r/seogaps

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?

https://preview.redd.it/raxkxmn6ucjh1.png?width=2231&format=png&auto=webp&s=c907adb094b4a51abb1630c22668c75e7e9d8382

Hey folks, i'm Karsten Madsen, huge passion for SEO and old school video games. Combining it with Morningscore - gamified SEO tool. All my childhood I thought I was a loser. SEO rescued me by finally offering me something I was just truly good at so I could save my first company from bankruptcy 😅

Built a digital agency and grew sales via SEO + networking to 40 people. And then later an SEO tool that is now at 4000+ clients and $1.5M yearly revenue. Long term goal is to be the no. 1 tool and beat Semrush 😎 Trying to be a good human and stay noble in a pretty screwed up biz world.

Things to ask me that might help you:

• How it is to run and grow an agency vs a SaaS tool
• Anything about SaaS - I can openly share almost all our numbers
• The last 4 tough years for me and how I see the industry moving forward
• All my SEO projects: results + failures - no filter
• SEO + GEO data and my honest opinion about it as a tool maker
• How I see the future of SEO
• Honest biz advice

Personal stuff:

• Born in Soutern Denmark.
• 35 years old.
• Live in Amsterdam since 2022.
• French wife. 2 kids.
• Office and team in Denmark while working remote from here (yes it's weird)
• Love video games. Especially N64 era. But any game with art and soul.
• Hate mobile dopamine crap games that somehow young kids love ;D
• Enjoy sports. Started playing field hockey. Big here in Netherlands.

I follow Lily Ray, and today I saw this:

https://preview.redd.it/lnjb2m2wntih1.png?width=780&format=png&auto=webp&s=ffbc17b39769c149b910c1f3739396deb93547d4

I thought this was a done deal already. And now people are talking about it again from the SEO context: Can the search engines detect it? Well, they can, but doing something about it is something different altogether.

I've written about this in the past:

https://kafkai.ai/articles/ai-seo/ai-content-detection-fails/ and https://kafkai.com/en/blog/detecting-ai-generated-text-a-look-at-the-challenges-and-mitigations/

And of course, the whole world is much bigger than Claude.

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?