The Lab

The Reddit interception experiment

A short video claimed SEOs are hijacking the searches LLMs run by putting reddit in their URLs, titles, and H1s. I checked the claims, then built the experiment. This page is the public log, and the verdict will be posted whichever way it lands.

The claim

When you ask ChatGPT for “the best X”, it often runs a web search for X reddit, because that is how humans hunt for honest opinions. It reads whatever ranks for that query. So SEOs have started shipping pages with reddit in the slug, the title, and the H1: not on Reddit, just dressed for the search Reddit triggers. Rank there and you are inside the AI’s reading list.

Scorecard: what checked out before we spent anything

The experiment

One live site, one matched pair of pages, published the same hour in the same format with the same internal linking. The only variable is reddit optimization. The test site is virginiamitchell.ca, a small established Shaklee distributor site in a niche where Reddit dominates the skeptic queries. Both pages are honest content; the tactic page links every real Reddit thread it summarizes, criticism included. If the tactic only works with bait pages, I want it to fail here.

Success criteria, stated before the data exists

• Tactic page reaches the top 10 for its reddit query within 6 weeks, and its trajectory beats the control page’s trajectory on its own target.
• Stretch goal, and the claim that actually matters: a verified citation of either page in a ChatGPT or Perplexity answer, checked weekly with a fixed prompt script.
• If neither happens, this page says the tactic failed on a small site. That result gets published with the same enthusiasm.

What could fool us

• The test site’s robots.txt and llms.txt switched to allow all AI crawlers (including training) in the same week. Any LLM-visibility change is partly attributable to that, not just the pages.
• The site already had a /shaklee-reviews page. If the tactic page cannibalizes it for "shaklee reviews", I will log that as a cost of the tactic.
• Search volumes are tiny (10 to 30 per month), so rank positions will be noisy. I care about the trend gap between tactic and control, not any single reading.
• Reddit blocks automated reading from here, so the tactic page summarizes threads at theme level from what is visible in search results, with every thread linked. No quotes were invented.

The log

12 August 2026

Transcribed the source video (46 seconds, credits SEO David Quaid). Extracted the five claims above and researched each. Ran baseline searches on four unrelated "X reddit" queries to see the tactic in the wild: found one live specimen ranking #8 in a competitive niche, and wide-open local SERPs.

13 August 2026

Picked the test niche and matched keyword pair from Canadian keyword data (both targets near-zero difficulty, comparable volume, same skeptic intent). Captured day-zero SERPs for both target queries: the tactic query returns 8 Reddit threads in the top 10, and both queries already show a Google AI Overview. Published the tactic page and the control page on virginiamitchell.ca within the same hour, same format, same internal linking. Started rank tracking on five keywords.

14 August 2026

Protocol change, one day in, logged rather than hidden: the site owner wants the tactic page to work as a real reviews destination, so it now also displays all 15 Google reviews of the distributorship and the 46 customer reviews from Shaklee store listings for the catalogued products alongside the critical Reddit threads. Both experiment pages went into the sitewide footer at the same time, deliberately as a pair, so neither gets an internal-link advantage over the other. A third page also shipped, a research-studies hub, which links to neither experiment page. Net effect on the experiment: both pages gained equal internal linking, and the tactic page gained content depth the control did not. From here, a tactic-page win is evidence for reddit-optimization plus richer content, not reddit-optimization alone. The control page stays frozen.

19 September 2026

Nothing to report, which is itself the report. The weekly rank and AI-answer checks I promised on 13 August have not been run since the pages went up. The test site has had no commits since 14 August either, so the pages are untouched and the experiment is still valid; it is the reading that is missing, not the setup. Five weeks with no data is longer than the six-week window I set myself for the first success criterion, so the next entry has to be a real set of readings or this stops being an experiment. Logged here rather than quietly backfilled, because a gap in the log is data about how the experiment was run.

19 September 2026, later the same evening

Gap closed. I took the readings rather than leaving the entry above as the last word, so this page now has five-week data instead of an apology. Ranks first, organic positions with the SERP features stripped out. On "shaklee reviews reddit" the tactic page is 4th and the control page is 8th. On "shaklee reddit" the tactic page is 5th and the control page is 8th. On the control page’s own target, "pros and cons of shaklee products", the control page is 1st and the tactic page does not appear at all. Both reddit queries still show an AI Overview, and Reddit threads now hold 7 of the top 10 organic slots on each, down from 8 at day zero, with the two slots they lost going to these two pages.

19 September 2026, the reading that changed my mind

The half that matters went differently than the rank numbers suggest, and I got it wrong the first time, so here is both the mistake and the finding. I asked a grounded AI surface five Shaklee questions, three runs each, and my first pass scored the pages as absent because neither URL appears in the answer text. That was the wrong test. The pages were in the retrieval set the whole time; the model just never names them out loud. Resolving the source links properly: asked what people on Reddit say about Shaklee, the model retrieves the tactic page. Asked for the pros and cons of Shaklee products, it retrieves the control page twice over, plus the older /shaklee-reviews page. So each page wins its own question. Being retrieved and being named are two different measurements and I had been conflating them; from here this log records both, separately.

19 September 2026, where that leaves the claim

The first success criterion is met and the second is not. The tactic page did reach the top 10 for its reddit query inside six weeks, comfortably, at 4th. But it has not beaten the control page’s trajectory on the control’s own target, because the control page went to 1st. The uncomfortable part for the tactic, and the most useful thing on this page so far: the control page has no reddit in its slug, title, H1 or body, and it still ranks 8th on both reddit queries. A page that ignored the tactic entirely cracked the same SERP the tactic was supposed to unlock. That does not kill the idea, because 4th in a Reddit-dominated SERP is harder won than 1st on a quiet long-tail, and the two queries are not equally competitive. It does mean the tactic has not yet shown it does anything the ordinary page did not.

Current verdict

Leaning against the tactic, on five weeks of data, and not settled.

The tactic page works: 4th on “shaklee reviews reddit”, 5th on “shaklee reddit”, and it is the page a grounded AI pulls in when asked what Reddit says about Shaklee. The problem for the claim is the control page. It carries no reddit anywhere, and it still sits 8th on both reddit queries while ranking 1st on its own target. So far the honest reading is that a good page on a trusted small site ranks, and the reddit dressing has not yet been shown to add anything on top. I will keep taking readings weekly and publish the verdict either way.

This experiment is one of four. The rest, and every SEO claim I checked and did not think was worth testing, are on SEO claims, checked and tested, and the clips those claims came from are in the clip library.