And there are many reasons for that:

• Data-driven studies were also found to drive consistent search visibility if you plan them with SEO in mind.

• High-quality assets attract backlinks and brand mentions consistently, when done right. Both are important for search and LMM visibility.

• They build trust and get cited a lot.

• They drive relevance factors and brand positioning inside LLM training data.

>>>> JOIN us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

And yet, most of these campaigns fail miserably. In fact, there are so very few examples of businesses doing them right that we don’t even do competitive research for inspiration anymore.

Most of what we see is too mediocre for us to use as a sample of work done well.

Here’s why most businesses fail to make their digital PR strategy work:

1. Too much focus on scaling

Our industry has always been guilty of trying to scale everything to a point when it becomes easy to sell.

As I said before, if it is easy, it is not going to work because everyone can do “easy”.

Scaled PR campaigns fail to capture the attention of truly good publications. Now that many more businesses attempt to do those studies, it is becoming harder to stand out.

Most agencies want to sell more. But it is not about the volume. It is about creating something great each time to attract real signals.

At Smarty.Marketing we spend at least a month brainstorming, researching, and creating assets that have the biggest potential to do well.

2. Not enough time and effort to brainstorm truly great ideas

Brainstorming is the hardest and the most important part of the process. And yet most marketers neglect it. From what I’ve seen, most people simply use ChatGPT to generate idea lists.

I’ve said this before and I’ll die on this hill: ChatGPT cannot come up with something truly unique. It can give you some directions but a good idea needs much more work.

When brainstorming digital PR campaign ideas, we take time to:

• Read relevant subreddits to see which topics trigger active discussions

• Research available data and come up with angles that were never done before

• Look at relevant search queries and questions (We want those studies to be found organically long after it is published)

• Read stories that were done before by solid publications

3. Over-focusing on the wrong KPIs

Businesses tend to over-focus on old metrics. For digital PR, these are usually backlinks.

While we still like and report on backlinks, focusing on the link building aspect of digital PR means you oversee other metrics which are just as important.

For our campaigns, we look at:

• Brand mentions (linked and unlinked)

• Backlinks

• Organic visibility of each campaign

• LLM citations of each campaign

• Overall traffic and sources

• Reddit visibility and activity (how actively each campaign is discussed on Reddit)

This combination of different metrics gives a lot of data for a balanced success evaluation. A campaign may bring just a few good backlinks right away but then it will start driving many more through good organic visibility. This is as good (or even better) than a campaign that went viral (and then died out over time).

If you need help brainstorming, let me know! Data-driven PR is what we have been doing for more than 16 years!

How to regain search and AI visibility?

Here is what you need to start doing:

>>>> Join us LIVE to discuss this topic and bring your questions!

1. Truly Unique Content (Based on Your Experience) That Requires a Click

Most content strategies are not keeping up with current buying journeys. Generic “how to” or “what is” content is easily summarized in an AI answer and seldom needs a click for further reading. This traffic has been lost forever.

While I still encourage businesses to publish it if it is useful, truly unique (non-commodity) content is needed to generate traffic and visibility.

What could those be?

• Unique proprietary research studies (based on your own data or original surveys)

• Unique studies based on public data, exploring trends, patterns, etc.

• Videos (especially interviews on current trends, unique commentary, actionable walk-through and how-tos)

• Case studies and product testing

All of these are not as easy to summarize in a quick answer, so they will require a clear, visible reference.

They are also great at generating links and awareness:

• Research studies become top lead magnets for just about any brand we create them for (even huge and well-linked ones)

• Videos are highly shareable social media content assets (because you can cross-share them through multiple channels)

• Unique product tests and comparisons rank for branded queries and get linked by journalists naturally.

2. Cross-Channel Distribution

I’ve always been an advocate of meaningful content repackaging in order to reach a wider audience. I think I’ve been talking about that since at least 2005! This interview I was able to find is from 2015 but there were many more.

With LLMs consuming content spontaneously from everywhere, content repackaging for cross-channel distribution makes even more sense.

While the main article should live on your site, you also can:

• Visualize your unique research study and post it on Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

• Use takeaways from your video (interview) and post them on Twitter, Linkedin and elsewhere

• Use visual quotes from the video and post them on Instagram

• Turn your video into a podcast and distribute it through podcast streaming platforms

• Take individual graphs from your study and tweet them using one important point that makes people talk

• Discuss your visual study in your own subreddit and other subreddits (r/DataIsBeautiful, etc.)

• Break your video into reels and shorts for different content types (Instagram, TikTok, etc.)

One unique, non-commodity content asset can have lots of lives and last for months if you bring up a new message every time. And it all reminds LLMs that you exist and makes them remember your brand better. If they have consistent context around your brand, they will keep surfacing you, and citing you.

If you need help creating this strategy, reach out!

Here’s how SEO shortcuts work: You exploit a known tactic; you gain traffic for 3-6 months; you either sell or just set up a new site to do the same.

>>> JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

This build-and-flip model has been here for ages. And it is not rocket science if you are willing to lose everything before you start a new site.

Unfortunately, these so-called success stories have been loud enough for brands to start trying things like these. And this is nothing new. Let’s go back in time to list some of the most notable brands that lost 90% of their visibility and had to fire 90% of their teams because they were willing to try shortcuts:

• Panda Updates (2011): This is when businesses thought it was a good idea to create a semi-auto-generated page for every variation of a search query. Unfortunately, those low-quality pages dragged high-quality pages down to the bottom as well. This was a sitewide automated penalizing update. Lucky for them, there was a solid recovery route there. You just had to nuke 90% of your site and slowly build your visibility up.

• Penguin Updates (2021-2016). These have been part of Google’s core algorithm (updates) ever since. These updates have been hitting lots of websites trying to take advantage of quick link-building shortcuts (PBNs, bulk guest posts, paid links, etc.). Those were devastating for lots of well-known brands, but yet again, Google gave them some recovery routes (like Disavows).

As you can see, back then, there were well-defined recovery steps. Ever since Core Updates started, there have been none. You actually need to fix everything in hopes of recovery, and the stakes are much higher.

Ever since AI content generation has become a thing, we all saw where it was going

All those smart tools using ChatGPT content and generating “AI-undetectable” content. It didn’t last long. Quite predictably.

It has always been the main rule: “If something is easy to do, it won’t last”

Google cracked down on easy links, easy content, easy anything else before.

It was quite logical that AI-generated content would not last.

It is obvious that self-serving listicles won’t last.

We already have lots of well-documented cases when pretty big brands are losing visibility because they tried both or either of those shortcuts.

is reporting on those cases, and so is :

It was equally obvious that Reddit would crack down on AI-generated content and automated spam.

I actually think that Reddit is well equipped to do that, since most of it is manually moderated.

And it is quite logical: If something is easily scaled, why won’t everyone do it? How would you stand out?

Shortcuts are not effective in the long run because they are not competitive.

If everyone can do it easily, who is rewarded with visibility?

To be visible, you need to stand out:

• Create something original, like proprietary studies, tools, reports, etc.

• Build a real Reddit presence, which takes time and creativity, hence most of your competitors will fail.

• Invest in tactics that help everywhere, from organic search to LLMs, for long-term organic visibility.

Stop looking for silver bullets and invest in something real and long-term!

And feel free to connect if you need help brainstorming!

The problem is, this is the bottom-of-the-funnel searches, meaning that people searching for [brand name reviews] already know the business. They are interested enough to research you. You have already spent money on them getting to know you (ads, SEO, etc.)

