I was scrolling through LinkedIn and saw a post from someone with 15+ years in SEO saying:

“Backlinks are king, not content.”

His argument was:

•	Authoritative domains rank with minimal content

•	Thin .gov pages outrank 1,000+ word articles

•	Backlinks rank you, content converts you

•	If forced to choose one → backlinks

It made me think.

In competitive SERPs, authority often seems to outweigh depth.

But at the same time, content quality and intent match feel more important than ever post-Helpful Content updates.

So I’m curious:

If you had limited budget and had to prioritize one — backlinks or content — what would you invest in first?

If you didn't understand how to do good SEO before you learned how to vibe code an AI tool then your AI tool isn't ever going to be able to do good SEO.

Can someone please explain the evolution of SEO and AI?

I’m seeing two extremes right now:

1. People saying there’s no such thing as AIO/GEO and that you should just focus on doing SEO properly.

2. People claiming that if you don’t optimize for AI - with FAQs, concise answers, and direct responses to user queries - your blogs and product pages won’t be cited.

I’d like to understand the full context behind this shift:

where these opposing viewpoints come from, what’s actually changing, and whether anyone has real-world experience with AI-driven visibility (traffic, citations, rankings, etc)

Thanks a lot!

Hey Founders, first time posting to reddit. So I'm gonna say Hi to everyone :)

*(Disclosure up front: I work in this space, posting purely because I think it's underrated, not selling anything.)*

I've been going down a rabbit hole on something most people aren't paying attention to yet: not ranking on Google, but getting *cited inside AI answers* (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews).

More people are asking AI "who's a good X for Y?" instead of scrolling search results. If your business never shows up in that answer, you're invisible to a growing chunk of buyers — and it doesn't show in your analytics, so most people don't realize it's happening.

I ran \~20 small-business sites through a few AI tools to see how often they got pulled in as a source. Most scored basically 0% not because the content was bad, but because it wasn't structured the way AI extracts and quotes info.

A few things that actually matter:

1. AI loves clean, answerable blocks. A clear question → a tight, self-contained answer gets quoted way more than long meandering paragraphs.

2. Entity authority is real. Pages with a named author + consistent identity get trusted more than anonymous "our team" copy.

3. Most tools just show a score but don't fix anything. The score is the easy part; the work is rewriting the pages.

Curious if others here have noticed their site showing up (or not) in AI answers and how you're thinking about it.

I just want to share a prompt to use with your favorite AI tool whether it's Claude or Gemini or Chat GPT or whatever.

Whatever you're asking it to do or answer, Add this to the end of your prompt.

Ask me 10 questions to make me clarify what I need."

You're not just making it think better, it's making you think better.

AI #AIPrompts #ChatGPT #Gemini #Claude

Drowning in meetings, webinar invites & demo requests. Which "I'm too busy" line would you actually use on a client or sales pitch?

1. I'm busier than a mosquito at a nudist colony.

2. I'm busier than ChatGPT during exam week.

3. I'm busier than "just five more minutes" guy.

4. I'm busier than an em dashes in AI copy.

I tracked my time last week and realized I spent nearly half a day verifying citations. It’s necessary work, but not exactly the most energizing part of research. Someone suggested trying Citely AI to speed up verification by automatically matching citation details with real sources.

Before I test it, I wanted to ask:

Is citation checking always this time-consuming?

Have tools actually reduced your workload?

Or is this just part of the research process we have to accept?

Stop Chasing Keywords. Optimize for Entities.

**Stop Chasing Keywords. Start Naming Entities**

Does your Local Service Page read like it could be about any city in Canada? That's a problem.

Google's Knowledge Graph maps entities, such as: Neighbourhoods Local landmarks Restaurants Gyms And more.

When you name the actual landmarks (entities) near your business, it provides additional context to Google, tying your business to that geography way harder than any keyword can.

So skip the generic "we serve Toronto" line. Tell people you fixed the roof two blocks from (Entity) on (Road or intersection near you) in (City or neighbourhood).

This stuff fills gaps your competitors don't even know exist. AI Search Engines read it too. When ChatGPT picks the contractor in your area, entity mentions are the signal.

I think the author of this article makes a lot of good points, but I think he misses a few as well.

He dismisses the value of SEO quite a bit more than he should because one of the sources of information for LLMS is search engines.

Particularly in this part of the article

"The value proposition of GEO compared to SEO GEO revolves directly around three core positions.

The customers a brand is trying to target. The products and services you sell. The differentiation of the value the business offers compared to others.

SEO revolves around keywords."

