u/Certain_Bag4005

been digging around for a new broker and Axonera AG keeps popping up on comparison sites, but i can barely find actual user experiences that aren't obviously affiliate stuff or ai-generated nonsense. their spreads look competitive on paper and they're supposedly regulated, but so was my last broker and we all know how that ended lol. anyone here actually deposited real money with them? how are withdrawals, do they stall or actually process within the timeframe they claim? support real or just ticket-system black hole? honestly just trying to avoid headache number three at this point

So i'm going to China next month and trying to figure out the best way to keep access to Google apps, WhatsApp, etc. behind the Great Firewall. I know VPNs are the usual recommendation but honestly every time i read about it someone says their VPN stopped working or got throttled. I've been looking into eSIMs that route through foreign networks so your traffic basically never touches the Chinese internet infrastructure - meaning Google, WhatsApp, Instagram all just... work. No VPN needed.

Has anyone gone this route recently? I was looking at a few providers Airalo, Holafly or Esimglobe.

Few things I'm wondering:

• Did your eSIM actually bypass the firewall reliably or were there dropouts?
• How was the data speed? Like could you actually video call on WhatsApp or was it barely usable?
• How much data did you burn through in say 2 weeks? I'm thinking 10-20GB should be enough or not ?
• Anyone have issues activating their eSIM once already in China or should I set it up before landing?

Also curious if it matters which city you're in. I've heard coverage can be spotty outside tier 1 cities with some providers like Airalo or Holafly

Any recent experience would be super helpful, most threads I find are from like 2023 and things seem to change fast with this stuff.

3 years running a small family law / estate planning practice. We've always done fine with SEO - nothing spectacular but enough that it justified the spend. Standard stuff, blog posts, practice area pages, Google Business Profile, etc.

So here's what's been bugging me lately. I've been messing around with ChatGPT and Perplexity, asking questions the way a potential client would - like "how to file for custody in [state]" type stuff. And the answers these things give are... pretty good? They're pulling from various law firm sites, sometimes citing them, sometimes not. And it hit me that people are absolutely doing this instead of googling now. Or at least before they google.

I went down a rabbit hole reading about AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) and honestly i'm not sure how much of it is real and how much is just the SEO industry inventing new acronyms to sell services lol. But some of it seems legit?

Things that seem to actually matter from what I can tell:

• Schema markup, especially FAQ schema. Apparently helps AI models parse your content better. Makes sense i guess.
• Actually answering the question upfront instead of burying it in 2000 words of fluff. Which like... we should've been doing anyway
• Authority signals (backlinks, citations, mentions on other sites) still seem to matter for AI results too, not just google
• Jurisdiction-specific content gets pulled more than generic national stuff. Again makes sense.

But here's where i'm stuck. Traditional SEO already felt like a second job on top of actually practicing law. Now there's supposedly this whole additional thing to worry about? I've been poking around at a few vendors that claim to handle both traditional SEO and AI optimization together - looked at LexGrow among others - but i honestly can't tell yet if any of them actually deliver on the AI side or if they're just repackaging regular SEO with new buzzwords. Did get a free audit from them that at least showed me where we weren't showing up in AI results which was... humbling. But idk, still skeptical.

Anyway, questions for anyone who's thought about this:

1. Am i overthinking this? Like is the actual volume of people finding lawyers through AI chat still negligible?
2. If you use an SEO agency, have they even brought this up? Or are they still just talking about rankings and keywords like it's 2019?
3. Has anyone actually tracked whether leads are coming through AI-assisted search? I have no idea how you'd even measure that tbh

Part of me thinks the firms that figure this out early will have a huge head start. The other part of me thinks I should just keep doing what's working and stop reading marketing blogs at midnight. Would genuinely love to hear if anyone else is dealing with this or if i'm just spiraling.

Their price doesn't make sense for our margins. I want something with a flat monthly fee that doesn't take a % of our sales.

I just need to create amazon attribution links, track sales and send payments. I don't need to find affiliates on the platform, we find content creators on our own. What do you guys suggest?