Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations went from nearly 4% to half a percent in about a week. Nobody can fully explain it — not the people who measure it, not Reddit, and definitely not the bloke who sold you a Reddit visibility package back in March. And if that was your strategy, you haven't got one anymore.

Hi, I'm Nikki Pilkington. My site is https://nikki-pilkington.com/ and in this episode of "SEO F**king What", I'm talking about what happens when you build your marketing on ground you don't own — because I've watched this exact film five or six times now, and it ends the same way every single time.

This isn't really a Reddit story. It's an article directories story, a guest posting story, a Facebook reach story, a Google Plus story. It works until it doesn't, every single fucking time.

Here's what I'm covering:

— What actually happened to Reddit's ChatGPT citations between the 8th and 17th of August, and why nobody — including the people who measure this professionally — can fully explain it — How the industry decided Reddit was "a channel", and what happened to the agencies selling packages and the people buying aged accounts

— Mark Williams-Cook's two rules, which I've been banging on about for years: stop building your strategy around holes in the system, and it works until it doesn't

— The graveyard tour: article directories and Panda, guest posting and one Matt Cutts blog post, Facebook reach going from 15% to basically zero, and Google Plus in people's actual job titles

— The only two things you own — your website and your email list — and why everything else, including your AI visibility score, is rented from a landlord who doesn't have to tell you before changing the locks

— The very specific mistake the Reddit crowd made: they didn't diversify, they substituted

— The one thing Reddit is genuinely brilliant for, which is free, which almost nobody uses, and which works whether or not ChatGPT ever cites a single thread

I also give you a proper piece of homework. Not the "might do that one day" kind. The actual do-it-this-week kind — including the site:reddit.com trick that hands you your next content plan on a plate.

If you know someone who went all in on Reddit for AI visibility, or who's building their entire business on one rented platform, send them this. It might save them from a very bad Monday morning.

Get found. Make money. Stop stressing. And never build your castle on someone else's sand.

Chapters:

00:00 — If that was your strategy, you haven't got one

00:41 — An 86% drop in a fortnight

02:48 — Stop building around holes in the system

04:24 — I've watched this film five times: the graveyard tour

07:20 — What you own, and what you're renting

10:07 — Three things to do this week

11:54 — What Reddit was supposed to be

Links mentioned:

Non-Wanky SEO Courses — the On-Page SEO Toolkit is now completely free: https://nonwankyseo.com

The data on the Reddit citation drop (Promptwatch, via Search Engine Land): https://searchengineland.com/reddit-chatgpt-search-citations-fall-report-485473

Mark Williams-Cook on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markseo/

Also Asked — Mark's tool, and a brilliant one: https://alsoasked.com/?via=nikki-pilkington (aff link)

Episode 2 — who actually owns your Google accounts (same problem, one floor down)

https://seofuckingwhatpodcast.co.uk/episode/your-seo-sht-who-actually-owns-it

Follow Nikki:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkipilkington/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikkipilkington/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nikkipilkington.bsky.social

Mentioned in this episode:

ICN Network

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

half a percent in about a week.

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

you haven't got one anymore.

This is SEO Fucking What.

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

websites by actually getting found.

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

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

also what you should be doing instead.

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

of all ChatGPT search citations.

That's pretty big for one website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we kind of have half an explanation there.

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

nobody really knows what's going on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the only way to find Reddit content.

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

So agencies built packages.

People bought aged accounts with existing karma, because new

accounts get spotted and binned.

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

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

Bear with me.

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

two things I've been saying for years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So people are manipulating the authentic place on the grounds that

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

Absolutely.

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

over and over and over again.

Article directories in the early 2000s.

This was the whole industry.

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

and the rest of them.

You got a link back, you ranked.

Entire businesses were built on it.

People had software to spin thousands of versions.

There were agencies whose only product was article submission.

And then Panda landed,

and Google took the lot out in one go overnight.

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

single one stopped being worth anything on a Tuesday afternoon.

Some of them never came back.

And then there was guest posting.

Same story, different decade.

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

hat future-proof way to build links.

Agencies sold guest post packages by the fucking dozen.

People built their whole client offering on it.

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

Guest Blogging for SEO, and that was that.

It all closed down.

Everything ended.

It no longer worked.

We then looked at Facebook organic reach.

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

told to build a Facebook audience.

Some of them spent real money buying likes.

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

forever." But you know what happened.

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

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

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

one, and the rent went up.

And I could keep going.

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

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

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

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

every single time it's the same pattern.

The people who went all in got hurt worst.

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

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

understand where these things were going.

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

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

because most of them weren't there.

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

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

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

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

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

Everything else is rented.

Your LinkedIn reach is rented.

Your Reddit account is rented.

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

suspended how the appeals process went.

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

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

to tell you before changing the locks.

There's no notice period.

There's no contract.

There's no account manager.

All you've got is a username.

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

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

This is the same problem one floor up.

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

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

email addresses they've collected.

Nobody has ever bought a business for its Reddit karma.

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

everything and live in a fucking cave.

Renting is fine.

Renting is normal.

I post on LinkedIn constantly.

I'm on there most days.

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

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

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

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

They didn't diversify, they substituted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

no one can take it away from you.

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

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

ChatGPT is citing a single thread.

That's coming up next.

So three things I want you to do this week.

Number one, audit what you'd have left.

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

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

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

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

It's not a reason to panic.

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

Number two, use Reddit as a keyword research tool instead

of as a broadcast channel.

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

change 'cause it's just listening.

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

Not your service name, the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

you've written it on your website.

You're selling bespoke integrated solutions.

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

Write the phrases down that people are using.

That's your content plan.

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

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

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

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

Now you own it.

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

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

sat on your domain doing its job.

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

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

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

Reddit was never supposed to be a distribution channel.

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

things that are annoying them.

That's why it became valuable.

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

Reddit didn't change.

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

when it went back to normal.

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

app you're listening to right now.

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

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

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

Go and find it at nonwankyseo.com.

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

castle on someone else's sand.