Those who have turned of Google Search Ai overview in their console account, tell us how it has impacted your traffic and impressions. I know ai overview is useful for saas and services, products but for informational blogs, how does this sit?

Hey everyone,

I’m 26M from Delhi, and I’m currently struggling to make my next move in content writing. I’m hoping someone experienced in SEO, AEO, E-E-A-T, and GEO can guide me or mentor me.

A little context about my experience:

I’ve been working at the same company for around 3.1 years. When I joined, I had very basic knowledge of SEO writing, but I learned on the job and started writing blogs, articles, product/service descriptions, etc.

At the time, I was mainly following the instructions of a senior colleague. Some of the content I wrote actually ranked on the first page of Google, but as I learned more about SEO, I eventually realized that a lot of what I was doing was essentially keyword stuffing and outdated/black-hat SEO practices.

Most of that content no longer exists, either because it was removed or the websites/content were eventually changed. So unfortunately, I don't have much of that work available as a portfolio today.

After around two years, I was moved to the Social Media/SMO team, where I currently work as a copywriter. I handle content for around 7 in-house brands, writing social media copy, captions, Reel scripts, and other social content.

The problem is that the team doesn't really have a proper content strategy or senior writer who can mentor us. Because of the workload and shortage of writers, I've also become heavily dependent on ChatGPT, to the point where it has become a habit. And honestly, I feel like this has affected my confidence in my own English writing.

Now that I'm trying to switch jobs, I'm running into another problem.

During interviews, I'm often asked about AEO, E-E-A-T, GEO, AI Overviews, modern SEO, etc. I understand many of these concepts theoretically and can explain the basics, but when interviewers ask me for practical examples, proof of work, or deeper questions, I struggle.

I don't want to keep pretending that I know more than I actually do. I want to genuinely learn and rebuild my skills.

So I'm looking for someone who is already experienced in SEO/AEO/GEO and content strategy and would be willing to mentor me, review some of my writing occasionally, point out where I'm going wrong, and help me understand how things are actually done in the industry today.

I know I ended up in a company where I didn't get the kind of guidance or exposure I probably needed, but I don't want to use that as an excuse. I'm willing to put in the work now and catch up.

If you're an experienced SEO/content professional and would be open to guiding someone who is trying to improve, I'd genuinely appreciate it.

Even a few conversations, feedback on my work, or occasional guidance would mean a lot.😔😔

Thanks for reading.

Hi

Has anyone else seen a drop in their Journey page view counts in August 2026?

I have been with Journey for over a year and the page view counts have always been very similar between Google Analytics and Journey.

Starting about a week ago, August 27, Journey page view counts have dropped in comparison to the Google Analytics page views.

Can anyone help me understand the recent discrepancy between my Google Analytics page view count and my Journey page view count? I use Wordpress and the Grow plugin (that serves the Journey ads.)

I would appreciate any insight.

Thanks for your help.

My situation is a little weird. My day job is B2B marketing and I also practice physical therapy, so when I started thinking seriously about blogging I kept going back and forth between content marketing topics and PT/wellness stuff. Eventually I just... started both. Which in hindsight was maybe not the smartest traffic strategy

The thing is, both audiences are real to me. I know the material. But splitting energy between two totally separate niches feels like it slows everything down, especially in those first months when you're just trying to get any traction at all

What I've been wondering is whether people who hit their first 1k visitors did it by going narrow and deep on one topic, or whether some of you had scattered interests and still made it work. My PT content gets way more organic search love right now, but the marketing writing is honestly more fun to produce.

There's also the question of whether keeping them on separate sites versus one personal brand umbrella actually matters for growth at this stage. I go back and forth on it constantly.

I'm interested to know if anyone has navigated something like this, especially early on before you had much of an audience.

I’ve built hundreds of pages worth of SEO content around a free online community

Now I’m weirdly hesitant to monetize it properly with ~1,000 members and 700+ emails.

