Let's talk about the disconnect between Google's PR and its reality.

Google's PR: Flying me to the Creator Summit, giving me a hug, and making me feel like a valued partner.

Google's Reality: A mysterious algorithm update that completely wiped out my $250k/year business, forced me to fire my employees, and has me eating at a food bank.

Danny Sullivan, after that warm welcome, you told me to hide my struggle from your engineers. Why? Were you afraid the truth would be inconvenient?

A question for the leadership team: Nick Fox, Elizabeth Reid, Prabhakar Raghavan, Sagar Kamdar, John Mueller.

Why did you essentially delete one of the top-ranking outdoor gear sites from the internet? My organic keywords are in a freefall, down by thousands in just months.

You offer no recourse, no explanation, and no human decency to even reply. You gaslight publishers, telling us to "make better content" while your own engineers privately tell me they use Bing for better results.

You should know that your actions are creating an army of witnesses. Every publisher you've destroyed is a potential testimony. Firms like Susman Godfrey L.L.P. are building a powerful case, and the DOJ is watching.

You took my business. You won't take my voice.

(P.S. I've already started two new local businesses. Unlike Google, I build instead of destroy. Good luck training your AI on the ashes of the websites you've burned.)

#GoogleSearch #Antitrust #Fraud #SmallBusinessOwner #Leadership #GoogleUpdate #TechAccountability

Cloudflare are now offering a new service where publishers can charge LLMs for using their content. It’s early days, but it could help claw back a lot of lost revenue from AI models.

I mean, the AI overviews is clearly a huge success as we can all see the big drop in organic traffic across all websites since it's launch.

Internet users are clearly not interested in browsing content sites anymore and it's only a matter of time the organic results will be removed completely.

However, the biggest source of income for Google has always been Adsense, and the longer the visitors spent browsing content sites, the more money Google made.

Some visitors spent up to 10-30 minutes browsing a website, and they could see lots of ads in various formats, including sticky banners, vignettes, video ads, etc.

I can't see a future where Google will be making the same amount of money with just AI overviews compared to millions of visitors going to websites and seeing dozens of ads every single day.

Am I missing something?

I’ve been speaking with teams, clients, and noticing a clear shift.
One thing is clear: AI Overviews are eating clicks 🧐

ChatGPT is answering before Google even gets a chance
And “ranking” doesn’t mean what it used to

some shifts I’m seeing:
- CTR is down, but branded queries are up
- teams are caring more about being cited than ranked
- off-site mentions, podcasts, and PR are moving the SEO needle
- “freshness” is back in a big way, updates > new posts
- content goals have shifted from volume to visibility

personally, we’ve started tracking mentions in AI tools, boosting topical authority, and putting more weight on structured, quotable content

what about you?
if you’ve adjusted your SEO goals or KPIs lately, I’d love to hear how you’re navigating this shift.
your input might help others too

They released an article today saying: "Today, July 1, what we’re calling Content Independence Day. Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world's leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content. That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it's only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it."

What do you think of this? Will it even have any effect on SEO?

From Google on Bluesky:

June 2025 core update - Released the June 2025 core update . The rollout may take up to 3 weeks to complete.

Dashboard:

https://status.search.google.com/incidents/riq1AuqETW46NfBCe5NT

https://www.change.org/p/stop-google-s-ai-overview-and-ai-mode-that-harms-publishers

As a publisher myself, I am witness to the damage done by Google's AI Overview and AI Modes. These systems have begun to severely impact the lives and income of billions of publishers across the world by misusing content, diverting valuable user traffic, and siphoning off revenue. These features are designed in such a way that either we allow Google to crawl our material for AI training and summaries or face exclusion from search results, a conundrum that feels akin to coercion.

Based on recent data, which indicates that an estimated 1.74 billion websites exist globally (Internet Live Stats), a conservative estimate that only 1% are publishers suggests a substantial 17.4 million potential victims. Google's far-reaching influence means it’s often an impossibility to find alternate streams of stable, fair income for publishers. Consequently, we call for an immediate halt and removal of Google's AI Overview and AI modes and the return of authentic, earned user clicks. Join us; sign this petition today.

Here’s my situation. I am working on launching my ecommerce site in the next 3 months. Up until a few weeks ago, I did not know much about SEO, just that it was all about keywords and ranking higher on Google.

So I started reading blogs and watching a few YT videos, and came up with this plan: 1. Publish 200 blog posts with strong content and outbound backlinks 2. Try to get a few inbound links through local partnerships 3. Use the blog to drive traffic and convert visitors into customers (In additiona to other strategies like paid media, social, and email marketing)

I used chatgpt to write a Python script that scrapes competitor websites and pulls keyword data. I consolidated the list with data from Google trends and analytics. After cleaning and analyzing it, I narrowed down a solid list of SEO keywords for my product catalog.

