I blame clickbaity headlines that dominate our industry. They contribute to the unbearable noise.

We need to get better than this.

Reports: ChatGPT stopped citing user-generated sites in its new edition. Meanwhile, the headlines: “ChatGPT dropped Reddit from its citations!!!”

Look, before we get any further, let’s have a quick look at ChatGPT visibility (traffic) for the past few months…

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For the fun of it, let’s take a look at how ChatGPT “SEO” has been doing so far

Looking at ChatGPT referral traffic data is as much fun as being an SEO strategist these days.

You can see how different models immediately change the traffic patterns without businesses necessarily doing anything to impact that.

Talk about GEO playbooks 🤌

Those ups and downs you see in the graph are - guess what - ChatGPT launching new models that generate answers differently.

How are you supposed to strategize around these whims?

Now back to Reddit: If you are doing anything *just* for GEO, you are wasting your money

It also means that you were doing it painfully wrong and were doomed to fail.

That, by the way, applies to overall SEO too, not just to GEO. (Next time, I am going to talk about Google’s concept of “content and effort”, which most agencies chose to ignore)

I cannot imagine a long-term marketing strategy that follows visibility whims like that.

If you are committed to building *REAL* Reddit presence that will drive brand visibility, trust, conversions, etc., THEN go for it. Because if you do it right, you will not only build an additional conversion and visibility channel, but it will BY ALL MEANS improve your AI visibility.

I’ve rejected ALL the leads that were looking for quick mentions in Reddit comments or seeded threads, because I never believed in that tactic. What’s the point in faking it if it will stop working tomorrow?

Instead, for our clients, we build brand-owned channels that are strong enough to:

• Host expert AMAs (which reengage past leads and get new ones from the Reddit community)

• Build brand trust, authority, and loyalty

• Announce exclusive Reddit deals (which convert like crazy!)

• Manage relationships and turn angry, unhappy customers into happy ones (who are even ready to go and spread a good word and/or delete older angry threads)

• Foster word-of-mouth marketing outside of your subreddit

This takes time, but having an organic channel like this is priceless.

One of our client’s less-than-a-year-old subreddit drove $80,000 from just one official thread announcing a Reddit exclusive deal:

In all honesty, this doesn’t have to be necessarily Reddit. You can, for example, do the same on YouTube, or another channel. Reddit just happens to be more visible outside of the platform itself…

Let’s talk about Reddit’s visibility and influence on other channels

Smarty.Marketing team has been doing Reddit marketing since about 2013 (give or take), LONG before it became known as a weird shortcut to GEO. In those years, whether Reddit ranked or not, it continued to be the most powerful visibility channel, if you had the brains to do that right.

Reddit has been influencing the bottom of the funnel for most businesses for YEARS (people searching “product name reddit”): These queries have been dominating branded search since at least 2018, which is when I spoke on that at conferences).

Consumers are actively searching for Reddit. It’s not like it ranks because Google decided so. Google followed the consumer demand!

THAT IS WHY Reddit is all over AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, etc. etc. (and likely it’s STILL part of the constantly updated training data for ChatGPT and all others)

It is because people need it; this is not artificial visibility.

So if your customers are asking Reddit opinions about your product, chances are your audience is there, and the only way to reach them is to be on Reddit, creating your own community for them.

If you are there to throw a few (or many) promotional and/or fake comments about yourself, you won’t achieve any, especially long-term, positive results. (You’ll likely ruin your trust and reputation instead).

And if you are visible on Reddit, you will be visible in LLMs. Because visibility drives visibility.

Repeat after me: Any tactic is only worth investing in ONLY if it builds up several channels, never just one…

The point is: If you were only looking at Reddit JUST for SEO or GEO, your strategy was already doomed and a waste of budgets… It is for everyone’s good that you are now changing your mind.

If you want to be on Reddit because your target customers are there, and you need to turn that channel into a long-term visibility hub and your Reddit community home, THEN reach out!

Some of the common questions that I see every day:

• Do backlinks still help for organic search rankings?

• Do backlinks increase your LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, AI Mode, etc.) visibility?

• What to do if I am penalized for spammy link building tactics?

The short answers are:

Do backlinks still help for organic search rankings?

YES!

Do backlinks increase your LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, AI Mode, etc.) visibility?

YES!

What to do if I think I was penalized for spammy link building tactics?

If you are not sure, you likely were not… But you may need to improve your link building strategy…

But let’s try to figure this all out in more detail and add some context…

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Do backlinks still matter?

This question has been floating around for years now, but those who do actual SEO work and track visibility have always known the answer: Yes. Because we see this in practice.

But there’s a very recent confirmation that got a lot of attention.

