ChatGPT Just Changed the Rules on SEO

On the 14th of August, ChatGPT quietly updated how it responds to queries.

For a year, everyone in my industry, including me, told you to go and get mentioned on Reddit, post on YouTube and social media.

But a firm called Petra Labs that tracks every link ChatGPT cites found something new.

In August YouTube dropped 88%, Reddit 81%, TikTok 72%.

A cliff like that is not a coincidence.

Some people suspect it’s connected to negotiations between Reddit and OpenAI about their partnership.

But OpenAI claims it’s just a routine update for relevance and performance.

Either way that loss is someone else’s gain.

GPT started going straight to very specific sites that most of us stopped caring about.

Help centers. Product documentation. FAQ pages.

The pages that win now are the boring ones that answer questions in plain words, on your own site.

But the catch is, it has to be the question people actually ask, phrased the way they ask it.

Not the tidy version you’d write for them.

These are also the ones that come up in the suggest search boxes on Google.

You can manually search and record these suggestions or you can use a tool like AnswerThePublic to do all the work for you.

I prefer it because it also shows me what questions people ask AI.

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