LLM Search Undermining Existing SEO Efforts

“yeah, this can definitely affect sales, especially in niches where people ask “what’s the best X for Y” instead of searching brands. I’d track which prompts your competitor appears for and what pages ChatGPT is citing; seoforgpt logs prompts and sources so you can spot gaps, write better guides/comparisons, and gradually win back a bunch of those answers.”

“I have seen stats that Google still sees around 90% of Shopping Queries. Not sure shopping is very popular on ChatGPT, yet I would think researching the product would be. I have asked it to find me best price, etc. and it is pretty bad. mixes up models, the links are embedded in a strange way, often just 3 options. I prefer Google”

“I feel it was the biggest change to how bid strategies performed since Google automated them in 2016. I have been doing this over 10 years but I don't have time, I am completely overwhelmed by work and agree with recent posts saying this is a crazy time to be in this industry. I am surviving and need a quick fix. Since the 17th, for one client, we have seen a more than 50% increase in CPC, with quadruple brand CPCs. I adjusted bid targets but when I did we simply lost share, didn't impro”

“This week, Google allowed website owners and publishers to prevent their site from being used in generative AI, mostly relating to Google AI Overviews, and their AI Mode. This might help people who do informational content which have been decimated by 0 click searches. I'm thinking of turning mine off as I own a content site. Anyone else thinking the same? I average 15K daily impressions for Generative AI features, which I'm fairly sure are mostly resulting in 0 clicks. submitted b”

“Found this in a client account today. Google's AI wrote the description, then Google disapproved it for having a phone number in the ad text. So Google broke Google's rule and then caught Google doing it. 😂 AI Max ad customization, if anyone's wondering how this happens. Two of them, both just sitting there not serving. submitted by /u/Wilson-KingOfPrussia [link] [comments]”

“the pitch was literally the 2012 seo playbook with find and replace. churn out listicles, get brand mentioned on roundup sites, call it ai visibility. three months in, zero citations in chatgpt or perplexity. meanwhile the client's boring comparison page with real pricing and actual test data kept getting quoted. my read after doing this for a living: the models lean on the same trust signals google spent 20 years building. you cannot spam your way in, and the spam might actively hurt once c”

“People ask an AI before they ask Google now, and the engines lean hard on directory pages. Getting listed on a few is about the only distribution that works with no audience. I run one of them, legit.show. Free to list.”

“That’s a really interesting point — I’ve honestly been thinking about SEO way too narrowly as “Google rankings” I hadn’t really considered how much the same content can influence visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI search experiences too. The idea of building content that gets cited rather than just trying to rank is something I definitely want to explore. I’m still very early with this site, so I’m trying to learn what actually moves the needle instead of throwing everything at it a”

“the claude code angle above is right but worth being specific about what that actually looks like, because "ask it to pull web searches daily" undersells it a bit. what actually works is a scheduled script (cron or a simple github action) that hits each competitor's specific product page url, extracts price with a css selector on their product schema (most shopify stores have decent structured data, look for the price meta tag), and writes it to a sheet or simple db with a timestam”

What???? Why?

“I’m competing with Ahrefs, Semrush, and other SEO giants with 90+ DR. Yet ChatGPT still started recommending RankOrg. Here’s what I did: Published useful SEO content every day. Built free tools around real SEO problems. Built a presence across Reddit, X, LinkedIn, etc. Focused on helping people instead of writing AI slop for algorithms. You don’t need a massive domain to get discovered by AI search. Build something genuinely useful. https://rankorg.com submitted by /u/Candid-Vegetabl”

“Search Console -> Performance -> filter by page -> sort by impressions instead of clicks. If the queries showing up are actually relevant to what you built, that's the real signal that indexing is working and ranking just hasn't caught up yet. Most new domains take 2-3 months to climb out of the 40s if the content underneath is solid.”

“My suspicion is yes! Just because when you ask ChatGPT or Claude to suggest tools, you can actually check where they found them, and Capterra and G2 show up there pretty often. But damn, they’re expensive 😅 What we did was just create an account and ask a few of our partners to leave honest reviews. We’ll see if it actually makes a difference!”

