I think if it does come with a sledgehammer - the waves will be rocky? Just me - anyone else getting spidey senses? submitted by /u/WebLinkr [link] [comments]”
“I’ve worked on SEO my whole career (25 years). So naturally the current paradigm shift is extremely interesting. So I’ve been going in deep and found that there’s surprisingly little evidence for a lot of what is bandied about. It’s nostalgic in a way; it feels like the early SEO days when nobody really knew anything and there was lots of correlation inference. For optimisation there are barely any new techniques beyond “do good basic SEO”. The visibility industry is a borderline scam. Selling v”
“The pipe dream is having LLMs to perform SEO content creation autonomously, and I did just that that and watched my ranking drop off the cliff and my organic traffic halved. This article is written entirely by me without any AI or help. I'm going to tell you how I used AI and agentically fucked the SEO of my site. Read on and I'll show you the SEO agent harness I built, so you can succeed and avoid the mistake as I made. Our SEO Agentic Dashboard As a solo founder building to 1M ARR, the”
“I run a small agency and lately I kept hearing clients say "someone found us through ChatGPT" so I got curious and ran a little experiment. I picked 10 cities and asked ChatGPT and Perplexity things a real customer would ask. Stuff like "best emergency plumber in Austin" or "who should I call for a leaking water heater in Denver". 30 searches total, then I looked up every business that got recommended to figure out what they had in common. Some things that surprised”
“ChatGPT has only gained raw user count since release. The lowered market share primarily represents overall market growth, and basically counts anyone who clicks a Google AI summary as a Gemini user. The only actual meaningful change has been Anthropic becoming a competitor for advanced users but their user base is much smaller. OAI still has the biggest advantage in the most important factor, which is the massive amount and quality of data they get every day, and Anthropic is even still ahead o”
“how do you get rid of irrelevant searches driving people to your page? Kinda like negative keywords in Google.”
“Most brands optimizing for ChatGPT Shopping are optimizing for the wrong queries. The instinct is to make sure your brand name pulls product cards. Nike running shoes. Dell XPS 15. Makes sense on the surface. But we tracked ~2 million prompts through Profound and the data inverts that logic completely. Open ended prompts like 'best running for flat feet' or 'lightweight business laptops with strong battery life' trigger ChatGPT Shopping at 12.1%. Brand direct prompts trigger at 3”
“Spending over $1 mil/month on Google search with average CTR at 15%. On June 29th CTR dropped to 11%. The past 4 days it's been 7-8%. It's never been below 13% for even a single day in the last 12 months before this. Anyone experiencing anything similar? What's weird is that clicks are steady, the change is basically that impressions have doubled. No changes were made and search partners are off. submitted by /u/ADAoverETH [link] [comments]”
“Correct. No more keyword stuffing in your product descriptions. That's not what AI is searching for.”
“Sweet. New paranoia marketing angle coming in to replace SEO. I get that search is an important acquisition channel for some practices. So are billboards and bus stops. Doesn't make any of them legal tech. (also obvious slop post)”
“Founder here at RankCaster. We measure whether brands get cited in ChatGPT/Gemini/Copilot/Perplexity, and we sell a percentage on a dashboard the same way Otterly, Peec, Profound and Adobe LLM Optimizer do. Nobody in the category shipped a defensible confidence interval next to that percentage until we published one. Reason: LLM responses are stochastic, so the number on any of our dashboards is a random draw from a distribution, and the confidence interval depends on how many calls the vendor a”
“A lot of irrelevant search terms have started getting clicks triggered by phrase match keywords not even remotely related to the search term. submitted by /u/human_marketer [link] [comments]”
“I am working with a company that has an aggressive blogging machine. This is in the health veritical and I think it will continue to get savaged by Google AIO. What kinds of content or platforms are you focused on these days? submitted by /u/Alvinquest [link] [comments]”
“I run a small company that does marketing for home-services businesses (plumbers, HVAC, that world). A prospect told me one of our case studies "read like ChatGPT." that bothered me because a human did write it. I wrote a lot of it. So i pulled up Wikipedia's "signs of AI writing" page and used it as a checklist against our site. there are some obvious, and extremely common tells that you'll see around today. Obvious tells like: "not just X, but Y" sentences”
“I run a small company that does marketing for home-services businesses (plumbers, HVAC, that world). A prospect told me one of our case studies "read like ChatGPT." that bothered me because a human did write it. I wrote a lot of it. So i pulled up Wikipedia's "signs of AI writing" page and used it as a checklist against our site. there are some obvious, and extremely common tells that you'll see around today. Obvious tells like: "not just X, but Y" sentences”
“Hello fellow redditors. Started doing this recently, Looked into my GSC data, found relevant queries I rank pos 4+ on but never mentioned. Added them to my content and saw results quite quickly, for most of them. Does anyone else do this? Im thinking out of a saas standpoint, finding and expanding to more keywords and queries might help drive more sales. I've decided to make a wordpress plugin serving this exact problem. If anyone wants to follow the development or gain early access, visit m”
“It shows: Whether ChatGPT cites your site Which pages it references Alternative sources it prefers A few suggestions to improve visibility I'd love some feedback. Is this useful / is there anything you'd want a tool like this to check that it doesn't already? Here's the tool if you'd like to try it out :) [ https://www.visiblee.ai/tools/chatgpt-citation-checker]() submitted by /u/purple_from_the_east [link] [comments]”
“Hi all- it seems like every business wants to get some traffic via organic channels and SEO if often the top of this list. These days I have noticed that I use ChatGPT to get recommendations for almost everything and I using Google less and less every day. However I have been told getting mentioned in AI overview, ChatGPT etc is basically SEO itself. So curious from the ones who have managed to cracked the code, what SEO tactics has actually helped you acquire customers especially in the age of”
“I manage growth for our company, and our CEO went to a conference recently and has asked that we add Al visibility to our monthly metrics dashboard. I'm not thrilled about it, but I know that's where the world is heading. I've just started to look into Al rank tracking. I know most consumers are asking ChatGPT for help with everything, and even if they do a google search, they pay more attention to the Al summary than anything else. So if we're not showing up in those first Al me”