>>> JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

These search results are leaking your warmest leads. It can be devastating for a business’s well-being.

So the most common question is, “How do we get rid of this thread?”

Well, you are likely looking at this the wrong way.

We have a client with mixed reviews on Reddit (which is natural), but there was one thread that included “HORRIBLE” in the title, which was ranking everywhere, for just about any branded query, even the main one, and consequently showed up in most branded prompts as well.

When that client came to us, they asked for a Reddit thread removal service. I immediately told them that we don’t recommend Reddit thread removal as the main strategy. We don’t chase negative threads to remove them (this can backfire big time as mods get very angry about removal requests).

Reddit thread removal can never be your main focus

Reddit cannot be taken by storm because it can backfire!

Our specialty is to build the brand’s presence to a point where:

• Old negative threads are not as visible.

• There’s a noticeable decline in negativity on Reddit because the brand sentiment has shifted

The client agreed.

So here is what we did:

• We set up an official Reddit account and built up its Karma, focusing on relevant authority-driven content

• We set up the official subreddit, focusing on addressing and explaining common pain points, and posting interesting and engaging content

• We set up a workflow for their customers to share real, detailed reviews, product pictures, etc.

After more than 6 months of work, we saw great results: more positive threads from the branded subreddit started showing up for a variety of branded queries.

And yet, that “horrible” thread persisted in visibility.

The thing is, those “horrible” and “scam” threads are hard to compete with because of their huge clickability. Google knows people will choose to click them.

So we assessed the situation:

• The thread was very old and outdated

• The discussed pain points were long addressed and fixed

Instead of bothering the mods, we reached out to the user and asked if they wanted to try the product again and see if they would change their opinion. At that point, we had already built a solid official brand Reddit account that was trustworthy enough for the customer to be impressed to see it in their DMs.

So the customer was open to it, got the free product, loved it, and removed their old thread.

The rankings took another week or so to shuffle, and the branded search immediately became much better balanced (and fresher).

The key takeaways:

👉 On Reddit, don’t attack the problem right away. You need time to build trust before you can get proactive with your old & outdated footprint

👉 It is hard work, and it takes time, but it fixes your problem forever

If you need help fixing your Reddit reputation, reach out!

• Bing Webmaster Tools show what Bing’s LLMs (Copilot) are searching for and whether your URL was cited to be seen. It is not about search (for all we know, LLMs may not be even searching Bing). These are LLMs searching, not people.

• Google’s Search Console reports whether your URL was ever cited inside search features (AI Mode and AI Overviews). In other words, it is a search visibility report (not Google’s LLM visibility report). We really don’t know who is searching here (for AI Overviews, it’s people. For AI Mode, it’s likely Google’s AI agents. Since there is no way to filter between the two, there’s no way to know.) But we know, it’s Google-only visibility.

It is a little funny how we are given so little insight into all the above, but it is important to know.

Now, let’s see if this data can be made useful:

>>>> JOIN us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

Bing’s “AI Visibility” section

The report consists of two sections: “Grounding Queries” and “Pages:”

• “Grounding Queries,” which are “the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was cited in its answer.” In other words, the queries are the “fan-out” terms that Bing’s AI agents use to search for and find answers, though we don’t know which search engines or platforms they access.

• “Pages”, i.e., the URLs included in the AI answers.

For every Grounding Query, Webmaster Tools now reports on:

• Query Intent (Navigational, Informational, “Learn and Solve”, Commercial, Conversational, Comparison). I found those latter two (Conversational and Comparison) quite useful.

• Query Category (I wasn’t a fan here but no complaints). Both intent and topic labels are AI-generated, according to Bing.

• The average number of unique pages cited per day in AI answers.

• “Citation share,” which is “the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown for a specific grounding query.” This is an interesting metric to look at.

Clicking any grounded query in the report will take you to all your site’s pages that were found and cited for that query. This is pretty awesome.

What can you do with this data?

You can:

• Identify all branded queries (those with “Navigational Intent”) and optimize the corresponding pages to better answer brand-driven questions

• See all grounded queries any URL had any visibility for, identify queries with fewer citation frequency and update your page to better respond to a problem behind those queries

• Identify pages with higher citation share and reverse-engineer why they might be performing so well for the corresponding grounded queries

• Group grounded queries by topic to identify related URLs (for internal linking purposes)

• Identify URLs that show up for the same queries and find if there’s a potential duplicate intent or a duplicate content issue to fix there

• Optimize content for under-performing grounded queries, etc.

• Track visibility trends after your optimization efforts to identify more effective tactics.

Google’s “Generative AI Features”

This report shows:

• Which URLs get impressions in Google’s AI answers

• How many impressions each URL got within a set period of time

• Which countries and devices each URL was viewed from

So what is an impression?

Most of the URLs are hidden behind the “Show more” button in AI answers, so we are not sure if the URLs were actually seen…

The “Show more” opens the full answer:

According to Google’s John Mueller, an impression will only be recorded if the URL is in the visible part of the screen. So URLs that are not immediately visible will not record an impression unless someone clicks “Show more”:

As of now, the report is not too actionable as there is no click-through data or feature-specific filters.

To make it more useful, you need to do some digging.

• Download the top-traffic URLs from the “Search results” sections

• Download the top viewed URLs from the “Generative AI Features” section

• Use Excel to combine the two

Now you can see:

• URLs that perform well in search but may not be included in AI features (so you can optimize them better for AI answers with a better structure, clearer answers, etc.)

• URLs that are featured in gen AI answers but not as well-performing in organic search.

There can be different reasons why there’s some disconnect between the two, to be sure. For example, some queries just don’t trigger AI features (so they won’t be included in the AI feature report).

Also, LLMs seem to reference the branded sections more. For example, this AI report includes methodology, the about page, and specific About pages about employees, etc.:

It is still useful to know and research which queries/prompts these brand-driven pages are coming up.

If you need help using the AI visibility reports, you can schedule a quick free call!

😱 Reddit ranks for about 2 MILLION queries containing “reviews” (These are reviews businesses have NO CONTROL OVER)

😱 About 500K of Reddit’s ranking URLs and titles contain “SCAM” (Searchers seeing these in search may make a buying decision right away without clicking to verify)

😱 About 500K of Reddit’s ranking URLs and titles contain “legit” (When your potential customer is questioning if your business is legit, would other Redditors be able to confirm that it is?)

Join us to discuss this LIVE, and bring your questions!

Is Reddit Here to Stay?

Businesses are not happy. I am often asked if I think this is long-term visibility or if they can hope Reddit will finally decline in visibility for their most important queries.

Well, Google didn’t start ranking Google just because they wanted to :)

GOOGLE just FOLLOWED THEIR USER.

According to Semrush (again, this is not ALL Google’s data),

✅ The word “reddit” is added to at least 9 MILLION queries Semrush knows about.

✅ This is over 100 MILLION searches a month. People want to know what Redditors think on that many topics.

Reddit is Google’s users’ DESTINATION. That’s why Reddit is so visible in search, and consequently in LLMs (AI wants to give people what people need!)

I cannot predict the future, but don’t assume Reddit’s visibility is because of high-level agreements with Google and OpenAI. The latter two just give users what they apparently need!

Can Reddit Be Manipulated?

Any platform can be manipulated. It all comes down to how much you value your brand and how ready you are to risk its existence.