Then I built another script (of course with AI help) using the chatgpt API + a literature database API to generate 200 long-form articles packed with those keywords. (It cost me $0.13 and ~2M tokens in using 4o mini model, in case you are curious). I am now manually QCing the content. The idea is to have the post exhaustively cover all the SEO keywords and more, and top key words will be reflected in the title, meta description, and urls. The post will also have heavy outbound links in the form of references to reputed sites.

The goal is to cover my SEO keywords exhaustively before launch.

I know I’m still just scratching the surface of SEO. But based on all this, do you think it’s still worth hiring an SEO expert? Or can I keep rolling solo for now?

So not a surprise, my main client is focused on SQLs and over the past 6 months these dropped off a cliff. From weekly SQLs via important blogs and some service pages to basically one request a month if lucky.

December 24 update saw the start of big drops in rankings, the April update didn’t help. Their GSC is the classic decupling with AI overviews just stealing all their traffic. Since the drop in performance I’ve been busting a gut to get improvements on rankings, mainly bofu pages to get SQLs up as the main KPI. Barely moved the needle. They were a small brand in their industry and lost so much positioning to stronger brands in their industry.

Wanted to express myself, trying to keep chin up and wondering if my USPS need to change to ‘get in the AI overviews’ instead of traffic and SQLs.

I have about 60k SEO pages that are "My Content in <location>". Originally Google indexed about 55k of them and traffic grew steadily over 6 months. A month ago, they de-indexed all but 15k of them, but my Google traffic is still rapidly rising. I'm getting the little trophy milestones every week or so.

Is this a sign of a problem? Are they just de-indexing pages not getting traffic? Perhaps less popular locations? I would ideally still like to have those available.

Hey everyone,

I run SEO campaigns and I’ve noticed a challenge that I’m guessing a lot of you might also face.

Even when the rankings are improving, I sometimes get questions from clients especially first 3 months like: “So what exactly are you doing each month?” or “Where is my money going?”

They want to know the work, not just the performance.

Right now, I use things like Google Docs or Trello to track tasks internally, but it’s messy to share with clients, and not super polished. I’m curious:

Do you actively show your monthly SEO work to clients?

Do you use any kind of roadmap?

How do you handle the transparency vs. overwhelm balance?

Would something like a client-facing roadmap with task updates & feedback loop help?

Really curious how others handle this. Thanks in advance!

During the days of high volatility in June, one of my websites jumped in rakings - basically the share of voice doubled this month. And I didn't do anything specific to it.

I was wondering if anyone else experienced dramatic changes during this month.

I've had a small online business for about 15 years; it's never gotten big, but it's paid my bills. Traffic has been dropping for awhile, and I fully own that I haven't done all I could to keep the site fresh. Part of that is time, and part is lack of clarity on what Big Brother really wants.

But this year, for me - as for many others - my traffic has dropped off a cliff. My search is 50% of what it was a couple of months ago. My relative position in organic results has changed that much, but given that the first half of the page is now ads, maps, social media - well, organic results get pushed down.

I don't have the budget for an SEO expert (and I haven't had great luck in the past); I certainly don't have the budget for Google ads.

So, here's my question. Is ranking as a small business - as Google tries to create an "ecosystem" of a few compliant monopolies - even possible?

I know that my story isn't unusual; I'm reading this more and more here. But has anyone who has been in a similar position found anything that's worked?

Thanks!

I just verified a new GBP via text message. No video verification required. Here's how I sidestepped video verification and got text verification for this client:

I'm doing some consulting work with a brand-new business. When they came to me, all they had was a janky WordPress site and an Instagram account. Our goals were to:

• Set up a Google Business Profile
• Fix the website
• Get them ranking

What most new businesses do is go straight to Google, add a business, and then have to deal with the most annoying process on earth: video verification. But here’s the process I followed to get text verification:

• We created a Facebook business page with the name, address, phone, and website URL and connected it to her existing IG account.
• We created a BBB listing.
• We updated the listings she already had online with the address and other info (a handful of industry-specific directories).
• We updated the website to include the NAP information in the footer of every page on her 11-page site.
• We connected her website to Google Search Console and Analytics using her company domain email that is on Google Workspace.
• We had someone she knows, who is a level 4 local guide, go to Google Maps and add the business. (This unclaimed listing started ranking for a few long-tail terms within a couple of days.)
• She got a few reviews from clients on the new listing her friend created.
• Finally, we claimed the existing listing using her Google Workspace domain-based Google account, and her verification options were phone/text or video. Obviously, we chose text. 1 minute later, the GBP was claimed and verified within her account.

