This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "Reddit’s SEO Gold Rush Is Crashing" (uploaded 2025-10-09T19:46:51+00:00). It contains an English conversation between Eric Siu and Neil Patel about how large language models and search engines have been over-citing Reddit content, the risk that marketers will spam Reddit and low-quality sites to game LLM/SEO results, the resulting drop in Reddit citations/stock coverage (PromptWatch/Yahoo Finance referenced), and the role of figures like Sam Altman. The discussion frames this as an SEO/marketing quality problem with parallels to early SEO manipulation tactics.
Chapters
So there was a post on Reddit. It says, disguised promotion on Reddit for the sake of GEO has to stop. And I saw it on Reddit and funny enough, I also saw that on Tim Soulo's account, the Ahrefs CMO.
Oh.
And I was cracking up when he took a screenshot of it and posted it and he said, he's like, no, no, no, this is just starting. And I was cracking up because I'm like, this is so true. I'm like, if these LLMs are going to cite, Reddit all the time, what the heck do you think marketers are going to do? They're going to spam the crap out of Reddit. And I'm not saying they should. I'm just saying this is the reality.
This is a game for every channel.
Yeah, this is a game for every channel. This is what all marketers do. We've been using spam really loosely, but on Reddit, people really try to spam. It's going to make the community crappier. I'm not saying you should. I think it's short-sighted. And I think it's a waste of time of doing that. But Reddit, and I think this was Very well do. Reddit stock sinks 12% as ChatGPT references to its content plunges from 10% to 2% in September.
And the headline I had originally, Reddit drops $5.3 billion because of an SEO report.
I believe it was from Yahoo. I saw it from Yahoo Finance. I don't know where it first came out.
So they pulled this. So there's a guy, there's a software called PromptWatch, and it shows you the big drop, right? And then some, some guy tweeted it and then it got cited by all these news sources.
Well, no, I think that was great because the problem— I'm not talking about the stock dropping. I don't want anyone to lose money. But when you look at Reddit and the citations that are happening on Google and on ChatGPT, it's insane in a bad way. They're referencing it too much and the quality is really low.
Mm-hmm.
I get Google has a deal with Reddit for data, and I get that Sam Altman owns a percentage of Reddit shares, whether it's through his fund or indirectly, however it was. And sure, he benefits from it. And they made an announcement before Reddit went public.
Yeah.
But for me, the quality of Reddit information—
Yeah.
Wasn't—
It wasn't the best to begin with. No.
And they were just citing it like crazy on ChatGPT. Yeah. And, and it has nothing to do with Reddit. Sure. If I really wanted to, I could figure out ways to game Reddit.
Yeah.
I know so many top users, but I, I, you know, I'm not focusing on that, nor do I care to do that because I didn't believe for the longest time that they're going to continually cite Reddit all the time because of quality. And the same goes with ChatGPT. Dude, you know how many people I know are just guest posting on junk websites and they're doing comparison tables with like structured data comparing their SaaS product with other people's?
This is no different than the early days of SEO.
Yes. And, and people are like, why aren't you doing that like crazy? It works so well for ChatGPT. I'm like, no, no, no, no. I've seen this show before. It works well right now. Eventually they'll realize this is making ChatGPT data more crap and they'll filter out crappy websites and it won't work the same.
For sure. At best, they will only filter. At worst, they'll start to ban people.
Yeah, they'll start going through.
Sorry for the—
Yeah, it's okay.
No, Neil's drinking a cup of water right now. Yeah. You know what's interesting as you drink? We have a mutual friend here in the Beverly Hills area. So I saw him at a YPO event recently. He's like, and he was kind of talking down to me a little bit. He's like, oh, you got to go on Reddit. Yeah, I'm all in on Reddit. I'm going to go hard on the stock. And I was kind of making the same points that we're making.
Is he the same one who got us both into YPO?
Yeah, yeah. Okay. And then he was like also like dismissing me as if I don't know anything I'm talking about, right? He's like, no, no, no, trust me, trust me. This Sam Altman owns this. Da da da. I'm like, yeah, man. Like it doesn't help if we spam the internet. We add more crap to it. Like we've seen this with SEO.
Yeah. Sam Altman owns portion of Reddit. Let's talk once he sells all his Reddit shares.
Yeah.
Right? If he already did, I don't know if he's a long-term holder, but eventually he'll look at as, oh, either I sold all my Reddit shares, so I don't care anymore, or B. Yeah, I still hold shares and my shares are worth $50 million, but man, my ChatGPT experience is becoming worse and that could potentially cost me $5, $10 billion in net worth. So yeah, it's all right.
It's okay if you lose the Reddit shares.
Yeah, I'll lose on my Reddit shares or dump 'em and then, you know, that's what a logical person does.
