ChatGPT Searches Individual Subreddits By Name via @sejournal, @suganthan
All Paid Media PPC News Social MediaAdvertising Video Advertising Columns Ask A PPC ExpertNEW PPC Pulse Webinar ChatGPT Ads Or GEO: What To Buy, What To Earn Audit where ChatGPT places your brand, then get the rule for when Ads win, when GEO wins, and when running both beats either one. Digital Marketing All Digital Marketing Analytics & Data Ecommerce Lead Generation Content Marketing Social Platforms Google YouTube Reddit LinkedIn TikTokNEW WordPress Other CMS Platforms Webinar ChatGPT Ads Or GEO: What To Buy, What To Earn Audit where ChatGPT places your brand, then get the rule for when Ads win, when GEO wins, and when running both beats either one. SEJ Live Webinars Rundowns PodcastNEW Ebooks All Resources Webinar Where AI Gets Its Answers In Your Industry Google rankings don't show which sources AI cites. Get the breakdown by engine and industry, plus the steps to earn a place in it. Suganthan Mohanadasan 30 seconds ago ⋅ 9 min read Suganthan Mohanadasan Co-founder at Snippet Digital Bio Follow Here is a search line ChatGPT wrote for itself this week, straight out of the traffic. fast|site:reddit.com/r/whatnotapp seller tips Whatnot live selling|3650|reddit.com Look at the path. It reads r/whatnotapp, one subreddit, chosen by name before anything was fetched. In the teardown I published on the 21st, I documented ChatGPT asking for Reddit at the domain level, reddit.com in the targeting slot with a 365-day window. The model picked the community, not the site, and gave it 3,650 days, a decade of threads. It came back with 48 Reddit threads out of 71 results in that conversation. 68% of everything it retrieved. reddit.com/r/whatnotapp/comments/1vqdlaq/tips_for_a_new_seller/ reddit.com/r/whatnotapp/comments/1r6mws8/advice_on_selling_on_whatnot/ reddit.com/r/whatnotapp/comments/1tzv075/new_to_whatnot_best_tips_for_selling_smocked/ Then it cited them. Six of the eight citations in that answer went to r/whatnotapp threads. One went to Whatnot’s own help centre. A Reddit chip sits next to the advice about not starting valuable items at $1, next to the point about treating a stream as entertainment, and next to the one about scheduling shows ahead. That matters because four days earlier I captured the opposite on the same account. Four days apart, same account, both commercial questions. One gave Reddit three quarters of the visible credit. The other fetched 84 threads and credited none of them. I published the second one on the 21st and read it as Reddit becoming an invisible input, feeding the verdicts while vendor pages collect the citations. This capture says that reading is too broad. It holds for that conversation. It doesn’t hold as a rule. What separates them is worth a guess, and it’s only a guess. Whatnot is a niche marketplace, and the practical seller knowledge sits in one subreddit and nowhere else. Live chat software is a vendor category with pricing pages, documentation and comparison sites competing for the same claims. When the honest best source is a forum, the forum still wins the citation. Last week, I wrote that Reddit fell out of ChatGPT’s citations rather than out of the model, and that everything else needed another experiment. This capture is that experiment, and it has consequences for the two explanations doing the rounds. Ryan found that Bing has stopped ranking Reddit for ordinary commercial queries, and reasoned that since Bing sits behind ChatGPT’s retrieval, Reddit went with it. His observation checks out, and it goes wider than his four examples. I ran them plus two of my own through Bing, reading the rendered SERP rather than an API. Not “not in the top 10.” The string reddit.com appears zero times in the HTML of all six pages, while Google puts Reddit at position 2 for two of them. Whatever has happened at Bing is real and worth knowing on its own. The step that doesn’t survive is an assumption the whole industry has carried since 2023, that ChatGPT’s web results are Bing’s results. I’ve repeated it myself in talks. A pool can’t contain what the index doesn’t have, so if 68% of that pool is Reddit and Bing’s page for the same query has none, the two aren’t one source. Something reaches Reddit another way, whether that’s OpenAI’s own index or the licensed feed from the Reddit deal. Ryan’s Bing finding stands either way. It may well be the same decision playing out in two places rather than one causing the other. Jenny pointed at Reddit’s paid-access wall, and asked whether OpenAI’s user agents are now getting the restricted robots.txt and losing access to the content. She’s right about the architecture. I checked it. Reddit’s public robots.txt is Disallow: / for everyone, and the permissive version is the one served to verified partners, so the open file is the cloaked one. I spoofed GPTBot and Googlebot, and both get a 403 rather than a robots.txt at all. That 403 is the interesting part, because real Googlebot is obviously not blocked from Reddit. It tells you Reddit verifies the requesting IP against the published crawler ranges rather than trusting the user agent string. Both OpenAI and Google publish those ranges, which is what makes the check possible. The consequence is that nobody outside OpenAI’s IP ranges can see what verified OpenAI agents receive. Jenny says as much in her own post, that she can spoof a user agent but not an IP. So a user-agent test shows the outsider’s view no matter who runs it. When I put this to her, she asked a good question. She still gets the user-facing robots.txt with no trouble, so was my test running from a US IP address? It wasn’t. I’m on a residential connection in the UAE. That turns out to make the result cleaner rather than muddier, because every request came from that same address within the same minute and only the user agent changed. Those all came from the same address within a minute, so geography can’t be the variable there. Her result and mine also agree, since a normal browser UA returns 200 for me too, so we were probably testing different things.
Source: Search Engine Journal
This article has been carefully curated and reformatted for educational and informational purposes. Full credit goes to the original publisher.
📚 Visit more helpful articles on Joab Peters Blog
No comments