In this solo commentary, Eric Siu ranks various marketing channels from S tier (most effective) to D tier (least effective) based on current performance and future potential. He places being cited in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini at the top S tier, followed by paid social advertising, which can amplify organic creative. Organic creative content (including UGC) is rated A tier, with the possibility of reaching S tier when combined with strong paid campaigns. Paid search also sits in the A tier, remaining valuable despite overall search traffic declines. Legacy SEO is classified as B tier, still relevant but less dominant. Traditional PR falls into C tier (potentially D tier depending on the firm’s quality). Reddit and buying/renting email lists are placed in D tier, deemed ineffective today. Siu emphasizes focusing on LLM citations and leveraging paid/social amplification for maximum impact.
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D tier would be Reddit. So a lot of people were hitting Reddit hard to rank higher from an AEO SEO standpoint. It doesn't work as well, at least as of today. Not saying it won't come back, but it was fairly easy to game and a lot of people were taking advantage of it. And if you're buying or renting email lists, that would be D tier. That hasn't worked in a very long time and it's still ineffective. Traditional PR would probably be C tier, maybe bordering on D tier depending on who you're working with. But if you find a good one and they know how to get you into good publications and they have good story angles for you and they're taking things off your plate, it could be a little higher than that. But for the most part, I would say it's probably C tier. Legacy SEO would still be B tier because most people don't accept it, but AEO answers, LLM answers are still grounded in traditional SEO. Paid social is still S tier today because a lot of traffic is going through Meta today and they're going through YouTube as well. And you can amplify a lot of the organic creative that you're doing as well. So I would say that is S tier, which brings me to organic creative. That's probably around, I would say A tier, right? Because organic takes a lot of effort and you can also hire people to help you with UGC content. It's really good and then you can scale it with paid ads. As well. I, I would say that if you marry that with a strong paid campaign, then it could be S tier. Paid search, depending on the industry that you're in, still very much A tier, right? Because even though search traffic is going down, people are still using Google, people are still using AI Overviews, right? So still in today's day and age, paid search is still A tier. So S tier would be being cited in LLMs. So whether it's ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, you want to be cited into LLMs. Because the conversion rates are a lot higher and people are using LLMs for research a lot more today. Follow for more on AI marketing and business.