“authority, and specifically the engine split it produces, is the one that surprises people. the same page can get quoted by one engine constantly and ignored by another for months, and the variable is not your content, it is who else mentions you in the sources that particular engine trusts. so the practical read of your third pillar: there is no single authority score, each engine has its own citation graph, and you work them one at a time. clarity you can fix in an afternoon, relevance in a qu”

“Most "find your niche" advice sends you to a keyword tool to check search volume. I did that for a while and it kept putting me in exactly the crowded places, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why. Search volume is a lagging indicator. A phrase only has volume after enough people already know to search for it, which means by the time the tool shows you a number, the topic has been covered, and you're competing with channels that got there first and have the wat”

“I'm trying to understand this more from the prompt side than the SEO side. We run a local service business and normal rankings are pretty stable but clicks have been softer, so I started checking how Chatgpt answers the same questions people used to search in Google. What I actually want is a Chatgpt prompt tracker that can run a fixed set of prompts, show when our brand appears, which competitors show up instead, and whether those answers change over time. Has anyone here built or used some”

dead app domain winning on brand is a common index issue. the model prioritizes age and links over current status, even for a 404.

“The insight that got me started: agencies already do this manually for clients, pulling rankings and review counts by hand once a month, because there's no cheap way to automate it per-client. So I'm building the automated version: weekly scan, competitor diff, plain-English summary, delivered by email or WhatsApp. Solo building this right now, India-first. Teaser video attached, waitlist opening soon. Would love feedback from anyone who's sold local/SEO services before, does this so”

“Recently i discovered that after the august spam update the desktop specific rankings had a sudden fall while mobile and tablet device rankings have been somewhat stable. I'm not so much of a tech guy so can you guys help me to figure out what might be the cause. Appreciate any help submitted by /u/Agreeable_Area4804 [link] [comments]”

“The signal most GTM stacks ignore is what competitors are actively paying to advertise. I query the Meta, Google, TikTok and LinkedIn ad libraries through an MCP server (adextract) and look at ad longevity and recurring messaging angles. A competitor that has kept the same ad running for months is a stronger signal than most intent data, because it means their offer is actually converting. It is cheap, it is grounded in real spend behavior, and it gives you a concrete creative and offer to test”

“The 39,000 transcripts living behind a runtime CDN fetch is the same failure I keep finding, and it is worse than a ranking problem because nothing reports it. Search Console will happily tell you a page is indexed and healthy while the thing that makes the page worth indexing was never in the HTML. You only catch it by fetching your own URL with curl and reading what comes back. The line I would most like to hear more about is the one everybody else leaves out: 76 sessions from ChatGPT and Gemi”

“Client is a VAR that resells Computer Aided Manufacturing software for CNC machining. One campaign. AI Max on for one week, then I shut it off. Nothing else changed in that time. The campaign was targeting the name of the software they sell Week with AI Max on: 955 distinct search queries. 72% of reported spend went to stuff that had nothing to do with the product. Some of what it bought: anderson europe gmbh (German woodworking machinery company) houfek a s (Czech woodworking machinery company)”

“Problem, but narrower than that. The search term I settled on names two things at once. Who the person is, and what they are stuck on. "Invoicing software" is a category and tells me neither. "Freelancers" is just a crowd. It is the two words together that work, because someone typing them has already told me their job and their problem, and the only question left is whether my product does that job. Topic keywords have the problem I had with the generic English terms. Stoici”

“asked ChatGPT to recommend agencies/tools in a few niches. Most Indian businesses never showed up — not even the big ones. Turns out AI engines recommend based on mentions, reviews & structured data — not Google rankings. I went deep into this rabbit hole (and accidentally built a small tool that tracks it). Curious: Have you checked if AI recommends YOUR business? Do you think "AI visibility" will matter in the next 2 years, or is it hype? Happy to share what I learned + free acce”

“the cobbler's children thing is so real. i worked at an agency where our own blog had like 3 posts from 2022 and we were selling content packages to clients for 2k a month the placeholder text one is just embarrassing though, how does nobody notice that i do seo for a few local businesses here, mostly construction and trade companies. the multilingual clustering issue you mentioned is interesting cause i got one client with site in spanish and english and the keyword overlap gets messy. woul”

“Not enough data yet to make a meaningful comparison, which is partly why I started this thread. But I think your point about not stuffing the PDP with every possible FAQ gets to the more interesting question. Even within AI-referred traffic, two shoppers landing on the same PDP may have completely different things left unresolved. One may be checking fit, another delivery, another whether the quality justifies the price. So I'm wondering whether referral source + aggregate metrics are only t”