The recent article from 404 Media exposes some vulnerabilities that still work.

Reddit’s visibility is also its major challenge. Will it be able to cope?

So far, it looks like it will.

Reddit understands its power in delivering real insights from real users. If AI slop prevails, it will not exist.

So just a few days ago, Reddit delivered a quiet “Reddit update”, and that’s what we saw:

• Major subreddits were suspended for a lack of moderation

• Lots of posts and accounts are banned without even a chance for a moderator to see them.

Reddit automation and manipulation are becoming impossible as we speak, because Reddit knows it is the matter of its existence.

So What Should Business Do?

Generally, building an engaged community on Reddit will help your brand’s sentiment for just about any situation:

• Explain pain points

• Talk to your customers, like you are a real human being

• Showcase customer stories without being promotional

Overall, make yourself heard as an authentic, legit business entity.

It takes time, but it is also long-term. Once you set up your business as a trustworthy brand entity, it is not easy to lose.

Here are some resources that can help to create a strategy:

• Reddit OWNS the Bottom of the Sales Funnel (And Businesses Fail to Do Anything about That)

• So, How Do You Fix Your Reddit Reputation? (For SEO & AI Visibility)

• The Dangers of Reddit: If You Cannot Beat it, Lead it

• How to Use Reddit for Marketing THE RIGHT WAY

• How to Manage Your Brand’s Reputation on Reddit

• How to Do Reddit Marketing without Making Enemies

And start working on your Reddit strategy now (actually, you should have started a few years ago!)

Don’t forget that these guidelines are about Google search AI-powered features (AI Mode and AI Overviews). It is not clear if these guidelines apply to Google’s standalone generative AI platform (Gemini). And these definitely don’t refer to other LLM platforms (like ChatGPT or Claude).

—->>> JOIN us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions we will answer in real time

Also, we are hosting another AI visibility AMA, this time on Digital PR. Ask your questions!

SEO is as relevant as ever

The guidelines confirm that SEO is still very relevant because:

• AI answers rely on search results to give more accurate and up-to-date results

• “Fan-out” queries are search queries that Google uses to search before giving an answer.

Google doesn’t call “optimizing for generative AI answers” anything other than “SEO”.

From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.

Best SEO practices still apply to AI answer optimization

Google recommends prioritizing effective SEO strategies over “AEO/GEO hacks”. The guidelines list the same practices that Google recommends for traditional SEO, mainly:

• Create “people-first” content (in these guidelines, it is referred to as “non-commodity”) with a unique/truly original point of view

• Structure your web pages to make them easy to read and use for people (no additional effort to optimize content for agents is required)

• Use high-quality and helpful videos and images. Overall, focus on what your site users would enjoy.

• From the technical standpoint, make sure your page is crawlable by (and is not blocked for) Google’s bots (Search Console is very helpful for verifying that)

• Semantic HTML structure should be created for people (and screen readers). No special optimization for AI agents is required.

• If you have JavaScript, make sure your content is visible with it disabled (Search Console is all you need for that too)

• Make sure your site provides a good user experience when accessed from various devices

• For ecommerce businesses, also ensure your product feeds are submitted in the Merchant Center.

What about the myth-busting?

Google’s guidelines are busting the most common myths in “GEO”:

• LLMs.txt file is not needed (which is not that clear btw)

• Markdown pages are not needed (it was later discovered these actual guidelines existed in markdown :))

• “Chunking” content (i.e., breaking it into short paragraphs for AI retrieval) is not required, unless it is for people ;)

• “Seeking inauthentic” links/mentions may flag your site as spam (just in the traditional SEO). AI systems do evaluate brand and product mentions across the web, but, just like Google, they can tell real mentions from fake ones. No wonder, as this is about Google’s LLMs

• No “special” structured data (schema) is required. For general SEO, it is not a bad idea to use the recommended schema types, as it helps generate rich snippets. This remains questionable as other Google guidelines recommend schema for clarity, not just rich snippets ;)

Overall, the guidelines emphasize two core ideas:

• Google’s AI answers directly rely on organic search

• For Google’s AI answer optimization, no “additional” tactics are required or recommended

BUT AGAIN, This is ONLY About The Search Features

Google talking about search features and saying it is still SEO has two quite contradicting messages, in my opinion:

• It is about search, of course, it is SEO

• Saying nothing has changed is very convenient, since they give us 0 insight into the click-through while everyone is losing clicks over those search features.

Here’s what changing (and problems I have with those guidelines):

• Clicks are going down

• There are no 100 reliable metrics to measure 0-click visibility

• Attribution is weird (as smart brands switch to cross-channel instead of relying on Google, and many of those channels are 0-click too!)

• Many of those myth-busted elements may be useful for other purposes outside of SEO (e.g., LLMs.txt file seems to be adopted quite well by API developers), so the messaging is terribly confusing.

• There seems to be no alignment inside Google (nothing new but still alarming)

• Google is pushing AI features (and an AI-powered search box) without clear guidelines on how businesses should adapt (instead, they just claim nothing is changing)

To be fair, even in the SEO guidelines, Google notes that in the future, AI agents will not only search but also perform various actions on human users’ behalf, like making a purchase or booking a hotel. So it is recommended to get prepared for that future and become familiar with the emerging protocols, like Universal Commerce Protocol. There are also separate recommendations for creating AI-agent-friendly websites, which website owners can start implementing.

This is a mere mention, but it should already be a wake-up call for everyone.

To sum up:

• Everything is changing

• Just SEO best practices are not enough (not that they were actually enough before)

• There’s another level of AI Visibility before LLMs, searching. More on this here. So it is not quite “just SEO”.

If you need help figuring this all out, I am always open to chatting!

But there’s one thing that is almost more important: Reddit as an analytics tool.

Using UGC for keyword discovery is not exactly new, but there’s much more to it now that we optimize for extremely shortened buying journeys. Let’s see how to use Reddit for GEO!

• Join us to discuss this topic LIVE on Linkedin and bring your questions, ideas, or examples!

• Also, please add my newsletter to your preferred sources on Google to see me more often :) [There’s a little box to check for it to be added]

1. Reddit for understanding the buying journeys

For years, we have been using keyword research to understand how customers arrive at buying decisions, and I have also often claimed that keyword research is far from dead and remains as useful as ever.

But LLM-powered journeys are different. Before AI, someone could have spent a week researching before arriving at a conclusion that they need a certain product. Today, it can happen within a minute of conversing with AI.

So I often turn to Reddit to better understand which problems someone may have, which may eventually lead them to my clients. What may they be struggling with before they even know they need know they may want to buy anything?

This is a great additional content planning tool, e.g., “This is what finally relieved me of my stabbing heel pain,” or something along those lines.

2. Reddit for brand positioning and defining the value proposition

Reddit is a great place to quickly understand any brand, its value proposition, and where it is failing. For any product launch, I suggest checking Reddit for more informed positioning. Redditors will often tell you exactly what is missing from your competitors’ products, so you can define your product positioning better.

I always check Reddit for GEO audits as well because chances are, if there are any confusion or pain points, Reddit already knows about them. What Reddit knows, LLMs sure know too.

3. Reddit for brand awareness assets (through Digital PR)

We have already discussed how Reddit helps us come up with content topics that resonate with the target audience, and drive links, traffic, LLM citations, and brand awareness.

The key here is to take some time to browse relevant subreddits, explore popular discussions, and figure out what is genuinely interesting to the communities.