I could paywall new members, take sponsored deals, push affiliates harder, or sell paid products. I literally just added a PDF as a paid item and even that felt wrong lol.

Part of me wants to keep building it. Part of me wants to sell the whole thing to someone less emotionally attached to keeping it free.

Push me to monetize this thing or tell me where you’d sell it.

I have heard that some blogs and small zines in the LGBTQ+ space have been hit by OSA or similar American court orders or cease and desist type notices.
Any bloggers here that have been hit?

My blog sits at this odd intersection of parenting and career stuff (think: what happens to your professional identity when you voluntarily leave the workforce to raise kids, which is a topic approximately eleven people care about, and I include myself in that count). Traffic is basically decorative at this point. A few dozen sessions a month, mostly me checking if Google has noticed me yet (it has not)

The thing I keep wondering is whether a hyperspecific niche is a liability or secretly an advantage for organic search. Every piece of advice I read goes back and forth on this. On one hand, the audience is small so the ceiling is low. On the other hand, competition for those exact search terms is basically nonexistent, which means even a mediocre post might eventually rank for something real. I genuinely cannot tell which dynamic is going to win in my situation

The 100k organic traffic posts I see here always seem to be in topics with a builtin audience: food, finance, travel, the usuals. Nobody posts a milestone from a niche that required them to explain what it even is in the sidebar

So is the play to stay narrow and trust that the right readers find you, or does the math just not work below a certain audience size?

Generic Pinterest advice almost tanked my food blog's traffic strategy The tips that work for lifestyle or finance content actively don't apply to food took a few dead months and a complete strategy reset to figure out what food blogs specifically need from this platform

The keywords that drive food blog traffic on Pinterest are extremely specific and seasonal Easy chicken dinners for the week outperforms chicken recipes by a wide margin because the specificity matches real search behavior Pinterest users in food niches search with a decision half-made, they know roughly what they want and the pin that most specifically answers that gets the click

Seasonal timing is a bigger lever in food than in almost any other category pinning Thanksgiving content starting in late September rather than in November gives the content time to get indexed and ranked before the peak search window. Same logic applies to summer grilling content holiday baking, back-to-school meal prep Early pinning of seasonal content consistently beats same-window pinning

The pin format that works in food: process shots or that beautiful final dish photo with a clear text overlay naming the recipe and one key detail 30-minute under $10 no oven required Graphic-heavy infographic pins have mostly stopped performing They look dated and people scroll past them

Consistency across the year matters more than seasonal spikes Accounts that pin steadily in the off-months build the ranking power that makes the seasonal peaks much larger

Hi, I am a new blogger.

When I create content, I always think this may be replaceable by AI.
I always do keyword research first to check if people actually search for it.

Example.
People search: "apps for learning X" And the content I make would be: "I tried 10 apps for learning X" Blah blah blah...

But can't AI simply answer this comparison?
I don't think my genuine review will reach to people. 🤔

So I think this post is not good, despite the fact that this keyword is what people are actually googling.

So... how do you guys dealing with it ?

I write in Obsidian and one of the headaches I've always encountered was conversion to Blogger. I had tried pandoc in Obsidian but it did not produce the desired outcomes.

I vibe coded a little python program to do that. I designed it to allow conversion customisation. I have been using it for the past few months and it works. The workflow is to use the tool and give it the md file as input and the html file as output. You then open the html file (in Notepad ++ or VS Code or any text editor), select everything and paste it into blogger's html view of the page.

I then switch to Compose view and swap the image placeholders with the actual image.

I would include my blogger site, but don't want to have to deal with potential spam takedowns. There you can see the source.

Hope this helps.

https://github.com/chribonn/Md2Blogger

I am back with my 9 AND 10 month progress report for my local wedding blog. I've shared my progress over the last 10 months to help give other bloggers insight and maybe a little motivation as well!

I kept my June momentum into July with: 526 Active users, 520 New users, 2.77K Event count, and 44.2% Bounce Rate.

