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Marketing teams have suddenly and urgently become interested in Reddit this year — not because their customers moved there, but because AI search engines have started citing it constantly.

Jeff Payne breaks down why that's the wrong reason to invest in any platform, why the keyword-seeding tactic fails even on its own terms, and the simple, no-cost test that tells a business whether a channel is actually worth its time before spending a dollar or an hour on it.

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Earlier this year, Google rolled out a quiet update that hit self-promoting “best of” listicles hard — some SaaS companies lost close to half of their organic visibility within weeks. It looked like the format was finished. But a fresh analysis of over five million search results tells a stranger story: self-promoting listicles are now growing faster in traffic than the market average.

In this episode, Jeff breaks down what actually separates the listicles that are thriving from the ones that got wiped out — and why the answer has nothing to do with SEO tactics and everything to do with proof.

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For 25 years, an entire industry has believed that somewhere inside Google is a formula — and if you could just find it, you'd win. Sworn testimony from Google's federal antitrust trial says otherwise.

Google's own Search VP testified under oath about a system called Navboost — one that tracks how real people behave toward a search result (clicks, hovers, scrolls, return visits) and holds that data for thirteen months to keep adjusting rankings. There's no shortcut around thirteen months of real human approval.

A separate survey of 1,000 marketers shows the same principle at work in AI search: citations are spread across nine content formats, with no single type dominating. Listicles lead at 22%, but comparison and alternative pages — the content type that shows up at the highest-intent moment in the buyer's journey — capture just 2.5% of citations, the lowest share of any format.

In this data-only episode, Jeff Payne connects the two findings into one lesson: both search and AI reward sustained, real usefulness across multiple formats — not a trick, and not a single-format bet.