@tjrobertson52

ChatGPT's responses have always been heavily influenced by Reddit, but starting May 8th, Reddit went from making up 3% of ChatGPT citations to almost 12% now. The citation rate isn't evenly spread out across industries. For sometimes a prompt's Reddit isn't cited at all, and for others it's over 50%.

But the point is we saw a nearly 4 x and the frequency of Reddit citations.

So what happened? Well, someone on the ChatGPT team made a change to how query fanouts work. You see, when you do a search in ChatGPT or any large language model, the AI tries to figure out the intention of your search, and then it does a series of searches.

In a traditional search engine, that's how it finds the information online to ground its response. This series of searches is called a query fanout.

Well, on May 8th, ChatGPT started adding the word Reddit to a lot more of its fanout queries. That's right, just as humans started adding the word Reddit to their Google searches a few years ago. OpenAI seems to determine that they can get better results by forcing Reddit inclusion into their searches.

So how can you take advantage of this? If you know what terms ChatGPT is appending to their fanout queries, you can optimize for those terms. So you can make a page on your website titled your brand, your product or service Reddit.

Just fill it with content about what people are saying about you and your product or service on Reddit.

And Reddit isn't the only word that ChatGPT and Google like to append to these searches. Other common terms are reviews and awards. You should absolutely make a page on your website titled your brand, your product or service reviews, and the same with awards.

Just fill it with relevant information, and most of the time these pages will be cited fairly reliably. So reliably, in fact, you now do this for all of our clients by default.