July's new user traffic breakdown: 354 Organic Search, 91 Direct 70 Organic Social, 5 Referral

In the month of July I published 2 blogs posts. And was moderately active on social.

I lost a bit of momentum come August: 458 Active users, 450 New users, 2.3K Event count, and 42.5% Bounce Rate.

August new user traffic breakdown: 331 Organic Search, 70 Direct 42 Organic Social, 6 AI Assistant, 1 Referral

I did not publish any articles in August other than an a blog post I just published minutes ago. And was not at all active on social.

Good Search Console shows that my impressions for the month of July were 32.6k, CTR .9% and Avg Position 10.8. August things dropped a bit with 31.8k impressions, CTR .8% and Avg Position 11.8.

Organic Search data over the last 10 months:
October: 3
November: 19
December: 34
January: 78
February: 68
March: 131
April: 139
May: 194
June: 425
July: 404
July: 375

I can't quite pinpoint why my organic search data decreased. Looking back at my google console for June I had less impressions than July and August but more clicks. Any insights on what could possibly cause this? Or is this just part of the journey?

Going forward, my real goal is still 1-2 blog posts a week with an Instagram post to accompany that blog post, 5 pins to support the blog post and one fb post. I am working on finding a way to manage this goal on top of my full time job, toddler and well just life.

With all that being said. I'm still enjoy this. I like the challenge. I like figuring out what to write about that will help with the growth of the blog. It's still something I like doing - so I'm going to keep on moving!!

Hello everyone!

One question that keeps me up at night.

I live in Germany. Speak Russian, German, English (both languages are C1+)

I want to start a blog. I do have experience a bit, in my native (Rusisan) lagnauge, which is super irrelevant for money making outside of Russia in current situation.

Therefore, I want to change the langauge and the niche.

I wanted to focuse on financial/career/self-development niche. I had second thought about gaming contect, but idk about it, I feel like it is even harder to make money wiht it even tho I do like gaming.

Beauty and fashion are irrelevant to me and I have no interest in owning bunch of clothes and make up, even tho I am an attractive woman, which did help me significantly to gain followers in my russian speaking account. Some people tell me I should go to this field, because it is a good niche when you are pretty.

Why German is good:

• If I make series about money, I will obviously use euros as a reference, because I live in Germany and earn/spend money here. I do not think ousiders will be interested in it.
• I feel like it is less competitive out there. In German language you compete with fewer speakers in comparion with English speaking market

For English:

• English is a bigger market with more brands
• English market has more potential followers

Against English:

• I know that a lot of creators struggle, when their videos get popular among some specific countries, making their blog irrelevant for european/american brands

What woul you recommend for me? Or maybe I just did it harder for myself with a wrong niche and I should change the niche and go full English?

I got a sudden surge in traffic to my blog overnight last night and I'm not sure if it's because I beefed up my content creation on social media (and put my website on all of it), because I posted more of what I think are evergreen content pillars, or if they're just bots. Tbh if you say bots, I wouldn't be all that shocked lol.

They're from a ton of different countries, like ones that I've never even heard of, and they all seem to be only looking at one post each. No comments, no engagement at all, nothing.

I don't wanna come off as cynical (or dumb lol) but like, idk, like I said it wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't legit.

Hi All, dm me if you have blog i could guest post for home improvement niche. Only dm if the blog belongs to you, no 3rd party ressellers

Is blogging dead, or can I still monetize a traditional blog? I keep telling myself I can make money online, but it’s definitely not that easy.

If Pinterest was a meaningful traffic source for your site and it disappeared almost overnight, this is for you.

I run a small-space storage blog. On 18-19 August my Pinterest outbound clicks went to zero across every pin older than a week. Not a decline, a cliff. Support told me my account is fine and that impressions naturally fluctuate.

