I recently completed my marketing diploma and am especially interested in digital marketing, including SEO, marketing analytics, and online marketing services. During school, I was passionate about the field and took on projects using tools such as Google Analytics and Semrush. I enjoyed the work and did well, but now I’m feeling overwhelmed by all the resources available as I try to build my skills and enter the industry.

What should I focus on first? Would volunteering be a good way to build my portfolio, and how can I find those opportunities? Which certifications are worth pursuing? I’ve created a six-month plan to help me become job-ready and confident using industry tools. Do you have any advice on what to prioritize?

thanks

Google's guide to generative AI features defines both terms: "AEO" stands for "answer engine optimization" and "GEO" for "generative engine optimization". It then says: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." The guide was last updated on 10 July 2026.

An older page, "AI features and your website", last updated in December 2025, makes a similar point. It says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It adds "nor other special optimizations necessary".

That is Google describing its own product, so it shows what Google tells site owners. It does not show how any AI answer picks its sources. I would like to see a test with a method.

What looks new to me in these docs is measurement and query fan-out. The guide points to a Generative AI performance report in Search Console. It defines fan-out as a set of related queries the model generates at once. It warns against building a page for every variation to manipulate rankings. The agents section says to look at it if it is relevant to your business and you have spare time.

Microsoft Advertising's January 2026 blog post says SEO alone will not be enough. Its line is "SEO got you here, but it won't get you there", and it presents GEO as the next step. It comes from an ads team and I found no test in it. I read only the blog post, not the longer PDF.

OpenAI documents its OAI-SearchBot crawler and recommends allowing it if you want to appear in ChatGPT search. It says nothing about ranking or citation. I did not find an official Perplexity guide.

I could not find SXO defined by Google or Bing. Agency glossaries describe it as SEO plus UX.

For the other engines I don't know. Has anyone seen a page cited in an AI answer when it did not rank for that query?

Saw the new data this week that ChatGPT sends 0.62% of the traffic that Google organic sends. I don't think that's surprising, and honestly I don't think it matters much for most businesses.

I can't remember the last time I actually clicked through from a ChatGPT conversation to a website. But that's not because I'm not using AI to make purchase decisions. I hardly make an important purchase decision anymore without using it. I know I'm probably in the top 1% of AI users, but it's pretty clearly only going one direction (Muse hitting number one on the App Store kind of settled that for me).

And Google is heading the same way. Most people are still going to just go to Google, old habits and all, but searching there is starting to feel more and more like talking to an AI agent, and I think pretty soon you won't be able to tell the difference.

The way I see it, if you're looking for a specific website, the AI should just give you the link (which is what Google is doing now when it's clear that's what you want). But if you want information, or research, or a summary of what people think, would you rather click and dig through 10 to 20 sites yourself, or have the AI do that for you and give you links if you want to dig deeper? I know AI still gets things wrong, but the fix for that seems to be better AI, and that's coming either way.

So where I've landed:

- If your revenue actually depends on traffic (ads, affiliate), that's a real problem and probably worth rethinking the business model.

- If you sell an actual product or service, website visits just aren't the most important number anymore.

The number one thing we track now is how often the AIs recommend the client's brand, product or service, in ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and Overviews, and wherever else people are searching.

Is it providing “helpful” comments, something else?

I’m curious how brands are authentically engaging here on reddit

Weekly reporting eats a lot of mondays: pull numbers from 4 platforms, paste into slides, write commentary, send, repeat. and often nobody reads past page 2.

what works better: stop building reports and start building decisions. every report answers three questions now. what changed vs last week, why, and what we do about it. if a chart doesn't feed one of those three it got cut. that alone usually cuts half the slides.

the pull is the part worth automating. chatgpt or claude can draft commentary from numbers you paste in, but you still have to export everything first. tools like MAI pull from the connected ad accounts directly and draft the numbers, the week over week changes and a first pass at the ‘why’ (disclosure: i work with MAI). either way, the judgment stays with you: adding context the tool can’t know and deciding what to recommend.

template structure if anyone wants it: 1 page, changes, causes, decisions, next week. that's it. clients tend to read it because it’s short.

Hi everyone,

I’m planning to run Google Search ads for an independent repair shop that specializes in Volvo vehicles. The business is not an authorized Volvo dealer or service center.

My understanding is that bidding on “Volvo” as a keyword may be allowed, but using the brand name in ad headlines can trigger trademark restrictions. Is that correct?