Reddit is the key brainstorming tool for our digital PR assets (and non-commodity content).

How Do You Actually Analyze Reddit?

I like to start the process manually because reading the discussions gives a better feeling of the community. I recommend this as a starting point for any of the above goals.

Reddit PRO dashboard is the next step. It gives a handy AI summary of key discussion points, reports on the overall sentiment, and references related discussions you’d need to check out.

It is also a tracking dashboard, with no limit as to how many keywords, topics, or brand names you can track (at least we haven’t reached any limits yet, and we track a lot!)

If you use a Reddit analysis tool, let me know! And if you need help with your Reddit strategy, let’s chat!

Most of those discussions rank in Google for branded searches (pushing people from buying) and impacting LLMs.

Very few businesses have any strategy around that.

>>> Join us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

Don’t Try Reddit Unless You Have a Strategy

Most businesses and agencies treat random Reddit replies or fake, seeded threads as a “strategy.”

Dropping a few posts and tracking links won’t fix your problem or build a pipeline. It won’t show up in SEO. It won’t get cited by AI search.

The best-case scenario is that it will be just a waste of money. A more probable outcome is that it will make your problem worse.

Without a strategy, a better way is to do nothing.

But a smarter strategy is not viewing Reddit as a problem. It is slowly and surely turning it into your competitive advantage.

What do you need to create a Reddit strategy?

• Clear understanding of your product positioning

• Clear understanding of pain points as discussed on Reddit.

This is where I start any Reddit reputation management strategy: What are people complaining about?

To be sure, all pain points should be treated differently:

• There are factual pain points that are simply wrong: Sharing and repackaging raw facts that beat those is the best way (dates, stats, numbers).

• There are “rumors” or outdated misconceptions that keep haunting you. You can keep trying to cry, “THIS IS NOT TRUE” at every corner, but it won’t do any good… Instead, share as many personal stories (in your subreddit) as possible, beating that negative footprint with real-life stories from your customers.

• There are loyal customers who just don’t like any changes. This is common for older brands with a very well-established user base. Whatever new thing you try, they will be unhappy. This crowd is not going anywhere. They love you, and that’s their way to show their love. The best solution here is to make them feel heard and appreciated. These are my favorite negative comments, as these people are very easy to turn into the most loyal, passionate, and ever-loving customers. These could be your driving source of changing sentiment on Reddit.

• There are actual mistakes that need to be acknowledged and apologized for (don’t get defensive or arrogant here! Own your brand’s mistakes and tell Redditors you are committed to learning from those mistakes).

Before doing anything on Reddit, make sure you have a clear, safe, and authentic strategy to deal with all of the above.

Reddit Reputation Strategy: Reactive vs Proactive

Most businesses and agencies build a Reddit strategy around chasing Reddit conversations and replying to angry comments.

Well, it may work elsewhere. On Reddit, this strategy usually results in:

• More negativity (as you make those negative discussions more active by engaging in them)

• No change in sentiment: Your comment is one of dozens or hundreds. It may clarify something, but it won’t influence the overall brand perception (for people or LLMs).

A much more effective way is to own those conversations, and to be the top of the voice.

That means:

• Build your own channel (a subreddit) where these conversations happen

• Address and explain different types of those pain points inside your own subreddit (and make sure they rank and are cited by LLMs)

• Build positive sentiment through sharing factual and relatable content (e.g., expert or customer-driven AMAs, customers’ success stories, stats that reinforce your value proposition, etc.). It doesn’t have to be all about you (rather, it shouldn’t, of course). But you can share relatable stories, trends, and numbers that make your value proposition clear and known.

We have a client who charges more than their competitors (because they are a bigger, more advanced law consultancy), and that’s what Redditors always bring up when discussing them. And here’s how I explained the Reddit strategy to them:

If you have to explain to people why you charge more, you are doing it wrong. Instead, build the authority to a level where there are no questions like that.

And so for them, we focus on expert-driven AMAs, expert news commentary, etc.

It is a different strategy for everyone, but the fundamental principle remains the same: Don’t treat your Reddit reputation management as a band-aid. If you really want to be safe on Reddit, get serious about that and create a long-term strategy!

The beauty of this approach is that, when done right, it won’t just fix your reputation, but it will also become your most effective marketing channel!

Let me know if you need help!

But do we actually know how AI answers are created?

There are many steps there, and we don’t have much insight into most of them.

But first two announcements:

• 👉 JOIN us to discuss this topic LIVE (free, no registration required!)

• 👉 Ask your questions in your week’s AMA on Reddit! This week, the awesome is hosting an AMA on AI, SEO, EEAT and more!

Here’s how AI answers are generated, in a very simplified way:

1️⃣ Training-layer: In many cases, an LLM won’t even go further. It already confidently knows the answer. There are no URLs at this point. Training data doesn’t store links from where it found the answer. If there are citations for these answers, they will be reverse (citing pages that support a pre-written answer)

2️⃣ Retrieval-eligibility: When an LLM decides to search, if your page is found for one of the fan-out queries (which are also largely determined by training data: Which brands it knows to search for, which publications it knows will likely give trusted answers, etc.). Where it is searching is unconfirmed, but mostly Google for now (and likely some partnerships, etc.).

3️⃣ Retrieval-ranking: It finds URLs, now it chooses which ones to “read”. Correct me if I am wrong, but we really don’t have much insight into how it makes a selection.

4️⃣ Extraction: Which content ends up being pulled into the answer? This is where content clarity, structure, etc., likely comes into play.

5️⃣ Citation-slot assignment: So an LLM picked URLs, pulled an answer, etc. Now it chooses what to cite. This is where it gets interesting. It can cite URLs it “read” and pulled answers from (4️⃣), it can cite URLs it never read but retrieved (3️⃣), or it can pull random URLs that never came up in 2-3-4 (from partners, or even hallucinate them). AND YET, this is pretty much all we can see/measure/test. The gap of how URLs got here is huge (see above).

As an industry, we overfocus on and measure 5️⃣, we optimize for 4️⃣, and tend to ignore 1️⃣ (which determines everything).

Let’s put it altogether:

1. Training layer

It is not SEO.

It’s all about building a known brand with a clear value proposition that answers a question or solves a problem in a prompt.

2. Retrieval-eligibility

This step is purely SEO: If your URLs rank well for what an LLM is searching for, it will be found by an LLM.

3. Retrieval-ranking

This is kind of SEO too, even though we really don’t know how LLMs pick which retrieved URL to “read”. It likely depends on:

• Rankings (the closer to the top your URL is ranking, the better the chances are LLMs will visit it to find answers)

• Search snippets (if the search snippet looks very relevant to the question behind the prompt, it will likely be picked for answer extraction). This is where schema may help a lot!!!

4. Extraction

This is kind of SEO too, or Answer Engine Optimization (if you need a new acronym to impress your boss).

5. Citation-slot assignment

This is what SEOs tend to stress about even though there is 0 clarity as to what will ultimately get cited.

Actual URLs that were found and pulled answers from may never get cited.

Google has long been struggling with the definition here. There was helpful content, there were hidden gems, but nothing that would express an idea in a practical way: You need content that is unique enough for it to deserve a click and attention.

Join us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

So what is commodity content, and what is non-commodity content and which one do you mean? (Spoiler: I think you need both)

What is “commodity” content? And what is non-commodity content?