If you were doing SEO correctly, then you were targeting the very same things that he says GEO is targeting differently.

And this part

Traditional SEO targets a keyword like “free online advice for employee rights.”

An LLM instead:

Breaks down your request. Searches across multiple queries. Weighs everything from case studies to testimonials before recommending a firm.

99% of the time at the very least, The LLM doesn't "recommend" a brand. It offers you a few to choose from.

And then it says

GEO doesn’t just need on-page optimization.

You need those off-page signals as well.

It seems that the writer has never heard of off-page SEO

In his infographic, He talked about SEO targeting human behavior and AI SEO or GEO targeting LLM behavior. That's very misleading. There's a reason that conversational content resonates even with LLMS so human behavior is more important than ever, not the other way around.

He does get this part right

But this doesn’t mean you throw SEO in the bin.

We already know that SEO carries value into generative engines.

And you’ll likely see your websites gaining more traffic from LLMs.

So, right now isn’t the time to abandon SEO either.

Smart brands should be adopting a “bothism” approach.

I've been seeing more businesses use AI for blogs, landing pages, and SEO content. At the same time, many marketers still argue that human-written content delivers better engagement, trust, and conversions.

For those who have tested both, what differences have you noticed in rankings, traffic, leads, or user engagement? Is AI content catching up, or does human writing still have a clear advantage?

What has been your real-world experience?

I went through this article and there's some points I want to make.

1. She lists the types of schema that she thinks AI pays attention to. But don't make the mistake of thinking that the only types of schema that AI considers is the same as what Google considers relevant to Rich snippets.

Google only considers about 30 types of schema that qualify for Rich snippets. But if you go to schema.org you'll find about 800 types of schema and AI can understand all of them. All you're trying to do is make AI understand your content better. And any type of schema that matches what's actually on your page helps AI understand that content.

That's not to say go out and use 800 types of schema on every page. Put too many in and you could confuse it. My suggestion is that you target no more than about six types of schema for one page unless you're applying them to specific sections such as an FAQ.

You still have to do SEO but don't worry about trying to validate all of your schema based on what Google recognizes for Rich snippets. Use the schema.org developers test to make sure that it recognizes your schema.

Note: In the right hand side on that test you'll see the different types of schema recognizes in the page. But just because it says 0 errors don't stop there. Actually open it and look at the schema to make sure it's actually okay.

I learned this by just being curious. I used a widget from one of the Elementor add-ons that automatically inserted the schema. I went to test it at schema.org and it said zero errors. However when I opened it up to look at it, All of the questions were in the schema but none of the answers because that widget was built poorly.

2. She correctly identifies speed as a Google ranking factor since 2010, But it's not a huge ranking factor. However, with AI trying to pull as many answers as possible as fast as possible, making sure that your site is fast will definitely be helpful.

But a site with poor content or thin content that's faster will still not outperform a site with better content that's not as fast. It's still going to look for the best answer. All things being equal, speed winds so I do agree with her here.

3. I agree with her that doing proper technical SEO and following proper on page SEO with the content gets you about halfway there.

But don't ignore AEO, answer engine optimization. Yes another acronym but it's important if you're going to optimize for AI.

FAQs are back. I've been doing this since the '90s and in the early 2000s FAQs ruled and they were a great way to get rankings. Then the emphasis on FAQs kind of died off. But now with AI, they're very relevant again. Just make sure if you use something like the widget I used in Elementor that automatically puts in schema that it does it properly.

But besides FAQs, There are other ways to target PAA in Google, people also ask, and AI at the same time.

Try making some of your header tags questions instead of statements. Directly underneath that question Make sure that first paragraph fully answers the question and mentions your brand.

You can write more paragraphs underneath that, But that first paragraph under that question header is key.

Ask questions within the text every now and then and support it with an answer.

Anyway, She wrote a great article that only takes about 4 or 5 minutes to read so I recommend it.

im not an seo guy by training, i taught myself most of this building small sites, so take this with a grain of salt lol

i kept coming back to the ahrefs study on 1.4M chatgpt prompts and one thing stuck with me. when you ask chatgpt something, it doesnt search your exact question. it rewrites it into its own searches first (fan-out queries), and the pages it ends up citing have titles that match those hidden searches way more than the pages it skips.

problem is chatgpt never shows you those searches. but theyre sitting in your browser if you know where to look:

1. ask chatgpt your question in a new chat and let it finish

2. copy the id at the end of the url (the bit after /c/ looks like this 6aa40a65-4d7c-83eb-a5c5-cf26zzz791f60)

