If Reddit Was Your SEO Strategy, You Haven't Got One, FFS!

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Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations went from around 4% to around

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half a percent in about a week.

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Nobody can fully explain it, and if that was your strategy,

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you haven't got one anymore.

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This is SEO Fucking What.

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I'm Nikki, 30 years in SEO, and I help small businesses make money from their

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websites by actually getting found.

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Today, I'm gonna talk about what happens when you build on ground you

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don't own and why I've watched it happen five or six times now, and

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also what you should be doing instead.

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Between the 18th of July and the 7th of August, Reddit accounted for 3.83%

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of all ChatGPT search citations.

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That's pretty big for one website.

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Nearly 4 out of every 100 sources ChatGPT pointed at were Reddit threads.

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But something happened between the 14th and the 17th of August, because that

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number dropped to 0.52%, which works out as an 86% drop in a fortnight.

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And it fell in two goes, which is kinda worth understanding.

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The first drop was on the 8th of August, and that one lines up with

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ChatGPT changing how often it queries certain sites in the background.

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So we kind of have half an explanation there.

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But then it dropped again a few days later, and the second one,

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nobody really knows what's going on.

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So the people that measure this professionally don't know, Reddit

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don't seem to know, and I'm telling you for sure, the bloke who sold

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you a Reddit visibility package back in March really doesn't know.

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And you have to understand that there was real money riding on that number.

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Reddit's been in the top three most visible sites in Google for over a year.

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It's been making up a huge chunk of the social media citations in Google's AI

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Overviews, and its share of AI citations has been climbing hard all year.

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Google signed a content licensing deal with Reddit in 2024, and has

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been indexing it harder than any other user-generated site on the internet.

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And Reddit blocked Bing and DuckDuckGo from its recent content, which made Google

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the only way to find Reddit content.

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So the industry looked at all that and decided that Reddit was a channel.

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So agencies built packages.

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People bought aged accounts with existing karma, because new

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accounts get spotted and binned.

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And then a number moved for reasons that nobody outside OpenAI can see,

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and all of it's evaporated. And this isn't really just a Reddit story.

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Bear with me.

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Mark Williams-Cook from Candour, who built AlsoAsked, posted about this and said

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two things I've been saying for years.

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So I'm gonna give him the floor for a minute because when someone

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else who knows what they're talking about lands on the same conclusion

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independently, that's worth more than me shouting about it again on my own.

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Mark said, "First of all, stop building your strategy around holes

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in the system." He's watched company after company run aggressive Reddit

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strategies with the stated goal of manipulating what AI says about them.

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And the justification for it, which is kind of funny when you have a

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think about it, is that Reddit is where the real conversations happen.

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So people are manipulating the authentic place on the grounds that

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it's authentic. Go and find your audience and talk to them honestly.

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Absolutely.

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Pay an agency to use AI to seed questions and fake answers about your own brand.

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No.

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And secondly, and this is one I've been banging on about since

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before most of these agencies existed, it works until it doesn't.

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Which is my actual point, and it's got very little to do with Reddit.

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The thing that wiped those people out wasn't Reddit.

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It was that they built on ground they don't own, in a game where

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they don't get a vote, where nobody has to tell them the rules changed.

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And I know exactly how this goes because I watched it happen

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over and over and over again.

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Article directories in the early 2000s.

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This was the whole industry.

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You wrote a 500-word article, you pushed it out to EzineArticles

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and the rest of them.

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You got a link back, you ranked.

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Entire businesses were built on it.

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People had software to spin thousands of versions.

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There were agencies whose only product was article submission.

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And then Panda landed,

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and Google took the lot out in one go overnight.

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People I know had thousands of articles on those sites, and every

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single one stopped being worth anything on a Tuesday afternoon.

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Some of them never came back.

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And then there was guest posting.

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Same story, different decade.

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By about 2010, everyone had decided guest posting was the sustainable white

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hat future-proof way to build links.

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Agencies sold guest post packages by the fucking dozen.

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People built their whole client offering on it.

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And then in 2014, Matt Cutts wrote one blog post called The Decay and Fall of

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Guest Blogging for SEO, and that was that.

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It all closed down.

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Everything ended.

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It no longer worked.

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We then looked at Facebook organic reach.

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Around, I don't know, 2012, every small business in the country was being

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told to build a Facebook audience.

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Some of them spent real money buying likes.

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"Get to 10,000 fans," they were told, "and you've got a free distribution channel

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forever." But you know what happened.

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Reach went from somewhere around 15% of your own followers down

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and down and down until it was basically zero unless you paid.

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Those businesses hadn't bought an audience, they'd rented

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one, and the rent went up.

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And I could keep going.

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Google Plus, where for about three years you were told authorship markup and a

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Google Plus presence were compulsory, and people even had it in their job titles

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right up until Google dropped the whole thing and eventually switched it off.