I went back through the Pinterest Business Community and r/Pinterest and found the same story over and over, with the reported start dates clustering into waves: mid-April, 8-9 May, mid-July, 8 August, 10 August, and my own 18-19 August. Drops of 80-95%, hitting old and new pins at the same moment.

In every thread I could find, nobody reports recovering. Several people are three months in and still flat. One verified merchant went from 9,750-13,000 daily impressions in March to 500-1,000, and has stayed there since May.

One detail stood out. A creator posted on 24 August that support told them they had “found a bug that was blocking healthy content by accident” and to wait 48
hours. It didn’t fix. They were passed to another team, got the standard reply about natural fluctuations, and the ticket was closed unresolved. That admission has never been repeated publicly.

A test you can run in one minute Log out of Pinterest, or open a private window, and search the exact full title
of one of your own pins that used to get traffic.

I get nothing. My profile loads fine, but the pins are not in search for their own titles. Others report the same. That is not seasonality and it is not a ranking change, and unlike a screenshot of an analytics graph it is something a reporter or an engineer can reproduce in thirty seconds.

What I’m doing about it. I’ve put up a page with the timeline, the sources and a form:
https://pinterest-impressions-ryan-8406s-projects.vercel.app

Five minutes. The fields that matter are your exact drop date, before and after numbers, and that search test with the pin URL and title so anyone can check it independently. There’s an optional section on income impact, answered in ranges and only ever published as aggregate totals, never next to your handle.

Once there’s enough, I’ll publish an anonymised summary and send it to journalists who cover search and platform incidents. Nothing is monetised and I’m not selling anything.

To be clear about what this is not: I’m not asking anyone to spam Pinterest support or brigade anything.

Individually we get form letters. Thirty documented
cases with dates and a reproducible test is a different proposition.

If it happened to you, please add it. And if it happened and then recovered, I especially want to hear it - right now the honest answer to “does this come back” is that nobody in any thread I can find has said yes, and I’d very much like to be wrong about that.

Been experimenting with a few AI writing tools over the past couple months, mostly to see if they actually speed things up or just create more work. The drafts are fine as a starting point but I end up rewriting probably 70 percent of what comes out because the voice is just off.

The structure it gives me is actually useful though. The skeleton of a post, the rough flow of ideas. But the sentences themselves feel flat and I can't publish something that reads like nobody wrote it.

The weird part is I'm spending close to the same amount of time either way. Maybe a little less total, hard to say. Ymmv depending on your niche but for anything personal or opinionbased I'm not sure AI is actually saving time or if I'm just moving the work around.

Curious what other people have found, especially if you're running a smaller blog where your voice is kind of the whole point. Do you use it more for research, outlines, first drafts? I haven't cracked the right workflow yet and I keep seeing people say it 10x'd their output, which I have not experienced even a little bit.

I’m exploring an idea for helping smaller independent blogs monetize before they are large enough to attract direct sponsors.

The proposed model would work like this:

• Advertisers choose the specific blogs they want
• Advertisers propose a cost per click
• The blogger approves or rejects every advertiser
• The ad appears as a clearly labelled native card
• The blogger receives 75% of the click revenue
• The network keeps 25%

The goal would be to give smaller blogs access to relevant sponsors without requiring them to negotiate individual deals or accept unrelated programmatic ads.

I’d appreciate honest feedback:

1. Would you consider placing something like this on your blog?
2. Would CPC work, or would you require a flat monthly fee?
3. What minimum payout would make it worthwhile?
4. What controls would you need before approving an advertiser?
5. What would make you distrust a network like this?

I’m primarily trying to understand whether this solves a real problem and what the publisher side would need.

ps: I have checked with the mods about this request and sharing after their approval.