Someone asked on Reddit if incorrect disavowing links can cause a sitewise penalty… And in the midst of everyone in the thread hating on the Disavow tool* and saying it is outdated, Google’s John Mueller joined in to say that the Disavow tool is still useful.

* Note: The Disavow tool allows website owners to instruct Google to ignore listed backlinks pointing to their websites.

If we try to cut through all the noise that this statement caused, here are some important takeaways:

• This means backlinks matter a lot (otherwise, why would the Disavow tool still exist?)

• This also means that the backlinks don’t just “matter”; they are still important AND often complicated enough for Google not to be able to figure them out algorithmically: there is still a tool that allows website owners to point Google to backlinks they don’t want to count for rankings.

So the answer is a confident yes here.

Will backlinks matter in the future?

Yes, but let’s talk more about this, as most marketing teams and business owners don’t like this answer.

A few decades of SEO spoiled us: We were trained to look at backlinks in terms of numbers: PR (and then DR or DA), as well as how many we got.

These days, it is about true visibility.

If backlinks drive relevant visibility in trustworthy publications, they matter, regardless of your goal: whether it is SEO, GEO, or wherever your goal is.

The thing is, Google, as well as any LLM out there (like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude), is looking for trust signals, and the best trust signals out there are:

• Citability signals (such as backlinks from trusted publications or relevant brand mentions)

• Organic search visibility (which is driven by the above).

For decades, humanity hasn’t come up with better trust signals than citability and mentions.

The thing is, if you are not mentioned anywhere outside of your own website, your business may not be trusted. The more you get cited and mentioned, the more you are trusted, and hence the higher your visibility in both organic search and AI answers.

It is that simple. I am not sure why this causes so much confusion or debate.

What if I Think My Website Lost Rankings Over Spammy Backlinks?

Let’s talk about penalties now because there’s still a lot of confusion here.

This confusion came from old link-related updates, called Penguin. Those were a series of officially announced updates when Google penalized websites algorithmically if a spammy link-building pattern was identified.

In 2016, Google announced that the Penguin update became part of the core algorithm. An important part of that announcement:

Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

This means that:

• Spammy links will not impact your whole site. Low-quality link building tactics can still impact certain pages, but the filters no longer act as penalties. Poor-quality links may be devalued, so your page may be losing rankings because a previously effective link no longer sends any authority signals. (This, unless you got a manual link-related penalty.)

• There may be no updates associated with a change in rankings. These changes may happen at any time, with no warning.

Instead of Thinking “Recovery”, Think “How to Do Things Right Going Forward?”

In other words, unless you got a manual penalty claiming your links are spammy, there’s nothing to recover from. If you are losing ranking, it may be just because you were wasting your money on questionable link-building tactics, and those backlinks just lost their link equity. And it is likely a sign to start investing in something real and long-term instead.

So the recovery route is not about fixing what you may have done in the past. It is about changing your current SEO and link-building tactics to provide higher quality.

If you need help diagnosing your traffic loss, creating a GEO-/SEO-friendly link-building strategy, or improving your visibility, reach out!

With AI platforms, the problem has become worse because AI agents will often search Google to find answers for their users.

The first step in solving this issue was Google canceling support for the num=100 parameter, which caused some analytics and reporting problems in the SEO industry.

Now, Google has introduced a new update trying to combat bot traffic: It hid the destination URLs from search results.

Google has been testing replacing direct URLs in search results with google.com/goto? redirects for a few weeks.

It is now officially confirmed that Google has rolled this update out within a month for most users.

You can only see the redirects when logged out of Google:

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

As this change is gradually going live for everyone, here’s what you will likely be seeing:

Your daily rank tracker may be showing weird results

It is a hard switch for rank-tracking platforms because the ranking URLs cannot be retrieved without clicking the links.

It may take some time for your ranking reports to start reflecting your actual rankings. Both Moz and Ahrefs are claiming to have solved the problem because they saw it coming (from earlier tests Google was noticed to do) and were able to adjust.

Semrush seems to be adjusting pretty well too. At the beginning of August, Semrush started reporting /goto links as ranking URLs but the numbers have declined recently. Presumably, this is a sign that Semrush has found a way to retrieve the actual URLs:

There are also free browser-based solutions already that fix redirects to point to direct URLs, so it is definitely doable at this point (but Google will persist, for sure).

If your rank tracker fails to adjust, you may notice your rankings disappear which may not actually be the case.

Your Search Console “Performance” section will likely be impacted

It is unclear how Search Console data may be affected yet. Even if all major rank trackers promptly figure out reporting, the data may still be skewed if AI agents change their searching behavior. Here are two possible trends we may start seeing:

• Fewer impressions without clicks being impacted (from AI agents giving up on using Google because the URLs are harder to retrieve)

• More clicks (Instead of giving up on searching Google - which is not easy to do because Google does provide the highest-quality results and is used by most people - AI agents may be compelled to click more URLs instead of just citing them without reading).

