Insights
The Redditification of Search Results
Like you, I've been monitoring the ongoing shifts in search results.
You'll have noticed that Reddit threads, Quora answers, and social media posts consistently appear in organic rankings, AIOs, and LLM responses.
What we're seeing is a breakdown in the lines between SEO, social media, and PR.
And those lines get blurrier by the day.
Search rewards real talk
What’s driving this shift?
Real voices.
User-generated content on these platforms feels messy, detailed, and human. In the mass of AI-written content and keyword-stuffed pages, that stands out.
When someone Googles "best project management software," they're increasingly clicking on the Reddit thread with 47 comments instead of your well-optimized comparison page.
Google AIOs and most LLMs are rewarding these platforms accordingly.
It makes sense when you think about it.
These sites contain the unfiltered experiences and honest opinions that users actually want.
Your target audience is literally telling you where they go for trustworthy information.
How to handle it as a marketer
1. Rethink your content strategy
Think distribution-first, not content-first.
Create assets that can be repurposed as answers, threads, or deep dives on Reddit, LinkedIn, or Quora.
2. Get active in communities
Build community credibility.
When you focus on genuinely helping people in relevant discussions, it now has SEO value.
Share your expertise, answer detailed questions, and build authority through consistent quality.
The opportunity here is huge.
You get direct access to real customer conversations and pain points.
You expand your opportunity to build trust through your expertise rather than via traditional SEO tactics.
Yes, it's harder work, but the results are often more meaningful.
3. PR = SEO
Try thought leadership content, podcast guesting, and high-authority quotes.
These traditional PR activities feed into your SEO visibility as they show up in LLM summaries or citation sources.
4. Monitor what’s ranking (not just your site)
Google your priority keywords regularly. If Reddit or Quora threads are dominating, analyze what makes them valuable and inject your brand into that space.
Don’t always fight to outrank them. Sometimes it’s smarter to be part of the conversation.
Final word:
Get your distribution right and your audience will reward you.
Related: AI Platform Citation Patterns
Quoteworthy
“From my experience, the average AI output is usually more consistent, logical and well-structured than the average human-written article. But crucially, there is still a big gulf between the quality of the best human-written content and AI outputs. For now, skilled human writers still have a sizeable edge—especially when they use AI as an input into their writing process.”
—Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing, Ahrefs
[Source]
Reinventing Search
In an article for SE Ranking, Victor Schmitt-Bush said he thought AI Mode was a 'gimmick.'
His observations on AI Mode are a good read, but there was a section that caught my attention.
Schmitt-Bush shared a side-by-side study comparing AI Mode with AI Overviews using 50 queries.
The results showed:
- AI Mode responded to 100% of queries vs. a 56% response for AI Overviews
- AI Mode uses fewer but more curated sources (12.26 vs 23.36 average)
- Only a 10.6% URL overlap with AI Overviews, suggesting a completely different source logic
- Heavy integration with Google Maps for local queries
Since the exact URL overlap between AIOs and AI Mode (for the same queries) was just 10.6%, it indicates AI Mode pulls results from entirely different sources.
This begs the question: How does optimizing for AIOs help you here?
Victor Schmitt-Bush's conclusion is that AI Mode isn't just a UI experiment but potentially a "soft launch" of Google's future search experience.
What do you think?
Related: Digital marketing and SEO-related topics may start driving more visitors from AI search to websites than from traditional search by early 2028.
What metric matters most for SEO?
2 weeks ago, I asked this question in a LinkedIn poll:
"Which metric matters most for your SEO success this year?"
The results:
Google tells us that, when people click to a website from AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality.
Soon after my poll closed, Mark Williams-Cook ran a poll which appears to reinforce Google's assertion re higher quality clicks:
Are you optimizing for what happens after a user lands on your site?
For example:
● Conversion metrics (sales, form fills, signups)
● Engagement (time on site, pages per session, interactions)
● Intent fulfillment (Did they find the info they needed? Did they act on it?)
In other words, focus on an outcome-based approach to SEO.
Track what people do when they get to your website and you'll see where they fall through the cracks.
This allows you to tweak your pages to optimize for a desired action—whether that's leads, conversions or something else.
Related: Ahrefs reported that AI search visitors to their platform convert at a 23x higher rate than traditional organic visitors.
Meanwhile...
2 days ago, Ahrefs published a study suggesting that AI users visit fewer pages and bounce more often.
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