Ask SEO questions in the AI SEO Discord

What an SEO question post needs

An SEO question post needs four things: the whole question in the title, the exact query or prompt, the page, and what you already tried.

Title

The whole question in one line: “Why does ChatGPT cite our competitor’s pricing page for ‘payroll app for restaurants’ and not ours?”

Query

The exact search or prompt, word for word, and where you ran it: Google, AI Mode, ChatGPT or Perplexity, plus the country if it matters.

Page

The URL you want to show up, or the kind of page if you can’t share it.

Tried

What you changed and when. Dates matter, because AI answers change from week to week.

Proof

A screenshot of the answer, with anything private cropped out.

Writing the title of an SEO question

Writing the title of an SEO question is most of the work, because the title is all anyone sees in the forum list.

• Name the platform. AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity pick sources differently, so “AI search” is too vague.
• Quote the query. Put the exact words in quotes, so people can run it themselves.
• Say the gap. What you expected and what happened: “cites a 2023 listicle instead of our page” beats “not working”.
• Ask one thing. Two questions in one post get half an answer each. Post the second one five minutes later.

SEO question examples: weak and strong

These SEO question examples show how much the title changes the replies you get.

The last one has a documented answer. OpenAI says the two bots are separate settings, and a site can allow OAI-SearchBot to show up in ChatGPT search while blocking GPTBot from training, per OpenAI’s overview of its crawlers. A strong title gets you to that kind of answer in one reply.

Forum tags for SEO questions

The forum has six tags for SEO questions, and every post should carry at least one.

• AI Overviews: the AI summaries at the top of Google results.
• AI Mode: Google’s conversational search mode.
• ChatGPT: ChatGPT search and the sources it cites.
• Perplexity: Perplexity answers and their sources.
• Technical SEO: crawling, indexing, robots.txt, structured data and site speed.
• Solved: added by the person who asked, once the answer works.

What happens after you post an SEO question

After you post an SEO question, the replies land in that post’s thread, so the whole conversation stays in one place.

You can start a new post every five minutes, which keeps the forum readable. When an answer works, add the Solved tag so the next person searching the forum knows it’s settled. If nobody has replied after a day or two, add what you’ve learned since: a new screenshot or a second query often gets things moving.

SEO questions that don’t belong in the forum

Some SEO questions don’t belong in the forum, mostly because they’re pitches with a question mark on the end.

• “Who can rank my site? DM me.” That’s a job post, and DM pitches break the AI SEO Discord rules.
• Anything that asks people to buy or sell links, reviews or accounts.
• Screenshots that show a password, an API key or client data. Crop them first.

Other places to ask SEO questions

Other places to ask SEO questions are worth knowing too, because some problems need a different crowd.

For a Google indexing problem on your own site, the Google Search Central Community is Google’s official help forum. For general SEO, the big subreddits move fast. The guide to SEO communities and forums compares them, and there’s a list of SEO Discord servers with working invites.

Sources

• OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
• Google: Google Search Central Community