u/Ivan_Palii

There are a couple of interesting studies from Peec and Promptwatch about the decline of Reddit citations in ChatGPT since August 8th.

https://preview.redd.it/41h9hzhlebkh1.png?width=1102&format=png&auto=webp&s=1dd8a5b8699dca0bcb42b2eef043c5a6b32b2575

https://preview.redd.it/oj190n38ibkh1.png?width=2188&format=png&auto=webp&s=a37fbfdb9d12abb9e373ffecad1813e12f549013

Many teams think that Reddit doesn't worth to work on anymore. Here are my thoughts.

1/ We have already seen how often ChatGPT experiments with citations. The drop in citations today does not guarantee that it will be permanent.

2/ ChatGPT is the largest player in the LLM market, but Google is gradually increasing its share. Gemini, AI Overview and AI Mod continue to cite Reddit.

3/ We do not know how the story of the revision of the terms of cooperation between Reddit and Google and OpenAI will end. But Reddit is escalating the revision of the terms of cooperation, because it considers its position strong.

Reddit has indeed managed to significantly improve the work of anti-spam systems and continues to be the owner of unique data. If one of the big players refuses to work with Reddit, then the one who continues to work gets a big advantage.

3 advantages that make Reddit data unique:

• the largest database of answers by long-tail queries
• more than one opinion per thread (sites rarely interview experts and users for their content)
• much better structured data than on other social platforms

Because of this, I predict that Google will agree with Reddit on new terms.

4/ Yes, most brands have paid attention to Reddit only to improve visibility in AI.

But those who do it correctly and for long enough notice that this channel has its own separate value.

• No social platform gives as much organic reach for posts from brand pages as Reddit.
• If LinkedIn and Meta are mostly used for demand generation, then on Reddit people often search for something just like on Google and those who track such queries and participate in discussions will receive real attention from the target audience.

5/ So many people hate Reddit for spam and fake accounts, despite the fact that Reddit is constantly doing a lot of work to fix this, while on LinkedIn 50% of comments and posts are already written by AI and there is no punishment for this at all.

Last, most controversial thesis. There is an opinion that Reddit only affects queries where LLMs use RAG, and in this case Reddit affects answers, only because it is in the top of the Google SERP.

But why then would OpenAI need a separate agreement with Reddit? Until ChatGPT completely refuses to use Reddit data, it remains possible that Reddit is also used for training data. I don’t know how to check this. If you have any studies or posts on this let me know.

Do you disagree with me?

SEO: you could do both demand capture and demand generation.

AEO: you work only on demand capture

In the old SEO world, each free tool or guide actually helped to buy views from a relevant audience. You owned the page people visit and could place a banner or link to your product.

Combine some creativity and pSEO experiments, and you could generate 100K+ views every month. That's why SEO was considered so valuable for a long time.

And that's the reason why the SEO role doesn't look as fashionable as before. Demand capture is too limited, and businesses can't grow without demand generation.

Of course, because AEO is considered a new channel by many CMOs, it helps us to adapt and win their hearts again.

But if you want to truly succeed, you have to look for ways to help with demand generation too. In most cases, it means creating (and sometimes even executing) a content marketing strategy on YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn.

Do you disagree?

Many of us are skeptical about the value of TOFu content for B2B today. I was also skeptical about it for 2 reasons:

1/ Adoption of AI chats is rising, which means that even the greatest guide will be stolen by LLMs. Even if there is a citation, it has 0 value if the brand isn't recommended.

2/ It became so easy to produce good enough content for a blog. We don't feel that publishing such content is worth it if every competitor can do it.

But sometimes it's useful to question even the most obvious things.

I was wrong with these assumptions. At least partially, at least for now.

9 TOFu pages generated 38 clicks from Google in 7 days

For 6 months, r/Tango team has been publishing content only for bottom-of-funnel keywords on the website. But these keywords are gradually running out.

2 weeks ago I suggested publishing guides by "{platform} implementation" keywords. The idea was that even if they get 0 clicks from Google, it still has value as a resource for internal links for /solutions/ pages.

I didn't expect these 9 guides would generate 38 clicks from Google, 70 users overall, and the first conversion in 7 days.

https://preview.redd.it/f24ieuvdqjih1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=408da1731d5928804c464fc7849eb87da66c6977

These queries have pretty high search volume for 7 days

It means that:

1/ We may be too pessimistic about the end of the old Google SERP with blue links. And it's clear that some people still prefer to read a well-structured article on the website, not in an AI chat interface.