In either case, if you notice your numbers start changing, don’t panic just yet.

So far it looks like many AI platforms are still searching Google and just citing the /goto URL (which I expect to change soon). So you may also start noticing your citation numbers going down as well.

What’s the future of SEO data?

This is one question that bothers everyone now. After Google lost the DMCA case to a well-known search scraper, SerpAPI (which is also used by ChatGPT to access Google’s search results), Google seems to be even more serious about blocking its results to bots. This will likely cause ongoing issues for SEO analysis and reporting.

Since then, “About” pages have become one of the most common checks in SEO audits.

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini often check official About pages to verify whether a brand is worth recommending. In my GEO audits, I always see a business “About” page as one of the most cited pages for target prompts.

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So when creating your About page, keep the SEO and GEO/AEO aspects of it in mind:

A clear value proposition statement

Start the page explaining what you do, in a very clear, non-promotional way.

This statement should be consistent with what you say about your business everywhere else (in your business social media profile bios, directory listings, etc.)

LLMs may ignore bold, marketing statements (“We are the best in XX”) but will likely pick up on factual, number-based messages (e.g., “trusted by XXX consumers for since XXXX”).

Credibility signals

When landing on your About page, both people and AI agents are likely to be already aware of your brand, so they are looking for verification, rather than business details. In other words, you need to prove that your business is trusted.

Any verifiable claims should be prioritized here:

• Years in business

• Partnerships with known entities/brand

• Certifications

• Security verifications

• Notable clients

• Recognitions from known organizations

• Industry awards

• Mentions in authoritative publications (names and links, not just logos)

• Testimonials from verifiable people

Be as factual and specific as possible: Add links to known entities, years your business was awarded, link to customer profiles on social media, etc.

Use cases

Your “About” page should clearly list which problems it is solving and for who. This will make it clear to LLMs which prompts your business is a good candidate for listing.

One of the best ways to create this problem-solving content in a meaningful way is to list summaries of your business use cases that would list a persona and a problem they were trying to solve (and how your product helped).

You can link to more details of each use case, but it is beneficial to list the key details on the About page.

Consistent terminology

One of the biggest AI optimization mistakes out there is inconsistent, and often vague messaging.

Update your About page and all your public business listings with specific, clear, and consistent messaging.

Schema

There’s no confident proof or confirmation on whether AI agents pay any attention to website schema usage. Yet, “Organization” schema is officially recommended by Google, so it remains a consistent SEO recommendation.

How detailed the schema should be is also a matter of a lot of debate. I recommend playing it on the side of clarity rather than too much detail. Note:

• Your business name (as noted in the official documentation)

• Your alternative business name (based on how searchers may refer to your business when searching)

• Your address and contact details

• Your logo

• Your foundation date

• Your founder’s name (here you can embed the Person schema for more details)

• Your sameAs properties (links to official social media profiles)

Overall, when working on your business About page, prioritize clarity, factual details, and establishing connections with trusted known entities.

Get in touch if you need help with optimizing your About page!

This question has been one of the biggest ones in the SEO industry for a few years now, because we are taught to live in the “keyword-based” world.

The answer came from Google, albeit an unofficial one.

A few days ago, John Mueller confirmed that Search Console recorded AI Mode prompts as queries.

So now we have an official confirmation that some of Search Console’s Performance section could give us a glimpse into real people’s prompting.

>>>>> Please join us to discuss this topic and bring your questions!

So let me share how to pull that prompt data from Google and how to use it (I’d welcome some more ideas here):

How to find real prompts in Google’s Search Console

1. Search Console query filters

Prompts are likely to be longer, so you can easily find those by using a regex:

([^” “]*\s){10,}?

There’s another regex shared by Jean-Christophe Chouinard on Linkedin that filters likely “follow-up” queries, like “yes”, “please”, etc..

Note: For high-traffic properties, you will only be able to see queries that send at least some clicks. Since AI Mode might be sending none, you will miss those unless you access the SC data through the API.

Which brings us to a free API-based solution:

2. A Google Spreadsheet extension

I’ve been using this Google Spreadsheet extension for many years, and it turns out to be useful for this task as well. All you need:

• Install and authenticate it

• Choose the website you want to run the report

• Group by query and use the regex above

From there, you can pull 25,000 queries that use the built-in Gemini capabilities to analyze and group the data:

3. A free tool

This may be a vibe-coded tool, but it is a very useful one! It is free; it pulls data from your Search Console (so it does need access to your account), but it does some useful things:

• Pull likely queries that are AI Mode prompts

• It categorizes prompts by topics and intent

• It shows impressions for each prompt

• It blocks “likely bot” prompts

You can export everything into a spreadsheet for further analysis:

Use it on your own discretion as it does access your SC data through its API.

