UGC sites (including Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.) are being cited less often by the newer ChatGPT model. What gives?
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!