2/ The ability of your competitors to create similar content doesn't mean you have to avoid it. At least because:

- they also may have an assumption it doesn't worth it in a new AI world;
- they may miss or forget it;
- they may create worse content (yes, even with AI)
- they may rank lower because of a weaker domain, not enough internal links, a JS site, and other reasons.

When was the last time you published TOFu content?

I've tested a couple of popular tools in this space:

1/ To make sure I buy something from trusted companies

It's not often, because in most case I buy something from companies I already know and had good experience with them, but anyway sometimes you buy something the first time anyway. For example, courses or software.

In this case I usually run quick analysis in different tools at the same time: Google SafeBrowsing, Trustracer, Virus Total, URL Scan.

2/ To protect my own sites

2 times during 10 years my Wordpress websites were hacked and a lot of content with affliate links were generated, because I didn't have protection. After this case I set up Sucuri and Wordfence plugins for all websites I launch and it helps a lot.

My experience with running own websites shows that often the website you visit maybe unsafe not because the owner wants to deceive you. Often the issue is that website was hacked and the owner even don't know about it.

That means that checking review websites, GMB reviews and so on is important, but it doesn't mean that it's enough, you still have to check websites for viruses and malware.

What's you experince? Do you use one website safety checker for all types of audits or have specific tools for different issues?

"We tested, this channel doesn't work for us" -> You can often hear this when you communicate with the founder or CMO of a B2B startup.

I remembered this phrase because a week ago we started testing a new channel for generating demos - cold calls.

On Friday, I sat in on the first session of cold calls that our contractor did and remembered scenes from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. That same day, he booked the first demo.

We already tried to launch cold calls 2 years ago, but it didn't work then.

But we also had this with cold emails. 4 years ago, the channel didn't work, and when we launched it again a year ago, it worked.

That's why I see such a pattern. We always have a chain:

1. Offer
2. Ideal customer profile
3. Channel

When we say that a channel does not work, we should make a remark that it does not work precisely with the existing combination of these 3 variables.

It is important to understand that of these variables, what is the first thing to change and be ready to return to the channel again.

A weak or irrelevant offer is usually the biggest risk. A mistake at this level leads the entire product and marketing strategy in the wrong direction.

Therefore, it seems to me that cold emails and calls should be launched as early as possible, because this is where the fastest feedback is.

But even when you have a good offer and the right audience, the effectiveness of the channel can vary significantly depending on the level of the freelancer or agency which owns this channel.

The best performers are those who:

• aren’t afraid to share the details of the process
• share interesting insights into how this channel works for other clients and openly talk about who it didn’t work for
• help you better see the gaps in your offer

Even if the channel doesn’t work, you should gain knowledge that will make other channels more effective.

Have you relaunched some acquisition channels 2-3 times, even if they haven't worked before?

I assume there are almost 100+ AI search tracking tools on the market. The demand is growing, and too many people want to capture at least a part of this pie, but in the long term most of these tools will die.

"God is on the side of the big battalions". Most of these tools don't have any moats or capital to compete in scalable user acquisition channels with both types of big brands:

• old profitable market leaders who added AI to the stack (Ahrefs, Semrush, ...)
• new brands who position themselves as narrow tools focused only on AI search and who already became leaders because of the right timing, good execution, and investments (Peec, Profound, Airops, Promptwatch,...)

So, that means small tools will follow one of the following paths.

1/ If there is a big influencer behind them, they can still live as a small business with $10k-100k MRR. But it's hard to maintain because things change fast and you have to reinvest constantly to improve and change the product.

2/ Founders of these tools will switch their activity to the high-margin agency business model and will present their tools as a valuable part of their service.

Do you disagree? Do you see any 3 path?

Here is an example.

• I started to track "seomonitor alternatives" 7 days ago. We had 0 mentions.
• We've published a landing page at Sitechecker comparing us with this brand.
• This page was indexed 2 days ago, and I got the 1st mention in Gemini.

https://preview.redd.it/uj68n4wwyyfh1.png?width=2944&format=png&auto=webp&s=403ba4b26dd4f19dbbb2c222cc8e0e27e5d95f9d

https://preview.redd.it/ke2wg3wwyyfh1.png?width=2974&format=png&auto=webp&s=660df46837af7a530a707dc354594627165888db

Going from 0 visibility to > 0 visibility is accurate enough. You definitely have to do something to make it happen, and this is great when you see WHEN it happens, and WHICH URL citation helped with it.

After many experiments, I also found that Gemini and AI Mode are the models where you can appear almost immediately if your page was indexed and rank in the top 10 of Google.