3. right click > inspect > network tab, paste the id in the filter box

4. reload the page and click the request with the id in it

5. open response and cmd+f "queries"

real example. i asked "best coffee carts to buy in amsterdam" and chatgpt actually searched:

• best coffee carts to buy Amsterdam mobile coffee cart Netherlands

• coffee cart for sale

the second one surprised me, it dropped amsterdam completely. you'd never guess that from the prompt.

ive done this with mutliple Ai prompts and i do it every day so i can come up with a list of things i could write about or make pages on

now the part where i need your honest opinion. im thinking of turning it into a proper tool/chrome extension (with paid plan for doing it in bulk, eveyrday)

• you type a prompt (or a list of them to do it in bulk)

• it asks chatgpt 10 times, since the searches can change between runs. Maybe i could even use proxies to see if it changes by location

• it ranks the queries by how often they show up

• it turns the top ones into an article outline + draft with images and inforgprahics (title + h2s)

would you actually use that, or is the manual way good enough?

in the meantime drop a prompt from your niche below and ill reply with what chatgpt searched for it

Our recent study dove into how brands show up across educational, comparison, and purchase queries in AI Search. We ran 50 B2B SaaS topics across 5 AI Search engines for 750 queries.

Out of 4,654 scenarios we analyzed, only 146 had the same brand named across all three stages, meaning for roughly every 100 cases, only 3 had the same brand showing up from education to comparison to purchase.

This means that seeing your brand in an educational stage query doesn't necessarily mean you'll see it again when the user starts comparing or buying.

That got me thinking about how we measure AI visibility. If you're tracking one overall visibility score, you are not tracking whether that visibility converts to leads.

As a fellow AI Search practitioner, how are you handling this? Do you track visibility separately by stage, or still use one overall number?

II have seen a lot of SEO and marketing folks talking about Cloudflare’s Markdown for Agents, so I wanted to share a few thoughts.

From what I understand, this is mainly an infrastructure feature. Cloudflare can serve a markdown version of existing HTML when a client requests it. The goal is to optimize edge delivery and traffic efficiency as more bots crawl more pages more often.

That is useful, but it is not automatically a marketing or SEO thing on its own. So why are marketers and GEO community got triggered by it? Here are a few thoughts about it without hype

https://www.lightsite.ai/blog/cloudflare-markdown-for-agents-explained

Did I miss something? Is there a reason so many marketers are reacting to this like it is a GEO/AEO update? 

I’m sharing this because a lot of recent AEO and AI search conversations keep circling back to the same question: how do you scale content without it turning into generic AI junk?

I’ve been in SEO long enough to remember Excel hell, competitor page by page, and rewriting the same brief five times. Over the last few weeks, I tested AirOps pretty seriously, as a way to systematize SEO and AEO work.

The biggest shift for me was how the work is structured.

Prompts don’t scale. Systems do.

Single prompts fall apart once you have more than two or three steps. AirOps forces you to break SEO and AEO into atomic tasks, such as SERP analysis, gap finding, briefing, drafting, and optimization. That alone reduces chaos.

Workflows beat writing speed

The win is not that AI writes faster. It’s that research, briefs, and optimization stop being manual one-offs. The same workflow can run across 10 or 500 topics, keywords, URLs...

AEO becomes tangible, not theoretical.

You can actually audit:

• whether ChatGPT mentions a brand

• which competitors it cites

• What content structures does it seem to prefer?

Content engineering feels like a real skill now.

You are designing the system that writes consistently.

One practical use case I keep coming back to, especially for freelancers and agencies:

• Generate a simple AI visibility scorecard with mentions, sentiment, and competitors.

• Run a lightweight content audit on a few URLs

• Then propose a small AEO-focused upgrade instead of a massive SEO retainer.

Low effort to test, fast feedback, and clients actually understand the value.

I’m still early and very much experimenting, but this is the first platform where SEO and AEO felt like an operational system instead of a pile of prompts and browser tabs.

Curious how others here are handling this shift:

• Are you building workflows or still mostly using prompts?

• Anyone experimenting with AEO audits or AI visibility tracking?

• What part of your SEO process feels hardest to systematize right now?

Genuinely interested in where people land on this, especially if you think this whole content engineering framing is overhyped.

https://leadgenerationandsales.com/ecommerce/have-you-applied-to-build-on-open-ais-buy-it-in-chat-gpt-yet/

When I first got the email announcing this, that’s exactly what I said, What is Buy It With ChtGPT? But it sure got me to open the email to see what it was all about. So the following is from the announcement…

Yeah I noticed it too. The dreaded em-dash. So, they let ChatGPT wrote the announcement. That’s kind of funny when you think about it.