Prompt impressions: How to find *real, human* prompts

The major question I had: “Why do some of these prompts have such insane impression numbers? How many types can the same prompts be logically used by different people?”

Well, these are likely to be prompt tracking software running these prompts in the AI Mode. So these may not be actual human prompts. Instead, these are what marketers *think* the prompts may be. This is still a good insight into what your possible competitors are focusing on.

If you really want to know what people type as a prompt to an LLM, keep an eye on 1- or 0-impression queries.

Bing’s AI query report vs Google’s query report

Another popular confusion: Bing AI section already reports on AI prompts.

No, it does not.

Bing Webmaster Tools gives you the grounding query report, i.e., what its LLM (Copilot) searches when a human being asks a question. There’s no report on what people are actually prompting.

While this is still quite a useful report, it gives no insight into real human interactions with an AI platform.

What to do with the prompt data

The answer to this question is going to keep evolving because this is the new data we are dealing with.

From my personal perspective, so far:

• Use AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) to categorize and understand the prompt trends

• Better optimize the ranking URLs to address those questions

• Refine your prompt tracking strategy (chances are, you have some essential prompts missing), but don’t try to track each and every one of those prompts.

If you need help with brainstorming and analysis, let me know!

»» JOIN ME to discuss this topic LIVE and bring your questions!

There’s no single, well-defined playbook as to which steps they should take to get surfaced by LLMs. Instead, there’s an incredible amount of noise in the industry as agencies are trying to sell single tactics that are proclaimed to be efficient: Reddit, Listicles, organic rankings… Each of these is often advertised as your best way to get into AI answers.

While all those tactics are helpful (when done right), individually, none of them will drive long-term visibility across a wide variety of prompts and all LLM platforms.

LLM visibility cannot be quikcly/easily built or scaled, and that might be your strongest competitive advantage by the way. In the world where everyone is trying to fake it, there’s a clear benefit of building something real.

There’s no one single tactic to elevate your brand’s presence in AI answers because there are two important components working here (driving one another):

• Your brand needs to be “known” by LLMs in a clear way (what you do and how you are different from direct competitors)

• Your brand needs to be consistently present across several URLs AI agents find and use to create an answer when searching.

This notion of a business clearly positioned around the web is referred to as “LLM consensus”, and there’s no one tactic to achieve it.

Ensure consistent messaging about your business everywhere

The first step to LLM visibility is ensuring that all the pages that rank for your brand name or variations consistently and clearly describe your business and its value proposition in the same way, to avoid confusion. This “LLM consensus audit” should be as extensive as possible, because AI agents search further than top 10 ranking URLs:

• Your website: On-site “About” pages are usually very outdated and weak

• Official profiles across social media platforms

• Your local reviews (Trustpilot, BBB, Google Maps, Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc.)

• Niche directory listings

• Any other pages mentioning your business

The essential details that should remain consistent from URL to URL include:

• Date and year when the business was founded

• Current address

• Consistent description of the business and the key identifying factors (that make your business different from direct competitors).

• Partnerships, collaborations, sponsorships (with other brands/entities)

• Awards, achievements, and milestones

Some examples of business details that can make your business stand out (and get surfaced more often):

• Manufactured in [America]

• Family-owned

• Locally farmed

• XX+ years in business

• Awarded in [year] as “XX”, etc.

If you keep repeating these unique identifying factors across the web consistently, they will ultimately become part of the LLM training data and help your business get included in more relevant answers.

Identify “gaps” in visibility

The next step is identifying the most influential domains and URLs where your business lacks visibility (and where your competitors are included). For bigger businesses that try to be visible across a wide variety of prompts, tools like Peec.AI and Amadora.AI can be useful. For smaller businesses that care about 3-10 prompts, manual prompting and analysis are also doable.

For your target prompts, take notes for:

• Most cited domains (in many cases, those could be Reddit, YouTube, etc.) and create a long-term visibility strategy around those.

• Most cited URLs. Those are likely to be listicles on well-established domains. If several of your competitors are listed but your business consistently fails to be included in those, create a plan on how yours can be included as well. Usually, this involves a well-crafted outreach or a relationship-building strategy with journalists/bloggers and editors of the publication.

Each of these steps can take many months. But there’s no easier plan to get consistently surfaced in AI answers. It is neither easy nor fast.

So stay away from marketing agencies that advertise easy and quick solutions because those usually involve short-term visibility or manipulations that can cost your business long-term visibility.

Don’t forget to monitor AI visibility progress using some measurable KPIs and clear metrics.

And feel free to have a quick free chat if you need help!

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.

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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!

Check out what Ann Smarty’s digital PR agency do to build links.

How to regain search and AI visibility?

Here is what you need to start doing:

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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:

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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.