P.S. The screenshots are from Promptwatch while we develop a new, better version of our AI visibility tracking tool.

What's your thought on this?

In 24 hours, it became the top 6 and cited in AI Overviews & AI Mode.

https://preview.redd.it/vvpa7f3ipldh1.png?width=2452&format=png&auto=webp&s=7018b37f90510738e3a1c11aa5e79d5dc4ae9051

https://preview.redd.it/hhfmie3ipldh1.png?width=2994&format=png&auto=webp&s=1cc91802b8130542a4d9aec39fbb45c4f5ac8734

https://preview.redd.it/wktc0f3ipldh1.png?width=2460&format=png&auto=webp&s=04a932f74b461e9b45b0cd067ebaf7731635430d

But:

• It didn't help to add Sitechecker to the list of recommended brands yet;
• Gemini and ChatGPT haven't cited the article yet.

There are 2 lessons in this experiment.

1. It is worth writing an article on Medium on your target topic if you see that current articles are bad and you are ready to spend time creating unique stuff.

2. One citation and one URL, even in the top 1 of SERP, rarely help your brand to be recommended in AI chats. You may say that I can't make such conclusions based on one experiment, but I talk with a SaaS founder and hear regularly: "our article ranks in the top 1, but we aren't visible in AI overviews".

You need volume to be recommended, and this is good news for me.

LLM as a channel just represents how the marketing works: market leaders always get most of the attention, and it should work this way.

If you created a new product that has something unique and valuable and want to succeed in LLMs, do this:

• define your category and positioning as narrowly as possible
• invest a lot into the most cited listicles
• [underated] align your influencer marketing and AEO strategy -> create detailed briefs for influencers which titles, messages, and descriptions they should use on YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.

I believe other LLMs will cite my article too after some time, but it's not enough.

The next step is a detailed YouTube video integrated into a Medium article.

P.S. My Medium became an effective and unique weapon. I wrote so detailed articles there that other Medium profiles can't beat it, and in 90% of cases, it means citations and improvement of brand visibility.

But I do it only for my customers at B2B Gaps. If your B2B SaaS has a product-market fit, $1mln+ ARR, and you want to move as fast as possible in your AEO strategy, let's talk in DMs.

I mean this article.

https://preview.redd.it/w0ncy4tnxzch1.png?width=3016&format=png&auto=webp&s=7ef5aaf3a7a8069c23722a1676a55f684345193a

Tim wrote on Medium before I even posted my first article there. However, for the last few years, I have published a lot of content there that ranks in the top 10 and helps my customers win in AI search.

Tim was fast enough to capture the opportunity and published an article in February 2026. Today, this article even hit the top 12 in Google SERP.

https://preview.redd.it/6hlxv56pxzch1.png?width=2816&format=png&auto=webp&s=225082b8e86bcd514f4dfa41355b9296d9aba08a

You probably know that in most cases, it's worth spending time on publishing on Medium, only if there are no good articles yet that already rank in the top.

However, Tim's article has one gap I plan to attack. This article is short and focuses on the Ahrefs Brand Radar and its pros.

Instead, I am writing a detailed, honest review of 7 AI visibility tracking tools that I tested, including nuances about unique features, pricing limits, and so on. It will be much longer, and I believe it will have a huge value for decision-making.

https://preview.redd.it/dfqmhx8rxzch1.png?width=2194&format=png&auto=webp&s=add54c16ae2b5ecd0c9eb353e87c2abd58b524b9

It's a real built-in public experiment, let's call it even the battle of articles :)

What's your bet? Will my article rank in the top 10?

P.S. It's definitely not a review of all tools on the market. I believe there are also some unique things I didn't mention there. I'm open to your recommendations after publishing, but only if you explain how it's different from other tools.

It looks like huge news. Google understands that people spend less time on site and more on social media.

A new Search Console property type should help site owners and creators understand how their social and video posts perform on Google Search and Discover.

It allows you to track which search terms lead people to your Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube content on Search, and see exactly how your audience is interacting with your posts.

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/search-console-social-video-platforms

I checked it inside my GSC account, and it's not available for me yet. Google promises these properties will become available gradually over the coming weeks.

Here is how it should look.

Adding social media property inside Google Search Console

Example of search performance report by YouTube property in GSC

This looks like an interesting feature, but there is a huge problem.

1/ Most site owners, who are active on social media, do it from personal accounts, not corporate pages.

2/ Most value from organic social media posts comes from influencer marketing and partnerships, which involve many different creators, not your own corporate channel.

