Forums are about to become valuable again for SEO

genuine community mentions can useful for visibility. they directly improve rankings without more data but being mentioned in relevant discussions can still help people discover the brand

forums useful again but genuine brand mentions will matter more than just getting backlinks.real discussions feel much more natural

forums were always valuable for one job, getting a tier 1 page crawled. a profile or a post that links to your web 2.0 gets that page fetched inside a day, i have run thousands of them for that with GSA SER /Xrummer AI and never once cared about the link itself. if the AI engines now read the same forums for opinions thats a second use for the same platform, but i would not confuse the two. one is a crawl trigger, the other is brand talk

forums can still useful for getting genuine brand mentions. real discussions works much better than dropping links just for seo