“I’d definitely look at AI-referred traffic separately before changing the whole PDP template. If those visitors are arriving after doing a bunch of research, the questions they ask after landing could be way more useful than guessing what extra content to add. I’d check landing-page conversion rate, time on page, add-to-cart rate and which PDPs are getting the traffic, then compare that against your normal organic visitors. For the pages that actually get AI traffic, I’d probably make the import”

“We haven't changed anything in significant way to try and cater to AI searches. What we are seeing however, is more potential customers skipping the traditional funnel... they're coming to us already knowing who we are, what we do, and how we might be able to help them. There's always been some of that, of course -- reputation and word of mouth -- but we've seen an uptick that corresponds to the timing of AI search.”

“How is that different from any feed-based product ads (like Google shopping or facebook catalog ads) that send traffic straight to product pages? Honestly organic search is a poor comparison for AI agents. They're more akin to referrals or affiliate marketing if the argument if "this customer converted because he was sent here from a trusted recommendation" Also I dont understand how the "traditionnal" customer journey takes multiple days and sessions but now they have on”

“yeah we’re seeing the same “teleported deep-intent” behavior on PDPs from AI tools. Bounce is lower, time on page is weirdly short, add-to-cart higher. What changed for us wasn’t the hero, it was the “I’m almost ready” stuff: super clear shipping/returns, sizing/fit, 2,3 killer FAQs, and a visible compare link. To actually see AI vs other traffic, we’ve been using seoforgpt to track which prompts/products ChatGPT and Perplexity are sending people to, then lining that up with GA4 behavior.”

“Saw an interesting Shopify study on traffic coming from AI search. https://www.shopify.com/uk/enterprise/blog/ai-search-insights Apparently 56% of AI-referred sessions landed directly on a PDP vs 20% from organic search. They also found that AI-referred traffic converted better. The PDP part is what I found interesting. If someone has already spent 10 minutes asking ChatGPT about the best product for their needs, comparing options, etc., they could arrive on your PDP pretty far along in the deci”

“I started listing ChatGPT and Claude separately in the signup question because those users kept choosing “Google.” I still ask for the exact prompt, since AI referral analytics are basically a shrug.”

“For a niche SaaS, would you rather target: A) High-volume keywords with broader traffic B) Lower-volume keywords with very strong product intent I'm leaning toward B, especially when the keyword directly relates to the problem the product solves. Curious what has worked best for other SaaS founders. submitted by /u/ResaleIQ [link] [comments]”

“To the "don't care" replies: fair enough today, but the answers exist whether you look or not, and buyers read them. Some data instead of vibes: since mid-July we've collected 23,395 AI answers covering 358 brands across 24 industries, and wrong or outdated details like the ones you found are common, mostly because engines quote whatever third-party sources they trust rather than your homepage. A stale directory entry can outvote your own site. Two things follow. Checking one e”

“You found the cause correctly, and this isn't really an SEO problem - it's a "which source does the model trust for this fact" problem. Right now that blog outranks you as a source about your own pricing, and that's the thing to fix. Three concrete things I'd do. First, check your Product schema on a live product page - run it through Google's Rich Results test. A lot of Shopify themes emit incomplete offer data, or the price without currency, and if your own struct”

Get chatGTP to do it all.

“I’m working on a local SEO project and would like to get some opinions from people who have experience with Google Business Profiles. The business is physically located at: 27816 219th Pl SE, Maple Valley, WA 98038 The goal is to rank its Google Business Profile in Seattle. I understand that the physical location plays a major role in local map rankings, but I’m wondering: Is it realistically possible to rank a GBP from Maple Valley for searches in Seattle? If yes, what strategies have worked fo”

“We’ve spent months publishing pages, tweaking titles, and checking Search Console 3x a day. Then our Generative AI impressions jumped from almost nothing to 40–50 per day for about a week, before dropping right back down. You look for any sign that your startup marketing is working. Sometimes the sign is Batman. Jokes aside, has anyone else seen a spike like this in the Generative AI report? I’m now trying to figure out what we accidentally did right. submitted by /u/Reasonable-Coat-”

“verseseo.com — because apparently ranking on Google wasn't stressful enough, now we have to rank in ChatGPT too.”

