Does SEO Still Generate Inbound Leads, or Did AI Search Break It?

Thanks. The part that makes or breaks it, in my experience, is keeping the original wording instead of bucketing threads into topics. Once you collapse twelve threads into "reddit lead gen" you're back to keyword research with extra steps. "How do I know if a subreddit will ban me for posting this" and "what's the best subreddit for SaaS" look like one topic and are two completely different pages, and only one of them has a person with a problem behind it.

The other thing that pushed me off volume numbers is that they can be actively wrong rather than just imprecise. About 12% of my Search Console impressions turned out to be scrapers running `-site:` operator queries, sitting at position 1-8, which made one blog post look like it was ranking on page one when it wasn't. Forum counts have their own noise, but I can open each thread and check that a human wrote it