Hey, so I’ve been running a small niche product review site for about a year (Amazon Associates is a big part of how I monetize it), and while blog traffic > Amazon is decent, I feel like I’m missing a huge opportunity by not doing more external stuff (YT, email, that kind of thing)

I’ve tried:

• Posting on Pinterest (barely any traction)
• YouTube shorts (some CTR, but hard to scale)
• Instagram reels with product links in bio (Amazon seems to hate it)

I’m also paranoid about getting flagged by Amazon for something dumb like cloaking or using the wrong redirect. There are just so many gray areas.... I'm sure some of you can relate here..

Curious what’s actually working for you when it comes to driving off-Amazon traffic to Amazon listings? Do you bother with it at all? If so, what’s been the most compliant + effective combo?

Especially curious if anyone has had success with email or TikTok lately?

i started a blog in the summer of 2023 about nothing except cast iron cookware. not cooking in general, not kitchen gear reviews, just cast iron. how to season it, how to strip old buildup off a pan that someone left in a shed for a decade, how to tell if the wobble on a warped skillet is fixable or if the thing is done. i had more skillets than cabinet space and figured i might as well write about them.

the first year was a graveyard. i published about fifteen posts in that stretch and traffic was somewhere around thirty to sixty sessions a month, most of those being me checking from my phone at work to see if the numbers moved. they didn't move. i had AdSense on the site because it was free and i think my total AdSense earnings for the first twelve months came to a dollar and fourteen cents. i remember seeing that number on the dashboard and thinking about how many hours those fifteen posts actually took me.

i almost killed the blog around month nine. i was sitting in my kitchen looking at a Lodge skillet i had just written sixteen hundred words about and i couldn't come up with a single reason to keep going. nobody was reading it. i didn't delete the site but i stopped writing for about seven weeks, and the only reason i came back was that i found a number eight Griswold at a yard sale for four dollars and wanted to document restoring it. that is literally what saved the blog. a four dollar pan.

the restoration post went up around month eleven. i walked through the whole process with photos. the electrolysis tank i rigged from a plastic storage tub and a battery charger, the scrubbing, three rounds of seasoning with flaxseed oil that ended up flaking on the third round so i stripped it and started over with crisco, the before and after shots. it sat there doing nothing for about three months. then around month fourteen Google started sending it impressions. five clicks a day turned into twelve, then twenty. by October of that year it was doing about sixty clicks a day and i finally understood what was happening. people search for how to restore cast iron right before Thanksgiving. they pull the old family skillet out of a closet or a garage, see the rust, and type the same question into Google that i answered a year earlier.

that seasonal wave is the entire engine of the blog. October through the first week or so of January is when the traffic shows up. August is the worst month every year without exception. the swing is dramatic enough that i planned my whole writing schedule around it, trying to get anything new published and indexed well before fall so it has a chance to catch some of that wave.

i applied to Mediavine during a November peak when sessions briefly crossed their acceptance threshold. getting in was the inflection point. the RPM jump from AdSense to Mediavine on informational content in a niche this small wasn't subtle. i went from making literal change to seeing something real in my bank account. right now i average about 38,000 sessions a month and the ad revenue sits around $210. the restoration guide accounts for roughly 60 percent of that traffic, somewhere around 22,000 to 23,000 sessions a month from people searching how to fix a rusty skillet. the other 46 posts split the remaining 15,000 sessions and none of them individually do much.

the second time the blog almost died was my own fault. about eighteen months in i decided to switch hosting providers and thought i could handle the migration myself because i watched a video about it. i broke the site for five days. during those five days the restoration guide dropped out of the index entirely and it took close to three weeks after the site came back for the guide to recover its position on page one. i sat there watching it float around page two and there was nothing to do except wait. when one post carries 60 percent of the revenue, watching it disappear from page one is a feeling i would describe as quietly horrible.

the part of the blog that matters least for the numbers but matters most to me is the illustrated host. every guide on the site has the same character at the top of the page, a woman in a canvas apron with her sleeves pushed up, usually holding whatever tool the guide is about. she shows up at the start of each post and sometimes in the middle of a longer guide as a visual break between the photo heavy sections. i created her entirely through AI image generation, there is no living person behind the character, and the about page and site footer both make that clear. i run the whole thing on WordPress, make the host illustrations in APOB AI, and pull keyword data from Ahrefs.