As Google’s AI defines it, a commodity is something basic and raw that can be bought and sold in commerce with two key characteristics:

• Its value is the same no matter who produces it (e.g., one barrel of oil is the same price regardless of who sells it)

• It is never a final product (it is used to produce more complex goods). If we extend this terminology to content, commodity content is something that be easily repackaged in an AI answer.

Well, in other words, it is ~90% of content that is being digitally produced these days (actually likely much more than that with AI generating this type of content within seconds).

It is also what, ironically, LLMs have been training from so far (that’s why they needed Reddit so desperately).

The non-commodity content, as a term, was first introduced by Danny Sullivan (thanks for the slide @Jean-Christophe Chouinard). I am pretty sure Danny actually came up with the term because it sounds like him very much :)

Here are the actual examples:

Running shoe store content:

• ❌Commodity content: “Top 10 Things to Consider When Buying Running Shoes” (Standard advice on sizing, arch support, and cushioning).

• ✅ Non-commodity content: “Why This Customer’s Shoes Collapsed After 400 Miles: A Wear Pattern Analysis” (A deep-dive video analyzing the wear pattern on a customer’s shoes after 400 miles, explaining exactly why their specific gait caused the foam to collapse laterally.)

Real estate business:

• ❌Commodity content: 7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers (General tips on pre-approval, location, and budgeting.)

• ✅ Non-commodity content: Why We Waived the Inspection (And Saved $15k): A Look Inside the Sewer Line (A breakdown of a specific bidding war you won last week: “We offered $15k under list but waived the sewer scope because I personally crawled the line and saw it was PVC, not concrete.”)

Interior design business:

• ❌Commodity content: 2024 Kitchen Trends You Need to See (Photos of green cabinets and brass hardware found on Pinterest.)

• ✅ Non-commodity content: Marble vs. Grape Juice: Why I Refused to Install Stone for a Family of Five (A video explaining why you refused to let a client put marble countertops in a house with three toddlers, showing the stain tests you did with grape juice and turmeric to prove your point.)

Non-commodity content is experience-driven and unique

It cannot be summarized in an answer without giving you prominent credit. That is the biggest part I see here.

Expertise is becoming a commodity. LLMs have expertise.

What they don’t have and never will is experience.

But the thing is, like Gus Pelogia stated, experience can be commoditized too, once it becomes part of training data.

It is a very fine line between providing non-commodity content and making it seen enough for it to become common knowledge…

So what to do?

You become the SOURCE…

It has always been key to building the authority (which drives all other visibility metrics) but it is talked about more these days.

If you are the source of the data or a finding or a trend, your name is much harder to erase from the summary. You are not one of the voices. You are THE voice.

I’ve talked about this a lot: You need to be investing in proprietary research. Your own data is what makes you unique. But it is also not just about building, it is always about doing it right (why would anyone care about your study?) and putting it in front of people who will find it interesting enough to spread,

It is good old content marketing with a new name.

So is “non-commodity content” all I need to publish now?

No

Don’t forget, Google’s guidelines as well as Danny’s presentation are all about SEO (getting you findable in organic search).

The most important SEO strategy out there hasn’t changed at all, “Your site should not exist for SEO only.”

SEO-first approach works until it doesn’t (which usually happens fairly quickly these days).

Your commodity content should exist as long as it helps your users. I am sorry for this commoditized advice (pun intended), but it is still true:

Search engines will like you if your users do. LLMs will like you if your users do.

This is the algorithm we should all optimize for, especially now that LLMs learn and mimic what people do.

Commodity content will help people who are at the beginning of their journey (if you do it right), regardless of how they found it. You need to be helping people at every step of their journey. This hasn’t changed.

So what has changed?

We have a new term to use! As an antonym to “commodity”, “non-commodity content” is something that doesn’t have a universal/flat-rate pricing and cannot be easily repackaged into an AI answer.

But it is not enough. For real impact, your non-commodity content should also make you “top of the voice” in your niche. It will work for organic search and LLM visibility. Otherwise, it may still be commoditized.

If you need help developing an effective content strategy that turns your brand into a destination, ask me how!

There’s not much information LLM platforms would provide us with, so we have to rely on patents and independent studies looking at correlations.

has collected all those available documents, found tactics that are most mentioned everywhere, and put together a list of what seems to move the needle.

I decided to take one step further here and create a bridge between traditional SEO and SEO for AI (GEO) to see how things have really changed.

Join us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

Note that SEO is being perceived differently depending on who you ask. In my interpretation below, I am talking about traditional SEO as I see it. And as someone who has been in SEO for more than 20 years, I think I am totally entitled to define it.

So let’s look at those GEO correlations and see if it is “just SEO” or if we need to start doing something differently.

1. URL accessibility = Is the URL accessible to a search / LLM bot?

100% technical SEO, although it is getting a little harder to navigate with more bots that can still access your page, no matter the directions, and new technology trying to control that.

2. Search rank: High-ranking URLs get cited by LLMs

100 % SEO

Not sure if this needs an explanation.

3. Fan-out rank = How visible a URL is for queries that an AI agent is searching for

90% traditional SEO

LLMs choose different queries to search. But these are still keywords…

4. Preview control = What you allow search engines to show their users

I wish we had more than 100% of SEO here.

The fact that LLMs use search snippets is the most solid proof that they depend on traditional search too much!

I have seen many tests showing that LLMs simply cite a search snippet without actually going to the page itself.

5. Query-answer match: Your page should match both the search query and the AI answer

It is, again, 100% SEO, but the term “semantic relevance” is thrown around so much nowadays that I’ll go ahead and give it 95% SEO in case I am missing something.

6. Intent-format match, e.g., Citing listicles when a user is asking for “best” options

We have been talking about intent optimization for many years in SEO. But I’ll give this a 20% of GEO because I think LLMs are just more straightforward with intent than people.

Human searchers may have no intent when searching. LLMs know what they are doing.

7. Topic cluster ranking: Ranking for multiple related queries increases your chance of getting cited

This is 100% SEO because it goes back to traditional rankings.

I’ll give it 20% of GEO just because LLMs do fan out to related queries a lot more. So you need to capture more than “obvious” queries here than in traditional SEO.

8. Answer near the top: Giving a good answer in the first third of your page will get you cited more

“Above the fold” has always been important in traditional SEO.

But I’ll give this one 45% of GEO because LLMs are lazier, so this has become more important than previously.

9. AI-ready structure, i.e., Ask & answer questions on your page like you are explaining things to a three-year-old

Clarity has been important for SEO, but it looks more important for LLMs.

Not a new tactic, but definitely discussed more due to GEO now.

10. “Factually specific”, i.e., Avoid bold claims, stick to the facts

Same as above: It has been important since the launch of featured snippets. But it seems more important for LLMs.

11. “Explicit phrasing”: Avoid vague statements, stick to an active, confident voice

This has also been part of featured snippet optimization, but not necessarily that much discussed.

12. Cite sources (not necessarily linked)

In SEO, this has always been a debate: whether outbound trusted sources add credibility to your page. Many SEO experts recommended linking out to GOV and EDU sources for EEAT…

The effectiveness of this has never been confirmed by any SEO studies (or officially).

In LLMs, there seems to be a consensus that citing sources helps (and studies to support that). Also, sources don’t have to be links.

13. Self-contained passages (+or sentences)

We have been (kind of) talking about this since Google’s passage-based ranking announcement (around 2020), but we definitely talk a lot more about this now.

