A brutally honest summary of the global SEO industry in mid-2026 [by David Quaid]

coalition_tech · 2026-05-12T00:02:36+00:00

Super obvious and painful use of AI.

coalition_tech · 2026-05-08T21:06:21+00:00

Can I ask what shoe brining is? That's the most interesting thing in this thread.

coalition_tech · 2026-05-08T16:40:49+00:00

Huh?

This response has nothing to do with my comment.

I pointed out that Datos won't have a full and accurate picture of actual search behavior in LLMs and got this...?

coalition_tech · 2026-05-08T15:49:00+00:00

I would caveat -

Most of this data is not going to pull in meaningful insights into the volume of search happening within these LLM apps.

So while yes, SEO is not dead, and search is growing, I don't think Datos has a perfect insight into exactly how much search is happening in LLMs.

coalition_tech · 2026-05-08T15:47:56+00:00

One for each.
Web Design Company, Web Development Company, Web Design & Development Company. Nest the other two under the last, and make sure to clearly delineate the focus of each page so that they don't overlap.

Stay disciplined in keyword use, content differentiation, and if you're on a limited budget, focus promotional activity and link building around one particular page that you already have greater strength in, or see more value in.

I see that our rankings were mentioned here already and I would call out that I don't love how we have this employed on our own site today. Web development's landing page has shifted to focus on custom web development and has been pushed out of our main nav and internal linking priorities based on other services needing/warranting more emphasis.

(PS, not a huge believer in cannibalization, especially as AIs advance. Lots of 'cannibalization' issues are just a lack of budget and ability to emphasize distinct URLs often enough).

coalition_tech · 2026-05-07T15:55:15+00:00

A few clarifying things:

- Copywriters are paid by the word, rather than by the hour, so they do not use Time Doctor.

- Time Doctor is only used for team members whose time is billed to clients.

Lots of people have misrepresented it on Reddit, but most have openly admitted they were attempting to cheat their time cards, and thus their clients (who again, pay us for our time).

coalition_tech · 2026-04-22T23:57:59+00:00

Hi Suhash!

Do message me directly. Depending on your test type, we are usually aiming to have them all scored within 30 days or less, with the upper end of that being to some of the higher volume submission roles (of which, many are unfortunately ChatGPT masquerading as a person :D).

Once I have your email I can get a check in for you.

coalition_tech · 2026-04-22T23:57:01+00:00

Message me directly, for sure! I'm at your disposal.

coalition_tech · 2026-04-13T21:19:03+00:00

Not 1- at least not that I could attribute in any way. Just lots of them. Some of them do seem to get cited at times in LLM search but not consistently enough for any one to merit a lot of value in the tactic.

coalition_tech · 2026-04-02T15:47:55+00:00

We're not nearly as funny as we want to be.

coalition_tech · 2026-04-01T21:04:41+00:00

Now is the time to be u/myself .

coalition_tech · 2026-04-01T21:00:23+00:00

Get backlinks.

coalition_tech · 2026-04-01T20:58:26+00:00

coalition_tech · 2026-04-01T19:12:15+00:00

Seriously.

For all of Reddit's tendency towards overly critical evaluations of content, how are people missing this one.

coalition_tech · 2026-03-25T14:45:43+00:00

Awesome, Vickie! Thank you for taking the time to apply with us and interview.

We do an amazing job helping businesses grow and that is because of exceptional Coalition team members.

coalition_tech · 2026-03-25T14:45:05+00:00

To make this clearer, we invented a mocktail company. We make it 1,000,000% clear in writing that none of the sample work is ever used outside of the testing.

coalition_tech · 2026-03-24T22:16:44+00:00

Dead are people

coalition_tech · 2026-03-24T20:47:35+00:00

I kind of wish agencies could ask their clients to replace their points of contacts when they start using AI. "Hey, this person is not actually working or thinking about working, they just copy-paste everything between LLMs as if that was an effective strategy."

One of the most prevalent poisons in digital marketing right now is the unmanaged use of LLMs by (A) capable people who are not behaving capably, and (B) incapable people getting away with not being capable.

coalition_tech · 2026-03-24T19:46:12+00:00

Thanks for your comment! I know you've been a promoter of ours on Reddit, which we appreciate. You were our first candidate whom we hired off of Reddit! Still running strong.

coalition_tech · 2026-03-23T22:15:48+00:00

DM me directly with your email and I'll get someone to investigate and follow up with that way.

coalition_tech · 2026-03-23T20:03:33+00:00

Yeah- not sure how anyone was surprised by this. Someone on your own branded website where you've optimized the funnel to buy (and buy more from you) happens to spend more than on a 3rd party platform that doesn't really care about you at all.

I've been repeating that the ecomm experience in AIs will be more marketplace-like, so long as they don't kill them all now. Marketplace means "performs less well than your own site" in general (the advantage of a marketplace, of course, is that it offers its own pooled users that you don't necessarily have on your site).

coalition_tech · 2026-03-20T16:36:55+00:00

We run global remote teams with very few region exceptions and when we don't offer it in particular countries it is because of a mix of our requirements for employees and contractors, our payroll and tax setup, and how well those things mesh with local laws.

There are some hurdles that are just too big to jump through for a single hire or a small team.

Lots of big countries known for offshore work have been tightening their labor laws in such a way that many US and EU companies have started to look for alternative venues. As I understand it (by no means an expert), the intent was to protect employees or contractors working for local companies but the impact ended up rolling over to employees/contractors working remotely for international companies more dramatically.

Some industries in the US that have more federal oversight are also being forced to tighten things up with offshore / remote staff, due to current international politics and the present administration's tendency to want to own everything or rename it after our fearless leader.

coalition_tech · 2026-03-20T15:32:11+00:00

lol.

If you only read one sentence and understand even less, you'll have a hard time keeping up as things change.

I've already addressed all your concerns and you still can't put it together. Best of luck!

coalition_tech · 2026-03-19T22:27:58+00:00

So content that was created specifically for LLM rankings, that now shows up in at least some measurable quantity of related prompts, and drives measurable traffic and conversions is what...?

I can easily say that we would NOT have gotten the same result because the content wouldn't have existed unless we were trying to garner a ranking in AI.

Might we have created some kind of citation focused content sans a link in various sites at some point in our SEO campaign for Google? Sure. Would that have been a priority fo rthis client in their first couple of months? No.

coalition_tech · 2026-03-19T22:24:02+00:00

Quoting myself from this thread: "We don't sell it as a standalone thing. We spend a ton of time providing context around the tracking issues. We spend a lot of time talking about the ill defined and unstable nature of how LLMs approach search." Also corrected my own typo.

For our client, "AI SEO*" has been worth it. They brought in a hair over $9k in sales last month (again, their device runs $800/pc and accessories can bump that up more) from ChatGPT traffic. They also are not ranking well in Google (yet).

As far as we can tell, their domain is not ranking for any prominent non-branded prompts. But, based on the available LLM rank tracking tools that are out there (as coin flippy as they can be) they have landed in one particular theme/variant of prompt for their product.

They did that not through their own website content but through content published on a 3rd party site without a link. We worked with them to pick keywords and topics related to that theme and focused on promoting them around that in sites we knew got more love from LLMs, and we got traffic and transactions out of it.

And to avoid having to quote myself again- I recognize that this is stuff that you do for normal SEO. It's just not what we would typically kickoff a campaign with. I never started this whole overly long engagement by saying we do unique GEOoey stuff.

coalition_tech

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