Where Reddit Falls Flat: B2B, Industry Depth, and Real Decision-Making

For every decent subreddit I’ve found, there are 50 that smell like garbage.

Yes, Reddit works for “product reviews.” You can track down whether the latest New Balance shoes are decent for running and if the Garmin 8 has meaningful notifications if you’re moving away from Apple Watch.

It’s not better in:

– Publishing source for specialized media
– B2B decision making in THOUSANDS of categories
– High-profile, high AOV sales
– Industry groups (I’m in WordPress, marketing ops, revops etc communities elsewhere because the subreddits just don’t deliver value)

The Google deal in 2023 that tanked half the web only to increase the keyword visibility by 20X was monstrous. ChatGPT taking that path is just a race to the bottom.

Josh BlyskalJosh Blyskal • 3rd+3rd+Answer Engine Optimization Strategy & Research @ ProfoundAnswer Engine Optimization Strategy & Research @ Profound1w • Edited • 1 week ago • Edited • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedInFollow

Reddit citations are up +400% in ChatGPT over the last 2 weeks, I pulled from our dataset of 630 mil citations to see what’s going on:

Could the OpenAI x Reddit partnership finally start to have impact? Reddit citations jumped 436% starting on May 19th. Reddit now accounts for 5.9% of all of ChatGPT’s search sources, which makes Reddit the second most cited domain overall behind Wikipedia (which is hovering right around 7%). Reddit is ChatGPT’s 2nd largest source of truth.

At the same time, Google AI Overviews’ citation rate is staying near 2% and Perplexity holds around 6%: only ChatGPT is seeing this spike.

Here’s what I think (and let me know your thoughts below): Doing AEO through Reddit used to get you visibility mainly in Perplexity, and to a lesser extent, GAIO. With this partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT, Reddit has absolutely legitimized itself as a major source of truth across answer engines.

Secondly, OpenAI is still making massive manual changes to their RAG process: 1 partnership immediately quadrupled Reddit’s influence in a week to become ChatGPT’s 2nd most trusted source. That’s an insane shift at an insane timescale.

I wonder what other changes are going on that we all haven’t caught yet. 👀…more