The biggest value for me is tracking the performance of YouTube in Search, considering how YouTube became popular in both Google SERPs and AI chats.

What are your thought?

How do you guys actually research a company before buying from it these days? Do you still trust Trustpilot, or do you rely more on Reddit and other alternative sources?

I used to read and trust reviews from real users, but lately, it’s getting incredibly hard to recognize who is real and who might be fake. Sometimes you find an amazing piece of feedback, but then you look at the user's profile and they’ve only ever left one or two reviews in their life. It makes you second-guess everything.

Moreover, I have Trustpilot widgets for one of my websites and have generated 50+ reviews there. However, often, the real reviews I requested from my customers were flagged as fake reviews and weren't placed.

I read that Trustpilot launched a big update and implemented much tighter AI-driven review moderation to detect and remove fake reviews even better.

Now I’m really curious: do you still actively use the platform, and have you actually noticed any positive changes after their recent updates? Interested to hear both sides: business and consumers.

This is the lesson I learned over the last 6 months of doing AI SEO.

When we target keywords in old SEO, you often don’t know whether people actually look for products like yours using that keyword. You have a hypothesis.

And you know this hypothesis works only when you receive conversions on a specific landing page, and you see by which keywords this page ranks for.

The faster way to learn which keywords bring customers is running Google Ads, because this is the only source where you see conversions by search terms.

However, many businesses don't run Google Ads, and they could target the wrong keywords for years.

In AI SEO, you understand much better and faster whether you target the right topic, because the response AI chat generates gives you a lot info about whether your brand is relevant to it.

https://preview.redd.it/fm4orbqmolbh1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=ae576c5c8528e523e52e57fa463d6bff415d3a2c

You see how LLMs describe such a product, which features are mentioned, and which competitors they recommend, and have to make a decision:

• Sometimes change your expectations from a specific prompt (if you target a broad topic, the responses can very a lot)
• Sometimes delete prompts, because you found that LLMs have a different view of the topic you focused on, and your ICP doesn't look for products like yours via such words.

So, review not just overall brand visibility or brand visibility by specific prompt, but review responses regularly to update your goals.

Just caught a mistake that made me smile.

A week ago, we released the SEO Tests tool at Sitechecker to log and measure experiments.

I made a post about it on LinkedIn and in r/Sitechecker subreddit. Today I decided to check whether the thread I posted on Reddit ranks well.

https://preview.redd.it/de4swfxuhdbh1.png?width=2372&format=png&auto=webp&s=744c7ed9d424b51a1bc01f453ac7201d71122ab8

The thread doesn't rank by this keyword yet, but Google AI Overviews say that SplitSignal was developed by Sitechecker. It's not true; this tool is a part of Semrush.

I don't know which content impacted Google's response, but this is a good example of why SEOs should focus not only on visibility but also on narrative contro.

You have no way to complain to Google or any other AI chatbot anywhere for misrepresenting your brand.

The only way to influence this is to consistently produce accurate, detailed information about your brand and publish it on platforms that LLMs love.

Early in my career, I heard an important rule of marketing that has become even more relevant with the rise of AI chatbots:

"A myth cannot be destroyed; it can only be replaced by another myth."

Do you see similar mistakes too?

Corporate Claude vs Personal Claude: which one is your company actually getting more value from?

Your company pays for the secure, governed, IT-approved Claude seat including audit logs and data protection.

Here's the uncomfortable question: is that the version of Claude doing your employees' best thinking or is the real work happening on the personal account they pay for out of their own pocket?

I believe it's a hot topic, because I prefer to use my own personal account too, just because it understands me and my goals much better.

The numbers are interesting.

• 78% of AI users bring their own AI tools to work (Microsoft & LinkedIn, 2024).
• Nearly half access AI through personal accounts that bypass enterprise controls entirely (Netskope, 2026).
• And even when the company hands them a sanctioned tool, 22% reach for their personal account anyway (TELUS Digital, 2025).

Most security write-ups stop here and yell "data breach." It's fair, but it dodges the more interesting question: why do people keep choosing the worse-protected, self-funded option?

I have 2 theories about it:

1. People won't be fully honest in an account that the boss can read. When employees know management can review their AI interactions, they self-censor and modify their behavior (research summarized in The Conversation, 2025). If you're scared to type "help me figure out if I should quit" or "I don't actually understand this thing I'm supposedly an expert in," you ask weaker questions. Weaker questions, weaker output. Does the corporate account quietly cap how useful the tool can be, not technically, but psychologically?