14. Content visibility, i.e., No hidden content that is accessible through JavaScript

One of the oldest, most forgotten SEO checks: Is the page fully readable with JavaScript disabled? Google has become incredibly good at rendering JavaScript, and I usually skip recommending anything as long as the page looks good in the URL Preview inside Search Console.

It is now fully back, as AI Agents are believed to skip any sections or page elements hidden by JavaScript.

15. Freshness, and the date on the page

It is hard to measure here, so I’ve put 50%/50%.

In SEO, it depends on the query. In GEO, the “freshness” bias may be fully driven by organic search results.

16. Brand entity and trust

I am a little surprised that this one comes at #16

I think being a known and trusted entity is the most important factor for both SEO and GEO.

But I guess it is extremely hard to measure.

17. Length / word count

The debate has existed as long as SEO itself, so it feels like it has entered the “GEO” sector out of habit.

In GEO, though, LLMs seem to have been proven to be too lazy to read further down the page, so the content length debate makes a bit more sense here.

18. Language

Both search engines and LLMs try to surface pages in your language…

LLMs are easier, though. To find pages in your preferred language in Google, you have to change the language settings. In LLMs, you can simply prompt in a different language for it to switch to that language and foreign URLs.

19. Entity consistency

The biggest difference for GEO so far. You need to be consistently described across (and outside of) all possible channels.

Not sure how that could impact citations, but it is definitely important for the answer inclusion.

20. Structured data (schema)

Rich snippets improve clickability, which improves rankings, which improve LLM visibility.

That, or else, pages with schema just tend to be better optimized overall, so they rank for many other reasons.

These are the best ways to explain any correlation between schema and LLM visibility, as far as I can see.

For the lowest three, I am not sure I have an opinion.

• The URL is already known to the AI engine via its training data (not sure how this can be measured…)

• Domain authority doesn’t correlate with anything these days, so not sure why we still talk about it.

• LLMs.txt would be 100% new for SEO if it worked…

If you are looking for help to figure all of this out, I have a free option to connect and discuss!

These links are called citations, and they may appear in-line within the answer and in a separate panel, often to the right of the answer itself.

Generative Search Optimization (GEO) services often prioritize “citation optimization,” but not many businesses understand how those AI citations work.

Understanding the algorithm behind being cited is key to creating an effective GEO strategy. But first a couple of free and unique SEO+AI education opportunities to join this week:

• Please JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE on Linkedin (and bring your questions!)

• Please ask your questions in this week’s AMA on Reddit hosted by SE Ranking rep Bogdan Krupin!

Here’s what we know about AI citations:

Where do LLMs find citations?

There is no official data answering this question. From exploring overlaps between citation visibility and search rankings, as well as by using independent tests, so far, we know that:

• ChatGPT*, Gemini (and AI Mode), and Grok use Google search

• Claude and Perplexity use Brave search

ChatGPT* also has long-term agreements with top publications which it can cite without searching any external engines.

Maintaining high rankings in both of those search engines increases your site to be cited.

What types of LLM citations are there?

Again, we don’t have any official statements as to how AI citations work but from patents and independent studies, we know about these three types of AI citations:

1. Grounded citations

These are AI citations that influence the answer itself, i.e., LLMs run searches, “read” the content of pages they found, and sync the answer from those pages.

In this case, if found and cited, your content becomes part of an AI answer.

2. Ungrounded (reverse) citations

I refer to these types of citations as “reverse citations” because the process is reversed here: an LLM pulls an answer from its training data (it already “knows” the answer) and then finds URLs that support this answer.

This process likely exists to keep the AI answers more accurate and unbiased.

In this case, citations do not influence the answer content. To be surfaced in an answer, your business needs to be known as a solution to an underlying problem or an answer to a prompt.

We don’t know how many citations are reverse, or how likely each specific LLM is to give answers before searching. The recent NY Times article indicates that half of Gemini citations are ungrounded, but it doesn’t cite the source of that data.

3. Invisible citations

In many cases, URLs are found, retrieved, “read” by an AI agent, and used to create an answer, but they never get cited.

The recent study from Ahrefs indicates that about half of URLs retrieved by ChatGPT remain uncited, but invisible citations can differ based on the source. For example, Reddit threads almost always impact an answer, but very few of them are cited.

4. “Ghost” citations

This is when getting cited didn’t help your brand appear in the answer. This can be due to the “reverse citation” process. This can also happen because your own content that got mentioned didn’t do a good job explaining how your business or your product helps solve the underlying problem, i.e., your brand wasn’t part of your own content context.

According to Kevin Indig, about 60% of citations are “ghost citations”, failing to get the brand included in the answer:

What are the actionable applications?

Knowing how LLM citations work can help you prioritize your GEO strategy better, as well as create content that helps your business’s AI visibility:

Being cited is not a priority

Many GEO strategies focus on the number of “owned” citations for important prompts, i.e., they measure the strategy’s success by how many times your own site is cited. Knowing that citations may not influence an answer or, vice versa, that a URL can be used to create an answer but never cited, helps shift the priority from getting cited to being visible in the answer.

Optimizing for AI citations is still a good idea, but your content strategy should focus on putting your products in context. This way, even if your URL isn’t cited, the answer will still include your product.

Being present in the training data is fundamental

LLMs may or may not search to give an answer. They may search after they have already created an answer, or they may or may not use a page’s content for an answer. Being associated with specific questions in the prompts is the only way to ensure consistent visibility in AI answers.

The training data often defines how LLMs search too. For example, if you prompt ChatGPT, “Best shoes for long-distance traveling”, it will search for specific brands and product names it already knows:

Your GEO strategy should be all about getting cited. It should prioritize building a brand that is known for solving specific problems.

Creating and marketing studies that are driven by your own data is how you do it, if you do it right.

>>> Join us to discuss this topic LIVE on Linkedin!

Cyrus Shepard published a study that identifies 5 common trends among winning websites in Google. One of those winning tactics is publishing unique studies.

As we are creating and marketing data-driven studies for our clients, we also see these consistently become top-cited sources for LLMs:

Data-driven PR campaigns win every race: They do well in Google, they send lots of great links, they get cited by LLMs, they go viral on Reddit, etc.

So, how to market proprietary data?

Find unique angles

You may think you don’t have data that could tell a unique story.

In most cases, you are wrong.

For example, Ramp is a payment processor. Boring? No! They were coming up with great, well-researched articles that are fully driven by their own data!

Use your own data in creative ways!

Don’t publish more than you can promote

This is a common question: How many should I do?

My answer is always the same: Do exactly as many as you can promote properly, because the marketing part is as important as asset creation.

Make sure to:

• Repackage your asset on social media (and then repackage more!)

• Reach out to journalists covering these topics

• If you have a Reddit presence, seed it there. Reddit loves unique studies.

The success (and future organic visibility of your asset) directly correlates with how much effort you put into promoting it.

Buzzsumo has great outreach tools I’ve been using for years.

Prioritize updates over brand new assets

I am a huge advocate of working with what you have already done. I love looking at rankings, citability, backlinks, new data, etc., to see if it is possible to update an asset to give it more life because that usually results in better organic visibility.

When you refresh an old asset, you have an opportunity to work on existing results (improve rankings, re-optimize, focus on what triggered more engagements, etc.) Less work than working on a new asset, better results because you can make more informed decisions!

If you need help brainstorming, let me know! Data-driven PR is what we have been doing for more than 15 years!

SEOs always discover a tactic that works and massively jump into it until it becomes a problem, even for those who are trying to do it right.