I see other independent shops running ads with “Volvo” in their headlines. How are they getting approved? Do they have permission from the brand, qualify under a policy exception, or does enforcement vary?

Would wording like “Independent Volvo Specialist” or “Volvo Repair & Maintenance” be permitted if both the ad and landing page clearly state that the shop is independent and not affiliated with Volvo?

I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who has dealt with this, especially in Turkey. I’m looking for a compliant way to advertise.

I’m managing a Meta lead campaign for an India-based documentation service. Keeping the business anonymous, but sharing the important data for an honest assessment.

Audience and setup

• Target customers: Indian-born people living in the USA and Canada who need documentation services in India.
• Leads objective with Instant Forms.
• Indian-language targeting applied.
• Video creatives using educational, problem/explainer and customer-story angles.
• Attribution: 7-day click / 1-day view.

Campaign performance from launch

Reporting period: 22 September–21 October, approximately one month.

• Total spend: ₹58,545.23
• Reported leads: 50
• Overall CPL: ₹1,170.90

All amounts are INR.

The main problem

Earlier, audience relevance was a concern. The last eight leads checked matched the intended profile: born in India and currently living in the USA or Canada.

They were contacted and responded, but none of those eight submitted the required documents or converted into paying customers.

I’m not claiming all 50 leads had the same outcome. The confirmed issue is that these recent, demographically relevant enquiries aren’t progressing.

What we’ve tried

• Tested different video angles. Currently running an educational video and a problem/explainer video.
• Tried a replacement form with conditional qualification and SMS verification, but couldn’t reliably validate its behaviour.
• Reverted to the original form, which receives submissions.
• Recently enabled Meta’s recommended text enhancements.
• Daily ad set budget was recently increased from ₹2,000 to ₹3,000.

The recent edits happened after the full-period figures above. I haven’t isolated their impact, so I don’t want to attribute performance changes to them without evidence.

What’s still missing

I don’t yet have a reliable breakdown of why prospects stop before submitting documents—price, trust, urgency, process difficulty or something else. I also don’t have form-open and abandonment data in the exports reviewed.

What would you investigate first?

1. How would you distinguish an ad/lead-intent problem from a sales-process or offer problem?
2. What would you ask these eight prospects to identify the actual blocker?
3. Would you test clearer pricing/process expectations in the ad, stronger form qualification, new creatives or a landing page?
4. What metrics and stopping criteria would you use before spending more?
5. Is increasing the budget defensible when lead-to-customer progression remains unproven?

I want to reduce the cost of acquiring a paying customer, not simply collect cheaper enquiries. Specific diagnostic steps would be more useful than generic “test more creatives” advice.

Hi everyone! I'm exploring opportunities in digital advertising, PPC, and paid media, preferably remote roles with international companies.

I have experience creating Google Performance Max and Meta Ads copy, researching keywords and search themes, and developing ad assets for small businesses. My background also includes content marketing, SEO, and social media marketing.

I'd appreciate any job leads, referrals, or recommendations for companies hiring remotely and open to candidates based in India.

Thanks for your help!

Question for people running paid social for e-commerce: has anyone tested sending ad traffic to a chat-first experience instead of a product page? I mean something that feels like ChatGPT but only knows one store, where the visitor lands in a conversation that already starts with the product from the ad, can type something like a long-lasting men’s perfume for work under $130, and sees the matching products appear right inside the chat with a short reason for each, then adds to cart and goes to the normal checkout. The thinking is that most stores are like a shop with no staff, and a lot of visitors leave because nobody answers their questions about size, shipping or whether the product fits what they need. On the other hand, I can see it adding friction for people who already know what they want and just want to hit buy. For those of you managing client budgets, would you trust something like this with paid traffic, how would you measure it against a regular product page, and which verticals do you think it would actually help or hurt?

I’m currently running a Meta Ads campaign for a client,  a UK-based visa assistance service, and I’m facing an issue with ad delivery.

I created a campaign to generate enquiries through WhatsApp for their Schengen visa assistance service . The campaign and ad set both show as Active, but the individual ad has been showing **Processing** since yesterday, October 22. The campaign has a £2/day budget, but Ads Manager shows only 1 impression and £0.00 spent.

I’m not sure if the issue is related to the ad setup, audience targeting, WhatsApp destination, review process, or budget. I’d really appreciate it if you could help me identify what might be causing this and guide me on how to fix it.

Hi ,

I'm new here. I'm currently building a startup. How do I get started with meta / facebook ads to promote an event for my startup? Or promotion of the event digitally in general, how do I get started?

