The Edward Show

E1142: Reddit citations in ChatGPT just totally collapsed.
Promptwatch data shows Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations dropping dramatically in August, falling to below 0.5% after previously sitting around 3-4%.
This is the third major Reddit citation drop we've seen, and it raises a bigger question for SEOs: what happens when an AI search strategy built around one platform can disappear overnight?
Klaas Foppen, co-founder of Promptwatch, joins me to break down what changed, what may have caused it, and what SEOs should do next.
We cover:
- Why Reddit citations suddenly fell in ChatGPT
- The difference between an AI citation, source, mention, and visibility
- Why Reddit can still be accessed by ChatGPT even though it is being cited far less
- The August 8 query fan-out change that appears to have reduced Reddit citations
- The much larger August 14 drop that Klaas believes may have involved a more deliberate adjustment
- Why nobody outside OpenAI knows whether licensing negotiations, user feedback, search quality, or another factor caused the change
- How this same dramatic Reddit decline is not showing up across Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
- Why SEOs should not abandon Reddit just because ChatGPT is citing it less
- The danger of building an entire AI search strategy around Reddit, parasite SEO, or any single third-party platform
- Why your own website remains the part of your SEO and AI-search presence that you control
- How technical SEO, complete product information, feature pages, comparison pages, landing pages, and fresh content can affect AI visibility
- Why listicles are still frequently used for commercial-intent AI queries
- Why product pages and landing pages may become more important as AI systems increasingly search official websites directly
- Why old-school evergreen informational content may be less valuable when an LLM already knows the answer without searching the web
- How OpenAI, Bing, Meta, Exa, and other companies developing or using different search indexes could reshape SEO
- Why new AI search indexes could create opportunities for SEOs before their spam detection becomes as sophisticated as Google's
- Whether PDFs, research papers, and sites like arXiv could become important sources for AI systems and training data
- Why AI search is much less stable than traditional SEO and why tactics that work today can change very quickly
The biggest takeaway is not that Reddit is dead.
It's that "post on Reddit and get cited by ChatGPT" was never a durable AI search strategy.
Reddit can still be a valuable marketing channel. But if your visibility depends entirely on Reddit, another social platform, or one AI search tactic, a single change can wipe out much of that advantage.
Build the website. Get the technical fundamentals right. Publish the information customers and AI systems need. Earn mentions across multiple sources. And treat AI search as a moving system that needs to be watched rather than a fixed formula.
⭐️ Klaas Foppen on 𝕏 - https://x.com/forgebitz 
⭐️ Klaas Foppen on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/klaas-foppen/ 
⭐️ Promptwatch - https://promptwatch.com/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Reddit Citations Vanish
00:38 Why The Drop Happened
02:11 Citations Vs Mentions
05:04 Deals And Partnerships
09:25 Other LLMs And User Backlash
11:10 Will Reddit Return
12:39 Diversify Your Marketing
14:02 Future Search Index Shakeup
19:53 What Content Works Now
23:09 Training Data And PDFs
26:10 Query Fanout Direction
27:23 On-Site SEO Foundations
29:53 Promptwatch New Automation
31:59 Wrap Up And Thanks
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#generativeengineoptimization #answerengineoptimization #searchengineoptimization #seo

E1141: Can you launch a brand-new website with 100,000 pages and survive Google?
That's the question at the center of today's episode with David G. Quaid.
A listener sent me a problem he and his friends keep running into: they launch programmatic SEO sites with 10,000 - 100,000 URLs, organic traffic shoots up, and then the sites collapse back to zero.
So David and I dug into whether large-scale programmatic SEO is still possible in 2026, where Google may draw the line between a legitimate database and scaled content abuse, and what separates sites that survive from sites that get wiped out.
