Highlights from the Event

Cloudflare and OpenAI put out a post this week about a pilot where Cloudflare's network helps OpenAI's search crawler decide what to crawl: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-openai-discovery-agentic-web/

It doesn't say how ChatGPT's search algorithm actually works, but I think it drops a few real hints.

Most of it is about Cloudflare sharing data that helps OpenAI figure out which pages are worth indexing or updating, so the crawler spends less time on pages that aren't worth it or haven't changed and has more resources left to index more pages. That's aimed right at what's possibly Google's number one pain point right now. Billions of new pages keep getting added, Google is indexing a smaller and smaller share of them, and a lot of site owners are having a harder time getting pages into the index.

The part I keep coming back to is that the article specifically points out that a lot of the most helpful pages on the internet don't have many links pointing to them. My read is that whatever they're building won't depend on links as much as Google does. In Google's defense, they've said many times they don't want to rely on links as much as they do, and the algorithm does seem to lean on them less as it gets more sophisticated. I still think it depends on links more than they'd like to admit.

Whether that's enough to compete with Google, I honestly don't know. Google has a huge head start and a ton of data. On the other hand, Cloudflare is the biggest CDN and DNS provider, so it sees server-level data Google doesn't. And a search engine that only has to work for AI is a lot easier to build: people look at the top one to three results, while an AI will happily read through a hundred or more, so you mostly need to find the best one or two hundred pages rather than put them in perfect order.

I don't think ChatGPT is going to replace Google as the default search engine, but the competition does seem to be heating up.

Hi, I need help regarding guest posting. I plan to contact many websites and publishers to secure guest posts and list myself on guest posting platforms like iCopify and Link Publishers. How can I do that? I also need help regarding a free posting website list

please help reagrding this I will be very thankfull if Someone share a list of those websites

Long story short we offer a global service for people visiting a particular country we rank top 5 in the US but totally invisible in the SERPS in Asian countries. Our top competitor ranks well in Asia but on page 2 or 3 in US and EU. We are totally invisible in the serps for Asia

Hi everyone!

I'm working on a new project and planning to build a website from scratch. I want to develop a solid SEO keyword strategy before launching the website, but I have a limited budget and would prefer to start with free tools.

I'm looking for advice on how to approach keyword research step by step, including:

- Finding relevant keywords and long-tail keywords.

- Understanding search volume, keyword difficulty, and search intent.

- Analyzing competitors' websites, content, and keyword strategies.

- Discovering questions users ask on Google, Reddit, forums, and other platforms.

- Grouping keywords into clusters and mapping them to website pages.

- Identifying realistic opportunities for a new website with little or no domain authority.

Which free tools do you recommend, and what workflow would you follow?

Would Google Keyword Planner be useful without running paid Google Ads campaigns? Are tools like Google Trends, Google Search Console, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, or free keyword research tools enough to get started?

I'd really appreciate recommendations based on your actual experience, especially for someone building a website from zero and trying to create a keyword strategy before launch.

Thanks in advance!

Hey guys! I'm working on a Tools Website (YouTube Download, other cool tools for Video editors) and i am getting about 50 People on the site daily. I started 4 days ago so that is ok. But to make some money off it i would like to increase traffic significantly but not shady. Real traffic, real users.

What is your approach? I am working on Backlinks, Languages, Subpages and so on with AI but i want to make sure i dont miss anything...

Also i cant tell what traffic is helping my site to grow and what traffic is useless... Do you have experience?

Thanks for your help!

Hello Everyone.

Today marks exactly one year since my website was launched. However, I have not been able to increase its 'topical authority' or 'website authority'.

I try to build backlink in my niche - image converter / Other image related tool. However, some site owner say that you have to pay $150-180 per backlink, or meet requirements such as having 10k monthly visits according to Ahrefs metrics. This is the real story.

So, what should I do to build authority?

In the past I've constantly watched my competitors ongoing using Moz free Link Explorer, watching the disovered and lost constantly, as I can't see the full picture.

Can anyone recommend a cheap ish software for getting a full back link profile for competition? Seems AI has gone to a lot of companies heads and causes their prices to increase.

In the past I've used SEMRush which used to let me pick competitors and run audits on them and find their back links, but what can people recommend that is inexpensive but does a good job of link research on competitors?

Looking to mimic back link profile of my competitors before establishing my own back links. I have rich content already I just need some external authority.