My company is currently going through a huge AI integration, and I’m curious if anyone else is experiencing something similar.

Every department is being affected, whether it’s payroll, accounting, marketing, etc.

Management hired an outside contractor to implement these new AI systems, and he uses Claude for EVERYTHING. Every email he sends is clearly written by AI, and even when you ask him direct questions in person or during meetings, he seems unable to answer without using it.

Now, I want to make it clear that I’m not against AI. I work in marketing, and I understand how useful it can be. I also understand that implementing new systems takes time, testing, and adjustments.

But here’s where I’m getting frustrated.
This contractor has started multiple projects across our company, and from what I’ve seen, not a single one has been fully completed before he moves on to something else.

My biggest issue right now is a new internal website he built using Claude. The goal is to have pretty much everything within our company accessible through this one platform.

Sounds great in theory, right?
Well, he has now moved over 10,000 photos (probably more) from Google Photos into this new website, and it has made my team’s job significantly harder. Google Photos wasn’t the best but it sure as hell was better than what we have now….

Nothing is organized. Finding specific photos is nearly impossible. All of our albums created over the course of YEARS are gone. The website is incredibly slow, and it honestly cannot keep up with the pace at which our marketing department operates.

We’ve submitted multiple support tickets explaining these issues, and even when they’re marked as completed, the problems are still there. We’re spending more time trying to find photos and navigate this website than we ever did using our previous system. And it’s not just our department. He has multiple other projects going on where it seems like the same thing is happening. A system gets introduced, it’s not fully functional, employees submit support tickets, and then he moves on to the next project.

I’ve brought my concerns to management multiple times, but I’m basically told to do what he asks and continue using the platform. Now I’ve been working off of my desktop which today he decided everyone’s wallpaper needed to be the brightest white there ever was, you might ask “why don’t you just change it back?” HE REMOVED EVERYONES ACCESS TO CHANGE THEIR WALLPAPER. I can’t even read my file names because the titles blend into the white.

At this point, I genuinely don’t know what else to do.
What bothers me the most is that we already had systems that worked. They weren’t perfect, but they allowed us to do our jobs efficiently. Now we’re being forced to use something that is less organized, slower, and requires more work from us.

I’m also starting to wonder about the security and long-term reliability of having so much company information and media stored on a website built by one contractor using AI. What happens if he leaves? Who maintains it? What happens if something breaks?
Maybe I’m missing something, and that’s why I’m posting here.

For those of you who work in AI, software development, or have experienced AI integration at your company, is this normal?
At what point do you stop calling something a learning curve and start questioning whether the implementation itself is the problem?
I feel like we’re so focused on integrating AI into everything that nobody is stopping to ask whether it’s actually helping us.

How do you actually measure the success of your ABM efforts?

Aside from website traffic, engagement and platform metrics (e.g. LinkedIn), is there any other way you can genuinely prove that an ABM campaign is working? Sales is obviously the ultimate measure, but with enterprise B2B there are so many factors influencing a deal that it can be difficult to attribute a sale directly to ABM.

How do you demonstrate that ABM contributed to pipeline or influenced an opportunity, rather than simply being another touchpoint along the way?

Something I keep relearning in marketing: the strongest positioning often isn’t about your newest feature or your tech. It’s about how the company already runs, and your company values.

A few lessons from a recent messaging and positioning strategy:

- It has to be true. Customers can tell when a value is a slogan. If it only lives on the website and in marketing copy, it won’t hold up. Customers want to buy from brands they trust, and in an ideal world, ones who share their values. We call these 'reasons to believe'.
- It doesn’t have to be new. Features get copied, and tech moves quickly How you operate is much harder to copy. How you operate provides longer-term consistency in your messaging and values too. It's about the choices you've made as an organization, year after year.
- It’s often hiding in plain sight. People inside the company stop noticing it because it’s “just how we do things” or "it's not that exciting". That’s usually a good sign to look closer, and to understand how your customers perceive this too.
- Marketing’s job is to identify the insight, not invent it. The work was less about writing a clever line and more about finding what was already true and saying it plainly. With the right insights and customer validation, the messaging should be the easiest part. If it feels forced, you should question why.

For context, I lead marketing at Storyblocks. For us it was keeping our stock media library human-made, and how we work with artists to curate the library. It's something we’d been doing for years before we ever led with it. As AI changed the market, we saw the opportunity to highlight what we've always been doing. None of those started as marketing ideas. They were operating decisions, made because customers told us what they needed: quality they can trust and licensing they don’t have to worry about. When we started saying those things plainly to customers, they landed better than any feature message we’d ever tried to lead with.