We cover:
- Whether launching 10,000 or 100,000 URLs at once is automatically dangerous
- Why David might launch a new marketplace or database slowly
- The difference between legitimate programmatic SEO and scaled content built primarily to capture search traffic
- Why empty location, category, job, or marketplace pages can become doorway-page problems
- Why proprietary data can completely change the equation
- Whether a site with genuinely useful data could launch at massive scale from day one
- Why backlinks, press coverage, branded searches, and other signs of a real business may matter
- Why user satisfaction could be one of the biggest differences between programmatic sites that survive and sites that collapse
- Click-through rate, pogo-sticking, return searches, and other user signals we think Google may be evaluating
- Why publishing 100 pages, checking performance, and then scaling may be safer than immediately publishing 100,000
- How to use Google Search Console to identify pages and queries that may be producing poor user signals
- Why misleading page titles can create problems even when they initially generate more traffic
- David's prediction for what Google's August spam update could target
- Why some publishers may be blaming AI Overviews for traffic losses that are actually ranking losses
- How to separate traffic lost to AI Overviews from traffic lost because Google moved your pages down
- Why HubSpot's organic decline may have more to do with rankings and changing user behavior than AI simply taking its clicks
- Whether Google Search has actually gotten better or worse over the last few years
- How far a site can expand into adjacent topics before weakening its existing topical relevance
The main question throughout the episode is simple:
If you have 100,000 pages that genuinely deserve to exist, can you make all of them available immediately without Google assuming you built the site to manipulate search?
David thinks there are conditions where it can work. The harder question is what signals Google needs to see before it trusts you enough to let it work.
⭐️ David Quaid on 𝕏 - https://x.com/DavidGQuaid 
⭐️ David Quaid on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidquaid/ 
⭐️ David Quaid on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@DavidQuaid 
⭐️ David Quaid's agency - https://primaryposition.com/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Programmatic SEO Today
00:17 Listener Database Launch Dilemma
01:12 Spam Updates and Scale Risks
03:18 Slow Rollout Strategy
04:25 Empty Pages and Manipulation
07:51 What Scaled Abuse Means
08:34 Proprietary Data Launch Debate
09:39 Grokipedia as Edge Case
12:31 Authority and Brand Signals
14:46 pSEO Example Book Calculator
20:34 Doorway Pages and Permutations
28:09 Phased Scaling and Testing
31:27 When Big Brands Can Launch Huge
32:46 pSEO Shortcut Mentality
33:17 When Programmatic SEO Fails
33:40 Localization and Scalable Pages
34:39 Finding Real Value Add
35:35 Brand Search Entity Mixups
39:28 Crawlers and Cloudflare Blocks
40:20 August Spam Update Predictions
42:15 Recovering From Traffic Drops
45:01 Free vs Freemium Titles
46:04 GSC Iteration Playbook
48:56 Are Google Results Better
50:23 HubSpot and User Signals
55:27 Expanding Into Adjacent Niches
01:00:49 Can 100k URLs Work
01:02:27 Wrap Up and Next Episode
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #programmaticseo #seopodcast

E1140: Claude is now watermarking everything it writes, and the SEO community is worried about what this means for AI content and Google rankings.
But there's an important detail: Google likely doesn't have the key needed to verify Claude's watermark.
I break down what Anthropic's new watermarking system does, why it's being implemented, what it can and can't prove, and whether any of this should change how SEOs use AI-generated content.
Anthropic is adding machine-readable marks to Claude's output as part of its compliance with the EU AI Act. The watermark can remain in text that has been copied and pasted, and Claude-generated files can include provenance metadata. The system is being rolled out across Claude, including its API and third-party platforms.
But a watermark doesn't necessarily mean Claude wrote something from scratch. If you give Claude your own writing and ask it to fix grammar, translate it, summarize it, or otherwise process it, the resulting text may still contain the mark. And if no watermark is detected, that doesn't prove Claude wasn't involved.
In this episode:
- Why Anthropic is watermarking Claude's output
- How AI text watermarking works
- Why the EU AI Act matters here
- Why switching from Claude to another major AI model won't solve anything
- What Claude's watermark can and cannot tell you
- Why short passages and heavily edited text are harder to verify
- Why Anthropic's secret detection key matters
- Why Google currently can't validate Claude's watermark
- Whether Google could use AI watermarking as an SEO ranking signal
- What Ahrefs' research says about AI-generated pages ranking in Google
- Why AI content and bad content shouldn't be treated as the same thing
- Where AI watermarking could matter for agencies, clients, and contracts
- The potential EU disclosure requirements for publishers
- Why human review and editorial responsibility matter
- My take on whether this changes anything for SEO
- Why generic AI content could still create problems even without an AI-content penalty
- Why trust, original data, strong opinions, fact-checking, and editorial review matter more than whether AI touched the content
- An example of AI-generated content that I genuinely enjoyed
- How we're using AI-assisted SEO content on a new SaaS while targeting bottom-of-funnel keywords
I also discuss Ahrefs' data on AI content in Google. Their research found AI-generated and heavily AI-assisted pages ranking throughout the search results, including at the top. The bigger issue appears to be something SEO has dealt with long before generative AI existed: bad content.