2. People work harder for a tool that feels like theirs. 35% of employees pay out of their own pocket for AI at work (Writer survey). Nobody buys a tool they're not invested in. When the productivity gain feels like it belongs to you (your skill, your edge, your career) do you push the tool harder than when the upside just flows to the company P&L?

The honest counterpoint: none of this proves personal accounts are actually more efficient.

It proves they're more used and more personally owned. Maybe that's the same thing. Maybe it isn't, and the company is just bleeding confidential data into consumer accounts while feeling clever about "engaged employees." I genuinely don't think anyone has cleanly measured which way this nets out.

So I'll throw it to the people who'd know:

• If your company gave you a managed AI seat, do you still use your personal one? Be honest, for what?
• Do you ask the corporate account different questions than the personal one?
• Owners/managers: have you noticed people doing their best AI work off the books?

I received an interesting question from one of the B2B SaaS brands I help with AI SEO.

"G2 is trying to sell us a package of content based on comparisons. We rank pretty high on a few of these metrics.

If we license the content, we can use those numbers on our site, which they say can boost our AEO scores.

It costs about $3,700 from now until December. Is it worth it or not?"

https://preview.redd.it/n2jx36bay68h1.png?width=2922&format=png&auto=webp&s=c53c980eda9ad3f46bd3171e7de17949a5dc548e

It's interesting how accurately G2 has found its value for brands in relation to the new, growing demand:

1/ Listicles, [brand] alternatives, and [brand] vs [brand] are too popular now.

2/ For many big brands, the goal is not to be visible (they are already visible); the goal is to be recommended as the best option.

But how profitable is this offer?

On the one hand, AI chats love tables, comparisons, and numbers.

On the other hand, AI chats rarely care about the authority of the source and the date of the last update of such a table.

This means that any competitor or third-party website can create the same table, building these numbers based on their fantasy, and without mentioning any sources from where they got them. And LLM can choose to cite this fantasy table instead of the tables from G2.

And here it is important what will happen after December, if the brand stops paying for these comparison tables:

1/ Can a brand leave this embed widget on the website? I assume no.

2/ Can a brand leave this data but not as an embedded widget, but as its own table, just copying the data and showing it without updates? This is more likely, and then you can try it if there are a lot of interesting insights on different competitors.

However, if you have to pay for it every quarter or year to keep the content on the site, it is definitely a bad deal. It is better to spend this money on regular link insertions on pages that have already been cited a lot.

Do you agree?

Я розвиваю агенцію, яка допомагає B2B SaaS будувати видимість в AI-чатах. Одні із ключових факторів які впливають на цю метрику це контент про бренд на Reddit, Medium, LinkedIn, YouTube.

Цікаво поспілкуватись з людьми які хочуть навчитись маркетингу, і вже активні на будь якій з цих платформ.

В мене поки немає готових вакансій для вас. Хочу подивитись, чи є тут взагалі кому це цікаво.

Every conversation about trust online ends in the same place lately: "We need to verify people are real." Bots write the reviews, apply for the jobs and astroturf the comments. So the answer everyone's reaching for is digital ID: prove you're a verified human before you post, rate, or apply.

Here's the part nobody wants to sit with: the cure might be worse than the disease.

Think about what we're actually trading. The whole reason online reviews ever mattered is that they were anonymous and cheap. A pissed-off customer or a burned employee could tell the truth with nothing to lose. The moment your honest 1-star review of an employer, a landlord, or a product is tied to your verified legal identity, that review stops existing. Not because it's fake, but because you're not insane enough to torch a reference or invite a defamation threat over a toaster.

So we'd "solve" fake reviews by killing the only reviews that were ever worth reading.

And notice who benefits. Brands have wanted to unmask their critics forever. Employers would love to know exactly who left that Glassdoor bomb. Digital ID hands them the deanonymization they could never get on their own, and we'd be cheering as we install it, because we're tired of bots.

The actual need here was never "prove humans are human." It's "give me one honest signal in a sea of manufactured ones." Those aren't the same problem. Identity verification answers who is talking. It does nothing about whether they're telling the truth, a verified human can be paid to lie just as easily as a bot, and now their lie wears a real name as a badge of credibility.

I don't think the future of trust is a checkpoint where you flash your ID to participate. I think that's the future of trust dying quietly while we call it security.

But I'm genuinely not sure what the alternative is, which is why I'm posting.

If anonymous reviews die, what replaces them? Is there any version of mandatory digital ID that doesn't end with critics getting silenced? Or is some amount of bot noise just the price of being able to speak freely?