I've been tracking whether brands get named in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and the part that matters most turned out to be the prompt list, not the tool. Here's how I build it right now:

1. Start from buyer questions, not keywords. 15–25 prompts written the way someone asks before they know any brand: "best X for Y", "X vs Y for [use case]", "alternatives to [competitor]", "is X worth it for [situation]".
2. Split by intent: commercial, comparison, alternatives, plus a few informational ones. Comparison and alternatives prompts are where brand names actually show up; informational ones mostly return generic advice.
3. Freeze the wording. Same prompts every run, otherwise you end up measuring your own phrasing changes.
4. Run each prompt in every engine separately. The same prompt can name different brands in ChatGPT and Gemini, so one engine's answer isn't "what AI says".
5. Log three things per answer: named or not, position in the list, and which sources were cited.
6. Recheck every 2–4 weeks rather than daily. Answers vary from run to run, so a single day tells you little.

The cited sources column ends up being the most useful one. In a lot of categories the answer leans on listicles, comparison pages and Reddit threads more than on the brand's own site, which changes what you'd actually work on.

Things I'm still unsure about:

• How many runs per prompt do you need before you trust a "named / not named" result?
• Do you check logged-out answers, logged-in, or both?
• Has anyone seen changes on their own site move AI mentions, or does it mostly come from third-party pages?

Curious how others handle this, especially when a client asks "are we showing up in ChatGPT?"

Hi,

I have a question regarding Semrush historical data on a starter plan. What's the duration for which it shows the data?

Let's say i enter semrush(dot)com, how many months of organic traffic will it show under the starter plan? is it 12 months or more

On a Pro+ Plan, it says, you can see data from 2012 but how about the starter plan?

Thank you,

Hey r/SEO,

My site — a multilingual Baltic ferry comparison site I’ve been building solo since December 2025 — just had a brutal overnight crash in GSC impressions and I can’t figure out the cause.

The numbers:

• Oct 10: 1,377 impressions
• Oct 11: 747 (−46%)
• Oct 12: 36 (−97% from baseline)
• Oct 13–14: ~100/day (partial recovery, no changes made)

What I’ve already ruled out:

• No Google Core Update on Oct 11 (checked Search Status Dashboard)
• robots.txt is clean
• No noindex added sitewide
• No manual action in GSC
• No deployments around that date

The weirdest part: it started recovering on its own 48h later without me doing anything. That makes me think it might be a Google-side indexing glitch rather than something I broke.

Site is 10 months old so still possibly in sandbox territory, but this felt different — too sharp and too fast to be algorithmic.

Has anyone seen a drop like this and figured out what caused it? Curious if Oct 11-12 was rough for others too.

Links from wikipedia carries a lot of weight. We all know that. Can anyone guide me how can I get one?

Hi there, I'm a mental health professional. I've been writing about connectivity and recently published a byline @ Featured. While I'm not sure how authoritative these links are, they are backlinks to my website. I've snagged like 4 in two weeks. Is there a cumulative gain from having repeat articles with backlinks from the same website? These have all been about my niche, children's mental health/families. Should I move on, or keep getting some easy backlinks from mental health blogs?

I own a few self-storage facilities in Belgium.

The storage market here is slowly maturing. It’s growing fast, but supply and demand are still nowhere near what you see in, say, the US. Most operators are small, with one or a handful of locations, and even the bigger players are still fairly small.

There’s no well-known or successful aggregator website in Belgium. With supply this fragmented, you’d think there’s room for one.

With AI, it’s fairly easy to scrape the data you need and set up a website. On the other hand, LLMs might make aggregator websites unnecessary.

I’m thinking about going for it and building a site from scratch. My strategy would be:

• Collect all the data, focusing on what Google Maps can’t offer right now: unit availability, prices, price comparisons and facility features.
• Build the site slowly. I don’t want to get carried away and pump out hundreds or thousands of pages. I’d rather keep it clean and easy to navigate. Belgium only has a few hundred storage facilities anyway, so the scale is manageable.
• Grow organically and hope Google Search, and maybe LLMs, gradually pick it up.
• Let storage operators claim their profile so they can update their own data. It would be completely free, with no hidden costs or paid features.
• Look for a business model only after organic growth works. Startup and hosting costs are low, so I can afford to wait.

My question:
Am I being too hopeful or optimistic?
Should I try it, or forget about it?

This post was written by me, translated to English by AI.

We run a software shop. Our developers know the most interesting things about our work, but they're busy shipping, so they never get around to writing about it.

So we've been experimenting with mining our Git history for topics. We look at commit messages, merge requests and the files that changed, then pull out the problems we solved, why we chose an approach, and what broke along the way. Those become the seed for posts attributed to the commit authors.

So far it has solved the "nobody has time to write" problem. It's too early for us to say anything about rankings, and I'm unsure whether Google would agree this is EEAT content.