My view is simple: if the output is enjoyable, novel, useful, accurate, and properly reviewed, the fact that AI was involved doesn't automatically make it bad content.
The bigger long-term question is what happens to brands that publish large amounts of generic AI content without developing a recognizable voice, adding original information, taking meaningful positions, or earning trust with their audience.
AI can help make great content. It can also make a lot of mediocre content very quickly. The difference is what the person using it actually puts into the process.
⭐️ Ahrefs: Claude Now Watermarks Everything It Writes - https://ahrefs.com/blog/claude-now-watermarks-everything-it-writes/ 
⭐️ My post on 𝕏 - https://x.com/edwardeachday/status/2089307227064500665 
⭐️ Ep 1110 - Google's Next SEO Apocalypse: The Scaled AI Content Crackdown Is Coming - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w66ME9-IRQ 
⭐️ Ep 1124 - YouTube's AI Detector Is Punishing Real Creators - Is Google Search Next? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33QKtsBy9As 
⭐️ Super Mario Bros 3 Jazz Lo-fi Remix - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNjuiOd1c1I 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Claude Watermark Panic
00:31 What Watermarking Means
01:58 EU AI Act Compliance
03:08 How Text Watermarks Work
03:58 Limits and Detection Keys
04:25 Google Rankings Impact
06:07 SEO Community Reactions
07:22 My Skeptical Take
08:49 Real Risk Reputation
11:23 AI LoFi Success Story
13:24 Using AI for SEO
14:54 Wrap Up and Thanks
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #digitalmarketing #seopodcast

E1139: Image backlinks work surprisingly well for SEO, and one old experiment found they could even outperform exact-match anchor text links.
I break down an SEO experiment from Dan Petrovic that tested four different types of backlinks to see which had the greatest effect on rankings.
The test compared:
- An exact-match anchor text backlink
- A naked URL placed after the target keyword
- An image backlink using the target keyword as the image alt text
- A "click here" backlink with the target keyword placed near the link
The result that stood out: the image backlink with the target keyword in the alt text performed better than every other link type in the experiment, including the exact-match anchor text link.
The experiment was conducted in 2013, so I also look at whether the idea still matters today:
Linked image alt text is still treated as anchor text for SEO purposes. I also cover more recent research from Kevin Indig and Semrush analyzing 35,000 backlink data points across 1,000 domains, which found that image backlinks correlated more strongly with AI search visibility than text links.
Then I get into the practical part: how to actually build backlinks using images.
We break down:
- Why image backlinks affect search rankings
- What Dan Petrovic's anchor text proximity experiment tested
- Why the image backlink beat the other link types
- How Google uses image alt text as anchor text
- Why image backlinks may also matter for visibility in AI search
- How to use infographics, charts, photos, maps, and product images for link building
- How reverse image search can uncover websites already using your images
- David McSweeney's TRUST formula for creating images journalists and bloggers may want to use
- How to find topics journalists are already covering
- How to turn research and data into simple visual assets
- How to find journalists and bloggers who may be interested in your images
- Why niche-specific stock photos can continue generating backlink opportunities after you publish them
- Why you should still be careful with exact-match anchor text
I explain a simple image strategy: create original niche-specific photos, charts, data visualizations, infographics, or other useful images and make them available on stock image platforms.
If bloggers, journalists, or other websites use those images, they may credit the source. You can also periodically reverse image search your work to find websites that used an image without attribution and contact them to request a source link.
The important point is that link building does not always have to start with asking someone to link to a page.
You can create assets people already have a reason to use.