Listicles are just one of many examples of this happening, over and over again.

We know they work for LLMs, as the list format is very easy to pull entities from. And the rise of self-serving and commercial listicles has been insane to watch.

Brands were forced into sponsoring their mentions in listicles, and lots of publications were switching to the “Top lists” format to monetise their existence… until Google noticed.

Poorly researched and self-serving listicles are losing organic search visibility now. One of the popular examples is ClickUp, which went aggressive with listicles to lose about 7M in estimated organic traffic over the past 6 months.

This has been well-expected. There has been so much talk about listicles that Google was bound to listen.

The real problem is that shortcuts are not right or wrong as long as you are making a well-informed decision.

Let’s zoom out just a little bit here… I know “GEO” sells, but so far, there are no actual signs that LLMs are driving real, massive visibility.

• Our own study indicates that consumers are not embracing AI as fast as it may seem inside our little tech bubble.

• But ours is not the only study that proves that. Ahrefs tracks online traffic trends and reports that LLM traffic is about 0.26% of the overall inbound traffic digital brands generate.

So why are we so obsessed with LLM optimization?

We are discussing this topic this week. Join us!

• On LinkedIn, we will discuss the topic and answer your question (no registration required! Just come over! Sam Page, an SEO expert and old friend (and the former Global Head of SEO at Amazon Business and Director of SEO at Slack), will co-host the event to share his insights!

• On Reddit, Sam Page is also hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on anything related to SEO and GEO! Ask your questions! This is a great opportunity to

I am not saying you should ignore where AI is going, to be sure…

I am the one talking about SEO for AI all the time. I even started a dedicated subreddit to curate findings and studies around “GEO”.

But let’s all face it: LLM visibility is not something to lose visibility in other channels for. At least not for now.

Even if something seems to work, on a grand scale of things, among all the tactics you can invest in, LLM optimization shortcuts will likely bring you some minimal results, even if successful.

“GEO” visibility is long-term. It is NOT about shortcuts.

It is about building a relevant, clear brand that is associated with what it does (and problems it solves). It is, first of all, building relevant visibility elsewhere where LLMs are pulling from (Google, Reddit, Youtube, maps, etc.)

It is about being known for what you do.

Shortcuts may work for a few months, but they may cost you fundamental visibility, which will be hard to rebuild.

Get real and build something that will sustain any Google reviews or LLM model changes. And if you need help, ask me how.

One topic that the article failed to give more attention to is the so-called “ungrounded” citations that make evaluating AI Overview accuracy challenging.

“Ungrounded citations” are citations that, basically, have nothing to do with the AI answer itself. This is when an AI answers links “to websites that [do] not completely support the information they provide”.

I found it surprising that the whole concept of citing sources that are not, in essence, actual sources didn’t seemingly surprise reporters who are taught to provide trusted sources for their claims.

Before I explain why this concept of ungrounded answers is actually a huge deal for SEO, here are two exciting opportunities for you to join:

• >>> JOIN US to discuss LIVE on LinkedIn and ask your questions (and/or get featured!)

• The one and only Lily Ray is hosting an AMA on Wednesday, and this is your chance to ask her anything you’ve been trying to figure out! Ask away before it expires!

Source: X

Let’s take a deeper dive into this AI phenomenon because it is not discussed enough, while providing a huge insight into LLM visibility (GEO) as a whole:

What are “ungrounded” citations, and why do I call them “reverse” citations?

An ungrounded citation is a link that an LLM finds after the answer is written.

In other words, the process is reversed here. Instead of using additional infor from URLs it finds, an AI bot will first write an answer based on what it knows and then find URLs that seem to support the answer.

Reverse citations are nothing new.

Back when ChatGPT was just launched, it gave no citations whatsoever. And we demanded. So it started providing URLs that had nothing to do with the answer because the process was reversed:

1. It writes an answer from the training data

2. It gives URLs on the topic (seemingly without “reading” those pages).

Since then, LLMs started searching much more. And they seem to sync answers from those URLs in most cases, but the question has always been there:

What comes first? An answer or the citations?

What influences what?

The NY Times article seems to shed some light.

Roughly 50% of Gemini answers are ungrounded

That is, it pulls answers from within its training data. And THEN finds what to cite.

We know (from leaked Claude docs) when LLMs have to search for answers, i.e., when the answer requires more recent knowledge than the training data realistically can have.

In about half of use cases, LLMs are likely to tell you what they already know.

And that is happening for at least two reasons (in my opinion):

• Training data gives more unbiased, more correct answers because citations can be manipulated (we are well aware of that)

• It is less resourceful than syncing answers from new searches.

Aaron Haynes has an excellent prediction here:

…the part that’s going to get worse: Gemini 3 got more accurate AND more ungrounded at the same time. Those aren’t contradictory - they’re happening at different layers. accuracy is improving in training (the model just knows more). Grounding is degrading in retrieval (the model needs sources less, so it cares about citation fidelity less).

And yet, training data doesn’t store URLs that LLMs once learned answers from. So, to provide you with sources, they need to search for citations that seem to support their answers. And at that point, citations don’t influence answers, nor your brand’s visibility in them.

Why do SEOs need to know this?

Quite clearly, this directly influences the optimization strategy.

If you are only optimizing for “retrieval” (which most SEO / GEO experts seem to talk about, you are very, very far behind.

Product positioning and awareness inside training data are fundamental and crucial for AI visibility. It is also a much more difficult process than simply optimizing for retrieval, and it takes a lot of marketing channels to align with your value proposition.

Digital PR, Reddit marketing, on- and off-site content alignment and visibility - everything should be adding clear, consistent context around your brand, for months and years, loudly enough for LLMs to notice.

If you need help with that strategy, reach out!

In reality, SEO expertise is the foundation of GEO for two main reasons:

• Organic search visibility is fundamental to AI visibility because LLMs primarily use search to research a topic and discover brands or products. Without SEO, your URLs will likely be unfindable for LLMs.

• Most traditional SEO tactics are key to LLM discoverability in one way or another.

Here are those SEO tactics that remain fundamental to AI visibility optimization:

>>>> JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE on Linkedin!

Keyword research

The conversational nature of generative AI search prompted many SEO/GEO professionals to announce keyword research as “useless” or “dead”.

I consider these claims fundamentally wrong.

First of all, there’s no replacement to the query data. We don’t have any access to the reliable prompt data. Essentially, we cannot know what users are typing as AI prompts to discover brands or products.

Keyword research is still the only source of insights as to how consumers arrive at certain buying decisions. Keywords can be organized by intent, giving you clues on how to structure your site to help your target customers at every step of their research.

Keyword (content) gaps help you identify what your site may be missing and where it is failing to be helpful to customers.

All of that is as useful for organic visibility as for LLM visibility because LLMs mimic people’s buying journeys and mostly take the same steps when helping their users to choose a product to buy.

There’s no way to optimize for prompts because they are likely to be all different and unpredictable. Keyword optimization is all we need to create content and pages that solve your customers’ problems and cater to their needs.

Content optimization

On-site content SEO hasn’t fundamentally changed due to LLMs. Like 5 years ago, we still need optimized content to:

• Help customers when they are still researching their problems (and may not be ready to buy).

• Put your products in a relevant, problem-solving context.

Optimized content may not generate the same amount of traffic these days that it did 3-5 years ago; yet it doesn’t mean you should stop publishing it and focus on “bottom-of-the-funnel” / high-intent queries that generate sales (this is a popular recommendation many “GEO experts” make).