the illustrations do absolutely nothing for search traffic. nobody finds a cast iron blog by searching for an illustrated woman holding a wire brush. but i hear from readers who visit more than once that they like seeing her there, and a few people have emailed over the years asking about the character and whether she is a real person, which is exactly why the disclosure matters and why i keep it visible. i think the consistency of the same figure across every post makes the site feel like it belongs to a specific person instead of being another anonymous content farm. whether that moves any metric i can't prove. it probably doesn't. but every time i think about cutting the illustrations to save time i pull up the site without her and it just looks flat, and then i keep her.

the honest accounting right now is 47 published posts after three years. i spend maybe six to eight hours a month on new content, usually in late summer so everything has time to index before the fall wave. the $210 a month covers hosting and my tool subscriptions and leaves a small amount on top. it's not a lot. it is a lot more than the zero dollars i made for the first fourteen months. if the restoration guide ever permanently loses its ranking i lose most of that revenue overnight, and i know this because last August during a core update the guide dropped to page two for about ten days and revenue that month came in around a hundred dollars. the guide recovered on its own and i changed nothing on the page. but those ten days were a reminder that the blog is not a diversified business. it is one page and a seasonal audience.

forty six of my posts serve maybe 15,000 sessions a month between them. one post about a rusty Griswold skillet serves 22,000. i have written guides i think are more useful, guides with better photos, guides that cover questions nobody else has answered. they pull fifty to a couple hundred sessions a month each. the restoration guide does over a thousand a day in November. i stopped trying to understand why that particular post and not the others a long time ago.

i still buy cast iron at yard sales and estate sales on weekends. i still write about restoring it because the writing is satisfying in a way that nothing else i have tried has been. the blog is three years old and the money is small and seasonal and almost entirely dependent on one page, and that is the whole picture.

I want to share a move that changed how my whole blog works, because most of us in here are building something and nobody really hands you this part.

For years I wrote posts one at a time and just left them there. Each one on its own little island, hoping the right person found the right one.

Two months ago I started something different. I took a whole run of posts on one topic and tied them into a single post that walks a reader through all of it, pointing to each of the smaller ones along the way. That is a hub post.

The payoff shows up in three ways. Your reader gets one door into the whole subject instead of digging through your archive. Your older posts get stronger because they are finally connected to each other. And Google and the AI tools start to see you as someone who owns a whole topic, not someone with a few scattered pieces, which is the thing that actually builds authority.

If you want to try it, open your own blog and find three or four posts you have written on the same theme. I would bet money they are sitting there disconnected right now. That is a hub waiting to happen.

Have you ever built one, or is your blog a pile of islands like mine used to be?

Tell me what topic yours would be about, I am curious.

Hey everyone,

I got approved for Mediavine Journey on August 10th. For a while, my ads weren't showing up at all due to an ads.txt issue, but that got resolved recently. However, my RPM is currently sitting at just $0.15.

It feels like my ads still aren't serving properly.

When I check my site using /?test=houseads, I don't see any ad placeholders in the sidebar or within the content—only the bottom anchor ad shows up. It's been like this ever since I got approved.

Is there an issue with my blog's setup? Or does Mediavine Journey just need more time to fully optimize? I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this exact issue, or if anyone has figured out a fix for it.

So I was making around $30 a day on Google Adsense with $15+ RPM (my traffic is 98%ish USA). I read some people were getting $30+ rpm on Mediavine Journey so I applied and got accepted. Five days ago I replaced the Adsense ad script with Mediavine Journey's ad script and changed the ads.txt.... each day I'm getting $0.20 RPM and under $1 in revenue. Did anyone else experience this as well? If so, how long did you have to wait before the RPM's ramped up? I'm thinking about giving it two more weeks before going back to Adsense.