⭐️ SEO Sherpa: SEO Experiments - https://seosherpa.com/seo-experiments/ 
⭐️ Dejan Marketing: Anchor Text Proximity Experiment - https://dejanmarketing.com/anchor-text-proximity-experiment/ 
⭐️ Growth Memo: How AI Really Weighs Your Links - https://www.growth-memo.com/p/how-ai-really-weighs-your-links-analysis 
⭐️ Ahrefs: Build Links with Images - https://ahrefs.com/blog/build-links-with-images/ 
⭐️ Charles Floate's image SEO post - https://x.com/Charles_SEO/status/2021835662538813870 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Image Backlinks Surprise
00:37 Dan Petrovic Experiment Setup
01:56 Results Image Alt Text Wins
02:27 Still Relevant Today
03:09 Link Worthy Image Ideas
03:42 TRUST Formula for Visuals
04:46 Outreach and Promotion
05:02 Stock Photos Backlink Hack
05:50 Reverse Image Search Links
06:28 Avoid Over Optimization
06:38 Optimize Well Find Great Keywords
08:55 Sign Off
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #linkbuilding #backlinks

E1138: How does James Dooley start a brand-new SEO site with 650 industries worth of SEO experience?
James walks through how he evaluates a new SEO opportunity from the beginning, including when he'll use a fresh exact-match domain, when he'll buy an aged domain, how he evaluates the backlink profile before buying, and how he turns simple lead generation sites into larger brands.
We also get into the economics behind local lead generation, why James thinks SEOs put too much weight on DR, and what "good content" actually means when the goal is to rank and convert.
James explains why the strategy changes completely depending on the market. A low-competition local site might be built and earning quickly, while industries like finance or iGaming can require powerful aged domains, significantly more authority, and a completely different risk tolerance.
We cover:
- How James decides whether a new SEO opportunity is worth pursuing
- Why his team analyzes search volume and CPC when entering new industries
- Fresh domains vs. aged domains vs. exact-match domains
- When an EMD makes sense for local SEO and long-tail keywords
- Why competitive finance niches can require established authority
- What James looks for before buying an aged domain
- Why DR alone can give you a misleading picture of a domain
- How he evaluates branded anchors, naked URLs, spam, trust, and backlink quality
- The SEO tools and metrics his team combines when analyzing domains
- Why an existing Google Business Profile can make a domain more attractive
- The economics of buying high-value aged domains
- How aggressive iGaming operators can rank repurposed domains extremely quickly
- Why James is moving away from the churn-and-burn side of iGaming
- How he approaches local lead generation sites
- Why 50 targeted service/location pages can sometimes be enough to start
- How a small lead gen site can fund the next site and eventually become a portfolio
- James's definition of good SEO content
- Why some pages can rank with only a few sentences
- Why content should be "as short as possible but as long as necessary"
- The problem with burying answers inside thousands of words of unnecessary content
- How James turns an SEO site into a real brand
- Citations, reviews, Google Business Profiles, case studies, awards, social profiles, and third-party reputation signals
- How AI makes it easier to distribute brand assets across multiple platforms
James has spent years repeating this process across hundreds of industries, so this episode is less about one isolated tactic and more about the decision-making process behind starting an SEO project from zero.
If you're building your first site, launching another lead generation property, evaluating an aged domain, or deciding how much authority a new project actually needs, this episode gives you James Dooley's approach from the ground up.
⭐️ Ep 1131 - James Dooley & David Quaid: The SEO "Best Practices" We Ignore - https://youtu.be/jW8hYUn99Uk 
⭐️ James Dooley's website - https://jamesdooley.com/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on 𝕏 - https://x.com/james_dooley 
⭐️ James Dooley on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameszdooley/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jameszdooley/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/james.dooley1/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@JamesDooley 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Background
00:56 How James Starts Sites
01:19 New Site Context Matters
01:53 EMDs in Finance
03:06 650 Industries Explained
05:39 Aged Domains Strategy
09:05 Tools and Anchor Checks
11:35 iGaming Churn and Burn
13:46 Local Lead Gen Blueprint
14:37 Good Content Definition
16:51 Building a Brandable Site
18:50 David Quaid Call In
19:13 Wrap Up and Outro
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #blackhatseo #digitalmarketing