Basically, if Google has evidence that this is a real business and that your account is clearly connected to it, then you'll likely get better verification options.

If not, you can expect Google to ask you to prove the business's existence and your connection to it via video verification (gross).

Hope this helps!

Semrush is flagging a lack of llms.txt file as an issue. I don’t understand why they, and really anyone in SEO would want to incentivize people to get everything they need from an AI response and NOT visit their website. What am I missing?

The no click search is impacting everyone, including this site.

Reddit is being Sued for Securities Fraud.

Reddit owns and operates the eponymous social news aggregation, forum, and social media platform. Reddit receives a significant portion of its user traffic from individuals seeking answers to questions using Google Search. The complaint alleges that Reddit misrepresented and downplayed the impact that Google's use of Artificial Intelligence ("AI") technology in Google's search results had on Reddit's user growth. In truth, Google's use of Al dented Reddit's user growth by eliminating the need for individuals to visit and click through to Reddit to get answers to their questions. Rather, the answers appeared through Google's Al search

I am targeting a keyword where I’m positioned 4th. My competitors have significantly more backings then me. Now, if I want to reach to 1, should my focus be on earning backings or should I do other things like improving my content, ensuring that I follow best practices, etc.

Additionally if you replied yes to more back links, would you say that I should get equal to or more back links than my competitors who are ranking above me?

I have a local junk removal business with 45 landing pages for nearby cities/towns. It is do or die time for me, and I’m trying to decide if I should pay for monthly seo. Is it worth it in my case? Thanks!

I run programmatic SEO in high finance topics and had 15K+ pages on Google that were all indexed.

Before anyone jumps in - it's high quality content delivered via APIs (company valuation data). All pages are very different from each other. No AI involved. All linked together, all correct meta, sitemaps etc. There were all indexed before and picked up by Google and LLMs (even though my domain reputation is just around 5).

I've made edits to those pages (technical stuff, adjusting formula calculations etc). After this, half of the pages got deindexed from Google. They sit at "Crawled - currently not indexed".

Now I assume it's because of those changes? But it has been a month and nearly nothing came back. I try to "validate fix" in GSC but it gives absolutely nothing, and even fails, on pages that work and are all correct.

Anyone has any idea?

I have never given Semrush much regard, since their tools only do a so-so job at best, but recently I received several alerts for sites I monitors that there were critical issues with missing (404) pages that are 'broken' according to them. The funny thing is that none of my sites have ever had a llms.txt file.

John Mueller at Google has likened the llms.txt to the meta keywords tag, and my sites have seized the top (and sometimes only) listing in Google's AI Overview - proving they aren't necessary. It's funny that Semrush is positioning them as a required file, when it's nothing more than snake oil at this point.

I am curious to know if the core update has started showing traffic changes.

Hey everyone. Not farming karmas but asking in a few groups cuz I just want to know the general opinion before I spend too much time on something that may not work in today's SEO landscape.

So I used to work in SEO for a while — had a few affiliate sites, did client work, the usual grind. A few years ago I kind of burned out and walked away from it all (also life happened).

I’ve been watching from the sidelines as Google keeps doing its thing (nuking sites left and right or what everyone seems to be saying at least) and now, with all these AI changes and whatever the hell is happening in the SERPs, I’m wondering… is it even worth getting back into affiliate SEO at this point?

To be clear: I’m not here for the “SEO isn’t dead, you just have to adapt” comments. I get it. I’m not saying SEO is dead (I know it isn't). But is it still worth the time and effort to build traditional affiliate-style websites — you know, content sites that rely mostly on organic traffic and affiliate links? Or has that ship mostly sailed unless you’re some huge authority site or brand?

I watched a Youtube video saying that you have to write about topics that haven't been covered in Google yet. With so many different opinions, I don't know what direction to follow. So is anyone here still making decent money with affiliate SEO in 2025? maybe not? How can my time be better spent?

I've tried MarketMuse, Frase, Surfer AI and copy... all content - shitty...

Have you ever used any tool for content writing that was actually valuable to you?

Let me rephrase - delivered conversions, not just rankings

Hello all,

Do you have a list of AI's/LLM's you consider crucial for digital marketing? And if so, care to share? I work mainly with Claude and GPT, but I want to broaden my artificial intelligence horizons, so to speak.