“via u/rustybrick As you know, Google's August 2026 spam update began on August 18th and concluded on August 21st. But the volatility has not calmed down since and I think it is time I document it. We've been seeing chatter within the SEO community, in addition to the third-party Google tracking tools pick up on volatility within the Google Search results after the conclusion of the August spam update. submitted by /u/WebLinkr [link] [comments]”

“Remember when Google Search actually... Worked? Yeah. AI is rarely better for searching than Google Search was ten years ago. They crippled it on purpose to sell more ads. They're going to do the same to "AI search" once people are hooked. It's inherent in the system. "It'll make us more money" is all the justification they need, and there isn't anyone to stop them.”

You should see the latest as of today. I added like 8 more last night.

“All pages are indexed - 39 of 39, nothing in "crawled, currently not indexed". Site's two months old, but I only got listed in the extra directories two weeks ago, so those links haven't been picked up yet. Needs time.”

“Fair - a month took us from position 50 to 26.8, so it's early. Your GEO check is the useful bit; I have llms.txt but no recurring test of whether a model can state what we do. Adding it.”

“Pulled the coverage report - 39 of 39 indexed on Google, so discovery isn't our problem there. But you're right about the principle: Bing has 4 of 39. That one I'd missed.”

“How do you get your website in top rankings ? I am trying to improve my organic visibility. And how do we do it in-house ? We have no need to use external help from agencies or other companies.”

“No rank track exist for it, so measurement is just asking the bots the same questions every month, writing down what comes back and hoping the sample means something”

“What types of websites have seen ranking gains or drops after the August 2026 Google update? Which SEO factors seem to be driving these changes, and what patterns are you noticing? submitted by /u/DefinitionStrong8061 [link] [comments]”

“Buyers ask an answer engine before they ask Google now, and I had no idea whether any of them named my products. Rank tracking does not answer it — a page can rank fine and never be the thing the model says. So the tool asks the buyer questions instead of the keywords. You write the questions a customer would actually type — 'best invoicing software for freelancers', not 'invoicing software' — and it asks five engines every week and records one of three states per cell: cited (yo”

“Buyers ask an answer engine before they ask Google now, and I had no idea whether any of them named my products. Rank tracking does not answer it — a page can rank fine and never be the thing the model says. So the tool asks the buyer questions instead of the keywords. You write the questions a customer would actually type — 'best invoicing software for freelancers', not 'invoicing software' — and it asks five engines every week and records one of three states per cell: cited (yo”

“the thing nobody talks about is that backlinks arent just for google anymore. chatgpt and perplexity pull from the most cited pages on the web so building backlinks is basically building visibility everywhere. I use Outrank for this, works fine for a small SaaS team”

“Hi, We're working hard on SEO and GEO optimization. We're doing the classic things first: getting page speed on track, clearing all Search Console suggestions, adding all the LLM-friendly markup, adding FAQ pages, getting all the public "dofollow" backlinks we can, posting on Product Hunt, posting lots of generated content on our blog. Still, I think LLMs should give quite high priority to reviews on platforms that make it hard to post fake ones. Could you share how you approac”

opps

AEO/GEO is just Silicon Valley regurgitated SEO

“Absolute trash. We get a lot of spikes from ai traffic, but it's almost all scraping. Google, at least, gives you SEO guidance - do these things to make your data readable and accessible to people, bots, and services. And it's mostly all there in writing. The AI co's are almost completely black boxes. And they consider it a feature that stuff can change every day. And, most of the 'browsing' of your site from gpt happens in gpt's index. So that activity is all hidden from”

“i work on AEO for B2B brands and the hardest conversation is with founders who did everything "right." dozens of well researched articles, decent rankings, real traffic. then they test their buyer questions in chatgpt and perplexity and a competitor with half the content gets named instead. the gap is almost never quality. it is citability. their posts burry the actual answer 600 words in, make claims with no first party data behind them, and never state anything a model could quote wo”

““SEO doesn’t need another dashboard?” yeah, that line hits because dashboards never close outreach gaps. I’ve seen the same thing on my side ,once we stopped obsessing over reports and actually did targeted outreach, rankings and signups finally moved together.”

“two months is nothing for google, thats not the comparison yet. i put seo and geo checks next to each other in my product, and geo asks whether a model can state what you do.”

“nobody compares codebases, they compare google results. been running Outrank to handle the content and backlink side so i can keep building. DR compounds over time so the longer you wait the worse it gets”