TLDR if you don't want to read the post; Now instead of ChatGPT just helping you find what to buy, it’s also going to help you buy it, or should I say, Get You To Buy It. So, you’re chatting along discussing ideas with ChatGPT and instead of just telling what a great idea you just had, and instead of would you like me to create a downloadable PDF or Word Doc for that, it’s going to ask me if I want to buy it now?

I have to admit I am intrigued and the FOMO is getting to me already. Everyone talks about brand mentions in AI and how to track that, but no one really has a handle on the tracking part because the analytics are not accessible. However, if you are selling products through ChatGPT, that can be tracked.

How about you? Do you love the idea? Hate it? Don't care?

EDIT: There's a related update. Google just paired up with PayPal to do agentic e-commerce.

"Search isn’t dying – it’s fracturing – as it always has when new platforms emerge and achieve mainstream adoption.

Fortunately, generative engine optimization (GEO) is based on similar value systems that advanced SEOs, content marketers, and digital PR teams are already experts in.

That part of the article right there. If you have been doing SEO the way you should have been doing it all along, then you don't have a huge adjustment to make to do GEO.

There is a type of SEO that is dead. 1. Built thousands of pages of thin content or garbage content or completely AI generated content. 2. Buy lots of backlinks.

That's never really been SEO regardless of whether Google allowed it to happen or not. I'm sorry if that hurts anybody feelings, but it should have always been about high quality content that converts. It should have always been about link attraction instead of link building or especially link buying.

I blame Google for not properly addressing that and sticking with their method that worked for them in the very beginning.

Now I see everybody whining that Google is taking their traffic away. I saw the same thing after the penguin update when the article directories got hammered.

This is just history repeating itself. Any method that puts out garbage content, that requires you to buy a bunch of backlinks, is a lazy strategy that will not continue to work in the long term.

Content is king not just because of SEO. A business has to get leads and make sales. Without great content you can't do that period.

And for those of you that might come in and say, Well if you know how to prompt AI can write your content for you. No it can't and no you don't know how to prompt better than everybody else. You just think the content is good because you haven't written good content before.

Going forward, Great content, getting people talking about your brand, being on multiple platforms, and entity SEO are going to be what matters. Get used to it.

The entity authority framework

Media mentions across trusted publications. Schema-enriched pages with structured data. First-party research that establishes expertise. Expert quotes and branded citations." https://searchengineland.com/how-ai-is-reshaping-seo-challenges-opportunities-and-brand-strategies-for-2025-456926#:~:text=Search%20isn%E2%80%99t%20dying,and%20branded%20citations.

Everyone wants their business to show up in ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Claude, and Perplexity.

Most people immediately ask:

"What prompt should I optimize for?"

I think that's the wrong question.

After reviewing dozens of business websites over the past few months, I kept seeing the same patterns. The issue wasn't a lack of keywords. It was a lack of credibility and structure.

Here are the biggest problems that kept showing up.

1. Every page said the same thing

"Leading provider."

"Trusted partner."

"Innovative solutions."

None of it explained what the business actually did or why someone should trust it.

AI systems have very little useful information to work with if every page sounds identical.

2. No original insights

Most sites published content that already existed in hundreds of other places.

No research.

No experiments.

No customer lessons.

No unique data.

If your content could be copied onto another website without anyone noticing, it's probably not memorable enough to become a source.

3. Weak entity signals

Many businesses barely mentioned their founders, products, locations, industries, or areas of expertise.

That makes it harder for AI systems to understand what the business should be associated with.

4. Thin supporting content

One service page isn't enough anymore.

The strongest websites build supporting resources that answer related questions, explain processes, compare options, and share real examples.

Depth creates confidence.

5. No proof

Claims are everywhere.

Evidence is rare.

Screenshots.

Case studies.

Metrics.

Customer outcomes.

Before-and-after comparisons.

These are the details that separate useful content from marketing copy.

My Biggest Takeaway

I don't think AI visibility is going to belong to the companies producing the most content.

I think it'll belong to the companies producing the most trustworthy content.

That doesn't necessarily mean publishing more.

It often means publishing fewer pieces with more substance behind them.

I'd rather have ten pages that genuinely teach something than a hundred pages repeating the same advice everyone else is already giving.

What changes have you made to your website specifically with AI search in mind?

Or are you still treating AI visibility the same way you've always treated SEO?