LLMs can take your content, summarize it, and give it to your customers in the form of a comprehensive answer, so they never have to click to your website. But it will likely still influence your customers’ buying decisions because your brand will end up being part of that content, and LLMs will likely recommend them as a solution.

Nowadays, we optimize for buying journeys, but we still use keyword research to understand those buying journeys, and we keyword-optimize content for both search and LLM bots to be more likely to find it, and “understand” that it is relevant to the users’ needs.

Site architecture and navigation

In traditional SEO, flatter site architecture (which ensures no pages are dug too deep into the site) and better internal linking strategy ensure better crawlability and more long-tail keyword ranking opportunities.

In LLMs, clear site architecture ensures that LLMs understand your business better and place your products correctly in the training data.

In both cases, your site navigation should be:

• Well-structured for customers (or LLM bots) to be able to quickly find what they need

• Usable without JavaScript enabled (for it to be usable regardless of the browser (or absence of one) it is being accessed through)

• Clear and focused to reflect your site’s purpose and value proposition.

Link building

Whether any of the LLMs use any authority signals like backlinks, we don’t know. The only hint of Gemini / AI Mode using PageRanks was almost a year ago. So whether backlinks directly influence LLM citability is unknown.

However, backlinks (specifically, linked or unlinked brand mentions) are important for other aspects of LLM visibility:

• Higher organic rankings, which (again) drive LLM findability

• Entity associations (being mentioned/linked to alongside your well-known competitors)

• Authority: Regular and consistent brand mentions and links on authoritative publications make your business more trustworthy (which helps frequent answer inclusion)

All of these indirect LLM visibility signals are achieved by a high-quality link-building strategy (like data-driven digital PR).

Of course, there’s more to GEO than SEO best practices, at least for one crucial reason: GEO relies on different success metrics than SEO. But without knowing and implementing traditional SEO, your chances of being found by LLMs are almost 0.

Many of our leads and clients look at impressions and clicks, which are both solid metrics you want to see growing.

But if we are talking about Reddit in the context of LLM visibility, we consider the following metrics a success:

• More control over branded organic rankings

• More positive brand mentions (especially on Reddit)

• More organic reviews inside the official subreddit

• LLM citability

>>>> JOIN us to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

Let’s look at each of these in more detail:

More control over branded organic rankings (and more branded searches)

This one is pretty obvious: We cannot control all the sentiment for branded organic search but we do want to balance it with official sources.

Ultimately, we want the subreddit to rank for queries like [brand name], [brand name reviews], and [brand name reddit].

This doesn’t happen overnight and it takes a strategic effort but it does happen. Here is an example of a Reddit pack that includes our client after 5 months of work:

Overall, we want to see:

• More branded searches (growth in impressions and diversity)

• More of the official subreddit ranking for those in top 5

More positive brand mentions on Reddit

We start tracking the brand and competitive mentions right away to better understand gaps in the product positioning and the pain points that are being repeatedly discussed.

As we consistently build our own official narrative, we start seeing the sentiment shifting to neutral and more positive.

You can track the shift through Reddit’s own “Trends” dashboard (especially for bigger brands), and/or you can feed the recent threads into your favorite LLMs and let it analyze what’s changing and what needs to be addressed.

Start tracking your brand name in Reddit’s native dashboard to monitor shifts in brand perspective and product positioning

There will always be negative comments on Reddit (it’s the nature of the community), but balancing them with an authoritative voice and positive reviews works to change the overall context.

More organic reviews inside the official subreddit

Speaking of bad reviews, as I said, they will keep coming, but the goal is for them to start mostly coming into your subreddit, where you can manage them properly (reply, DM, etc. to fix the relationship with the client) as well as balance them with positive ones.

Negative comments coming to your subreddit are A GOOD THING because they will not blow up with more negativity from other users. They will be managed in a timely manner.

We report on the increased customer engagement with the subreddit, and call a growing number of both negative and positive reviews posted there a success.

LLM citability

All of the above progress we focus on contributes to a shift in LLM perception of your brand and the likelihood of your products being included in the AI answer.

The branded subreddit being cited by LLMs is a direct, easy-to-understand metric that clients are always excited about. So we report on those two. We use Peec to track those:

Do you need help building a Reddit marketing strategy focusing on the right metrics? Let’s hop on a quick free call.

[And yep, most businesses and marketers approach this WRONG!]

Let’s get to the bottom of this:

>>>> JOIN US to discuss this topic LIVE! Bring your questions! [No registration required]

+++ Also, check out us discussing Reddit marketing in the recent podcast episode

1. First and Foremost: HOW exactly ChatGPT (and other LLMs) uses Reddit to answer prompts

In fact, there are two ways, working independently here:

1.1. Reddit is part of training data.

We all know that OpenAI partners with Reddit on this. Two VERY important things to remember here:

1. Training data doesn’t store URLs! Whatever LLMs learned from Reddit and store for training is not linked (and consequently not cited). What you see cited in AI answers is NOT necessarily what LLMs were trained from.

2. Training data may take months to get updated (for ChatGPT, usually it updates with each new model launch which doesn’t happen that often!). If you spammed marketed on Reddit for the past two weeks, it is not going to be part of the training data too soon.

1.2. Grounding (AI bots searching, finding threads, analyzing them, syncing them in the answer, citing them)

The more visible the threads are in organic search (mostly Google), the higher the chances that they will be cited and/or influence the answer.

Let’s not forget that higher-ranking threads are often 3-5 years old, archived, and impossible to answer.

Another interesting (and VERY important) note here is that ChatGPT routinely uses the SITE:reddit.com operator to dig deeper into the brand sentiment on the platform.

Why do we need to clearly understand all of this?

Based on the above:

• It takes a lot of time for Reddit to start influencing the training data (which is fundamental to AI answers and product positioning)

• Organic visibility of Reddit threads is key to those threads being cited

• (Spam) comments here and there won’t influence your visibility. It’s about consistent, strong voice that can move the needle.

In other words, it takes a more strategic, more holistic approach for Reddit marketing to make any impact on LLM findability.

Is Reddit enough for AI Visibility?

This is my favorite question and the answer is a big NO!!!

Reddit is not used for “discovery”. Which brands make ito the answer is determined by:

• Organic visibility

• Brand awareness (through strategic PR)

• Clear product positioning

• Co-occurrence with other relevant solutions

Reddit is mostly used at the claim verification stage, meaning that ChatGPT wants to make sure all the found options are worthy and trusted enough.

In other words, if you didn’t make it to the list at the discovery stage, your Reddit presence is not going to help!

On the other hand,

If your brand was discovered by Reddit, but you have a suspicious footprint there, you won’t be recommended either

This is the bottom of the LLM-driven funnel. You built a visible brand, but you won’t get recommended until you earn trust. Reddit is one place (of many) to determine your ultimate visibility at this point.

You need:

• High-quality authority-driven presence on Reddit

• Consistent, highly-focused, highly-relevant context for your brand (best achieved through your own subreddit)

• Engaged community / your loyal customers (that will eventually help fix and balance negativity and share authentic product recommendations).

LLMs are getting increasingly good at claiming loud claims and identifying fake reviews. If you want Reddit to help your brand get recommended, you need to do it right. Otherwise, it is a waste of money, which can also ruin your reputation.

If you need help creating an effective, long-term Reddit marketing strategy, get in touch!