Questions for anyone who has tried something similar:

1. Has anyone used commits, PRs, tickets or changelogs as a content source? How did you turn them into posts?

2. Did you see any measurable effect on rankings, links or leads, and how long did it take?

3. Any tips, tricks or risks you'd pass along, or problems you ran into, if you've tried this approach?

I know its not legit :) but if we have any old account mention our brand in reddit comments. Will that help rank higher?

I'm working on SEO for a B2B manufacturing website targeting international buyers, mainly in the US, UK and other English-speaking markets.

Over the past few months, we've worked on:

• Technical SEO, indexing, redirects and Core Web Vitals
• Commercial product and category page optimization
• Internal linking and supporting informational content
• Search intent, keyword cannibalization and structured data
• Google Search Console, GA4 and Semrush monitoring
• Relevant backlink opportunities and manufacturer credibility signals

The website is technically healthier, and several commercial keywords are moving closer to Google's first page.

However, we've hit a plateau.

Here's what our recent data shows:

• 28-day organic clicks: 72 vs. 71 previously
• Impressions: approximately 8,970 vs. 10,200
• Average position: improved from 17.7 to 11.7
• Domain authority remains relatively low
• Some commercial keywords rank around positions 4–15 but generate very few clicks

The challenge is that ranking improvements aren't translating into meaningful traffic growth or enough qualified B2B inquiries.

I'm trying to avoid making unnecessary changes to pages that are already improving.

My questions for experienced SEOs:

1. When rankings improve but impressions and clicks stagnate, what do you investigate first?
2. For a B2B manufacturing website, would you prioritize stronger commercial content, topical authority, backlinks or CTR improvements?
3. How do you determine whether low domain authority is actually holding back competitive commercial keywords?
4. What has worked for you when trying to move B2B keywords from positions 4–15 into the top results?
5. How would you prioritize SEO activities for a smaller manufacturer competing internationally against established suppliers?

I'm especially interested in practical experiences and evidence-based approaches rather than generic SEO checklists.

Would appreciate hearing what's actually worked for others in similar B2B niches.

Does anyone know whether Google changed algorithm or something like that? This looks completely random.

Since I cannot send an image, here is a table of my past week:

I was under the impression that optimizing your site for visibility in the SERPs doesn’t make sense anymore. I saw a GSC screenshot of basically 3x growth in organic vis in 3 months with over 2M impressions and 2.2% CTR.

Is there a world where, if that screenshot is real, that website is not a growing brand and the increase in vis and clicks came from non brand queries?

If so, what am I missing and can anyone list websites that have seen growth in organic traffic that isn’t linked to just an increase in brand awareness.

I really thought non brand organic traffic growth in niches for non GMB listing dependent websites was not possible but i may be jumping and not doing my research. I will ask chat gpt too…

I launched a curated font library website a few days ago, but Google hasn't indexed most of my pages. Does this process take time or is there another reason it's not happening? I've got approximately 77 pages of downloadable fonts. Only about 22 pages are indexed. I add about 10 fonts to the website daily.

My site isn't the only one hosting these fonts, so I don't know if it's because Google treats the pages like duplicates or not. The website isn't SEO-optimised yet either.

I currently run a web tool utility website called Practical Web Tools and I just embedded the full open source versions of all the apps in Adobe Creative Suite.

I’m currently recovering from being de-indexed by Google because many of the tool pages were set up with templates, so Google saw them as duplicate pages.

I’ve since fixed this issue and have added some new tools to the site. Wanted to get some wisdom about embedding content on websites to optimize for SEO/AEO.

I currently run a web tool utility website called Practical Web Tools and I just embedded the full open source versions of all the apps in Adobe Creative Suite.

I’m currently recovering from being de-indexed by Google because many of the tool pages were set up with templates, so Google saw them as duplicate pages.

I’ve since fixed this issue and have added some new tools to the site. Wanted to get some wisdom about embedding content on websites to optimize for SEO/AEO.

You start a business because you’re good at something.
Next thing you know, you’re the CEO, accountant, customer service department, IT support, social media manager, and the person trying to figure out why the printer is making that noise.
Then someone tells you that you should also be optimizing your Google Business Profile, collecting reviews, replying to customers, and posting updates.
SIR. I JUST WANTED TO SELL MY PRODUCT. 😭😂
What is the most ridiculous thing you’ve had to learn how to do just to keep your business running?
I swear small business ownership is just Googling things until the problem goes away.
Thank God for Google I guess, Scale Quest wouldn’t get very far without it.