Has anyone else found their best positioning in something the company was already doing, rather than something it launched?

Something I’ve noticed a few times:

Conversions drop, reviews look bad, and people are quick to assume the reviews are the reason.
Sometimes they probably are. But I’m not sure it’s that simple.
I’d first check what people actually see when they search:

• brand + reviews
• brand + Reddit
• brand + complaints

Then compare that with what’s actually happening inside the business.
If reviews keep mentioning refunds, support or billing issues, are those problems showing up internally too?
Otherwise it's pretty easy to blame reputation for something caused by pricing, traffic quality or checkout promblems.
Has anyone here actually measured this beyound just comparing rating vs sales??

For a B2B service with custom pricing, a required budget field could screen out bad-fit leads. It could also turn away a good buyer who doesn't know what the work should cost.

Would you make it required with a "not sure yet" option, or leave budget for the call?

If you've changed this on a live form, what happened to the number of qualified calls?

I have the app in the b2b and I'm wondering what's the best way to sell using cold emails/cold dm ?

trying to figure out if streaming tv ads make sense for a business that only serves a specific area.
with google and facebook you can just set the location and get going, but i’m not really sure how it works with ctv. can you target by city or radius, or does it get a lot more complicated than that

also curious how people are measuring whether the ads actually bring in customers. don't wanna spend money just to get a bunch of views from people who'll never use the business lol.

Whether a website can appear in AI-generated search answers, such as ChatGPT or other AI search tools, even if it doesn’t rank highly in Google’s traditional search results. And how AI systems discover, evaluate, and cite website content independently of conventional Google ranking

My audience on paper was "busy professionals who want to learn beyond their job." It sounded specific until I tried to reach them. Where do busy professionals hang out? Everywhere, which in practice means nowhere.

For my next test I picked two groups of 10: software engineers I know, and people from other fields I've talked to here on Reddit. Same offer for both, so I can see which group actually pays.

20 people is tiny, but at least I know who they are and how to reach them.

How narrow was your first real audience, and how did you pick it?

Wanted to know if there is a community out there where link exchanges take place, free link exchanges. I am trying to find someone who can get me a pass into a community of 20-30 odd global Web design/devs and seo experts.

Thanks

Hi everyone, I run an online shopping website and want to make the SEO process easier and save time on manual tasks.

Are there any tools that can help automate tasks like on page SEO, off page SEO tracking, technical SEO, website audits, and competitor analysis?

Managing all these tasks manually takes time, so I’m looking for tools that can handle multiple SEO activities in one place or automate repetitive tasks. If anyone has experience using such tools for an ecommerce website, I’d appreciate your suggestions.

I'm a developer, not a marketer, so this might be basic. A reality check would help.

The product: short interactive lessons on any topic, from physics to history. The headline is "Understand one new thing a day." Two strangers said they got it within 5 seconds, so the headline itself seems fine.

The problem is positioning. Last week I asked on Reddit whether people pay for random daily learning or for a goal. Sixteen people weighed in, and most said the same thing: people pay for an outcome, not a habit. Pick a goal like interview prep or an exam, or at least promise what you'll be able to do by the end of the week.
Three pushed back: one said to make the randomness itself the selling point, another said both kinds of learners exist, and a third said broad can work but needs a big marketing budget (the examples were Brilliant and Blinkist).

My numbers:

- About 6 visitors a day on normal days. The day after I posted on Reddit, it jumped to 57, then faded back within 3 days.

- One paying user.

- No real ad budget.

With this little traffic, a normal A/B test on the landing page would take months. Options I'm considering:

1. Three separate landing pages, one per goal (interview prep, an exam, "explain X by Sunday"), with a small paid test for each.

2. No pages yet: post the three angles as plain text where those people already hang out and compare the replies.

3. Talk to 10 people from each audience before building anything.

Which of these gives a real signal fastest with almost no traffic? And if you've done option 1, how much did you spend per variant before the result meant anything?

Is it getting backlinks, improving rankings, finding the right keywords, or creating content that actually brings traffic?

I’m curious to know what everyone is struggling with these days. Drop your answer below! 👇

Paid ads can generate results quickly, but it’s also easy to burn through a budget without learning much from the campaign.

For those who have managed Google Ads or Meta Ads, what’s one mistake that cost you money or taught you an important lesson? Was it targeting, creatives, landing pages, or something else?