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Same thing with Twitter as a professional network, right up until it wasn't, because

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every single time it's the same pattern.

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The people who went all in got hurt worst.

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And every single time anyone who said, "Hang on a minute. Should we

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really put everything here?" got told they were behind the curve and didn't

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understand where these things were going.

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It worked until it didn't, every single fucking time.

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And that's the bit that nobody selling Reddit packages this year can tell you

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because most of them weren't there.

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I've said the same thing to clients for the best part of 25, 30 years,

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and I'll say it again now because it has never once been wrong.

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So here's the version of this that applies to you, and you're not gonna love it.

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Your website is the only bit of your marketing that you own.

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Your email list is the only audience you own, and that's it.

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Everything else is rented.

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Your LinkedIn reach is rented.

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Your Reddit account is rented.

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Your Google Business Profile is rented, and ask anyone who's had one

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suspended how the appeals process went.

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Your AI visibility score, whatever tool you're paying for that, is a measurement

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of something you have no control over whatsoever, and the landlord does not have

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to tell you before changing the locks.

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There's no notice period.

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There's no contract.

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There's no account manager.

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All you've got is a username.

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Back in episode two, I went on about who actually owns your Google accounts

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because loads of you don't own your own analytics or your own search console.

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This is the same problem one floor up.

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If the platform vanished tonight, what have you still got on Monday morning?

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For most people, honestly, they've got the website and whatever

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email addresses they've collected.

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Nobody has ever bought a business for its Reddit karma.

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And I wanna be fair here — this could easily turn into me telling you to delete

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everything and live in a fucking cave.

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Renting is fine.

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Renting is normal.

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I post on LinkedIn constantly.

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I'm on there most days.

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Half the people listening to this podcast found me on LinkedIn.

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The problem isn't using a platform you don't own, the problem is when the

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rented thing is the entire strategy and there's nothing underneath it,

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and that's what the Reddit crowd got wrong, and it's a very specific mistake.

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They didn't diversify, they substituted.

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They stopped writing on their own site because Reddit was working.

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They stopped building the email list because the citations were coming.

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They took the thing they owned and swapped it for the thing they were

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borrowing because the borrowed one had a better graph that quarter.

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Look, use LinkedIn, use Reddit, use whatever's working.

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Just make sure the thing you own is underneath it holding it up, and

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make sure everything you learn out there ends up written down somewhere

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no one can take it away from you.

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And there is one thing that Reddit is really brilliant for.

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It's free, almost none of you are using it, and it works whether or not

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ChatGPT is citing a single thread.

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That's coming up next.

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So three things I want you to do this week.

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Number one, audit what you'd have left.

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Take your last 20 enquiries and write down where each one came from.

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Then mark which sources you own and which you're renting.

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If more than about a third of your business depends on a platform

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where you've got no contract, no human to ring, that's your risk.

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It's not a reason to panic.

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It's a reason to spend the next quarter building the owned site up.

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Number two, use Reddit as a keyword research tool instead

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of as a broadcast channel.

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This is the good bit, and it's the bit that survives any algorithm

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change 'cause it's just listening.

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Go to Google and search site:reddit.com, and then the problem your customers have.

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Not your service name, the problem.

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In the words a really pissed off person would use searching late at

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night when they've had a couple of beers and they just want an answer.

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And then read the phrasing that shows up in the results.

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Because how people describe a problem to strangers is exactly how they

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type it into a search box, and I can almost guarantee it's not how

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you've written it on your website.

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You're selling bespoke integrated solutions.

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They're typing, "Why won't our stock system talk to our accounts software?"

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Write the phrases down that people are using.

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That's your content plan.

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It's free, handed to you on a plate.

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Number three, answer one of those questions properly on your own site.

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Find the question that comes up again and again in your field.

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Answer it in full on your website with your name on it.

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Now you own it.

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It can rank, it can get cited, it can get emailed to a prospect,

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and if every platform on Earth falls over tomorrow, it's still

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sat on your domain doing its job.

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Lily Ray said something about this that I keep coming back to.

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She said, "Watch all of this return Reddit back to what it was

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supposed to be in the first place." And that's it really, isn't it?

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Reddit was never supposed to be a distribution channel.

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It's a place where people gather to talk honestly to each other about

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things that are annoying them.

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That's why it became valuable.

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And then an industry turned up to optimise it, and it started being worth nothing.

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Reddit didn't change.

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We decided it was something it never was, and then we got upset

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when it went back to normal.

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If this was useful, make sure you're following SEO Fucking What in whichever

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app you're listening to right now.

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And the Non-Wanky SEO Onpage Toolkit is now completely free.

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It takes you through fixing the pages on your own website, which is exactly

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what this episode has spent however minutes long telling you to do.

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Go and find it at nonwankyseo.com.

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Until next time, get found, make money, and never build your

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castle on someone else's sand.